“Draw your sword and defend everything you believe in”
Episode 3.8: March 14 2016
A not-really-guilty pleasure in our house is Shonda Rhimes TV shows. (We’re watching Scandal as I write.) They’re perfect postmodern soap operas that know they’re ludicrous, they know they’re obscene, they know they are basically entertainment on some kind of crazy drugs. One extra reason I get transfixed by them, one reason I keep watching, one thing I can’t stop thinking about is the way all the characters TALK, in these broken sentences where they rant at 1,000 miles per hour and take breaths in the most… unusual places. The strangest places. With EMPHASIS and repetition and cadence. The kind of cadence that I would love to be able to mimic in real life.
So that’s this week’s goal: Talk like a Shonda Rhimes character. And find some good flippin’ links.
1. The World’s Most Extreme Dog Sled Patrol
(Kara Segedin, BBC Earth)
We had a Twitter snafu on Monday, so in fact the week kicked off on Tuesday with this desperately beautiful photo essay. The subject is some crazy members of the Danish navy who spend four months in the remotest parts of Greenland with only one co-worker, a bunch of dogs and a lot of ice for company. Here’s one question that the article never really answers (or at least I couldn’t understand it), though: Why do they run these patrols? Training purposes? Conservation? Just to keep track of things?
2. Joe Cool
(Alicia Elin, New Inquiry)
Even if you’re being charitable, it’s fair to say that Trader Joe’s, one of America’s most popular grocery chains, is a bizarre concoction. It combines the low price approach of its German parent Aldi with a tiki theme, for goodness’ sake. And, in this era of bending-over-backwards-to-talk-to-customers, it’s not on social media. Why?
3. The History of Ugliness Shows There is No Such Thing
(Gretchen E Henderson, Aeon Magazine)
“At opposite extremes, ‘ugliness’ has become not only an endpoint dismissal but also a rallying cry. In different times and places, any one of us might have been considered ugly: from the red-haired to the blue-eyed, left-handed to hook-nosed, humpbacked to blighted. It’s easy to turn any external feature into a sign for ugliness (and much more difficult to go the other way), or to reduce the story of ugliness to a string of case studies, without considering its larger legacy.”
4. The Bidding War
(Matthieu Aikins, The New Yorker)
There is so much in this piece that made my brain pop out of my head. The eye-popping sums of money; the mess of Afghan business and politics; the fact that a very young man, a kid really, was able to manipulate the system so completely—and with not just the knowledge of the U.S. military, but with their almost total cooperation. Deep, well-balanced storytelling from Aikins that makes you look at the world a little differently afterwards.
5. A Plagiarism Scandal is Unfolding in The Crossword World
(Oliver Roeder, FiveThirtyEight)
Just look at that headline and think about it for a second. A scandal! In crosswords! I KNOW.
Your weekly reminder. You can always share links with us by email, on Medium, or on Twitter. The door’s always open.
