PicoBlog

Hello! Chapter 3! And transcript: Thanks for coming on this journey so far. And thank you to everyone who has been spreading the word about it. Seriously, it helps so much. By the way, if you’re in Boston, come to this clothing swap next week. This Chapter, in the Japan Part, we get into my favorite anecdote of the whole series. The “Oh, Mistake” incident. And back in the United States, last chapter was really about exploring the roots of Ivy Style, which were extremely white, male, Protestant, and elite.

American Physician Partners (APP), formerly the sixth-largest US emergency medicine practice, abruptly ceased operations on August 1, 2023. Over 1,000 emergency physicians were affected. Most were not paid by APP for shifts worked in June and July. Clinicians were left scrambling to maintain malpractice insurance. In short, APP closed shop in a way that significantly harmed the emergency medicine community.  One month after American Physician Partners’ closure, what have we learned?

Three years ago, Kimberley and Mert moved into a small apartment with a garden in İstanbul's Nisbetiye district, a middle-to-upper-class residential neighborhood. Despite Kimberley's relatively well-paid job of about 30,000 liras per month and Mert's part-time job adding an extra 8,000 liras, the young couple grew increasingly concerned about their finances. They had been drawn into a legal battle with their landlord over the annual rent hike – a routine procedure meant to keep rental prices up to date with Turkey’s high inflation rates.

Spoilers for “Oppenheimer” follow below. Don’t say you weren’t warned! I walked into “Oppenheimer” thinking I knew the plot: man builds bomb, bomb blows up, man has second thoughts, man is disgraced. What caught me by surprise: the entire arc of Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s complicated nemesis. Who was this guy, really? Why was he so self-important? And did the Senate really reject him from President Eisenhower’s Cabinet because of his feud with Oppenheimer?

Monday was my last day at Time. In a couple of weeks, I’ll start a new job as senior political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Here’s the announcement the Journal’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker, sent to the staff: Molly Ball is joining The Wall Street Journal as senior political correspondent. Molly will bring her distinctive voice and finely observed reporting to analysis pieces and political features from Washington and around the country.

Yesterday I heard of the sad news of William Pope.L’s passing just as I happened to be landing in Chicago, the city where he was based for most of his professional life and where I first became aware of his work in 1994, when I saw images related to his piece  Black Domestic a.k.a. Cow Commercial.  In a related photo (from his series “Eracist”) Pope.L appears holding a glass of milk with a broad smile and a cow coming out of his crotch, an image that left an indelible mark in my memory.

Dear Everybody, On my first day as a speechwriter in 2009, General David Petraeus told me to buy a copy of the The Elements of Style, the classic handbook on English usage by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. “Follow the rules and apply the principles in that book,” he said. “I try not to deviate from them.” The book is best known for its 22 elementary rules of usage and principles of composition, but I’ve always been drawn to a lesser appreciated chapter titled, “An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders).

Reid Southen is a successful concept artist who has worked for many of the biggest studios (Marvel, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros, Paramount etc) on a lot of huge films (Matrix Resurrections, The Hunger Games, Transformers, and Alien, among others). Yesterday he noticed that the latest, greatest version of an AI-generated art system known as Midjourney was rather too good at drawing lovely art like this That appeared suspiciously familiar to this iconic still from the Joker:

Recently, we looked at an Old Fashioned built on a combination of two types of Scotch, a hint of rum, and honey syrup. It’s a layered, complex drink that balances basic blended Scotch whisky with an aggressive Islay expression, plus a hint of over-the-top, hogo-heavy rum, all bound together with the floral, mellow sweetness of honey syrup.  It’s a great drink. But with three fairly specific bottles of booze on the ingredient list, it does take a somewhat well-stocked bar to make.