PicoBlog

I started playing around this week - I’m not running, see, as I’m injured - putting together a Spotify playlist of songs about running. It’s a niche area, it turns out. People sing about a lot of things, but very few people sing about running. Now, you may have all sorts of songs popping into your head that you think are about running, but trust me, most of those are using running in the wider context of “running away” or “run into my arms” or “running my life”.

The question came frequently: “What year did you graduate from West Point?” But unlike so many of his military peers, Colin Powell never attended West Point. “Well, did you go to the Citadel, or did you go to Texas A&M or Virginia Military Institute?” Except minorities weren’t welcome at those schools in the mid-1950s. So Powell, with his modest grades and humble South Bronx roots, blazed his own trail. City College of New York, ROTC, Army second lieutenant.

Welcome to the Abrahamic Critique and Digest! This is the new home of my writings dealing with Middle Eastern history, Arab intellectual life, philosophy, Jewish history, and Middle Eastern politics. —Hussein Aboubakr Mansour By Hussein Aboubakr Mansour · Over 1,000 subscribersNo thanksncG1vNJzZmibop7Bqr3UnpinnJSetKa%2F02eqrpqjqa6kt42cpqZn

The Archives of Sexual Behavior recently retracted an article reporting survey results from over 1600 parents regarding rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). Gender dysphoria refers to "strong, persistent feelings of identification with another gender and discomfort with one's own assigned gender and sex." Rapid onset means such feelings and discomfort appearing more or less suddenly and apparently out of the blue. ROGD runs afoul of activists (both in and outside of academia) because it implies that, at least for some people, transgender identity has the superficial features of a social contagion, rather than reflecting deep, enduring commitment to identifying as a different gender/sex indelibly etched on the person’s psyche.

When I was a gangly, longhaired teen asshole the main activity I and my friends engaged in was going to the movies. It was one of the few things you could do as a kid that had a whiff of independence about it while being wihtin the general budget of a teen asshole, which is to say cheap as hell. We went to the movies just about every weekend, sometimes with a specific movie in mind, sometimes just to get out and watch whatever was showing (and that is the story of how I wound up paying money to see Who’s Harry Crumb, possibly the worst film ever made).

The second of our end of year trips into the archive. You can read the first, Day of the Tunnel Boring Machine, here. One of the odder facts about the world I've come across recently is that there are two landlocked countries in South America – and both maintain navies.  A landlocked country, as you almost certainly know, is one which doesn’t have a coastline, thus requiring the locals to cross someone else’s sovereign territory to launch a naval flotilla and/or go to the beach.

A friend recently shared an article from The Harvard Crimson’s 2022 “Senior Perspectives,” which is a publication that provides an opportunity for graduating varsity athletes to reflect on their careers. This particular article was authored by a senior named Charlie Olmert. To my surprise, Olmert didn’t highlight a big goal or an Ivy League title. He didn’t reflect on helping his team make the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2014 or being elected captain his senior season.

Note: I apologize in advance for the potentially rambling nature of this piece, which is something of a stream of consciousness geostrategic meditation. It’s possible that this is too abstract to be interesting. If so, please berate me in the comments. I am a great lover of chess. While no more than a middling player myself, I am endlessly entertained by the seemingly countless variations and strategic contrivances that the world’s great players can create from that same, familiar beginning.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting with a friend over an aperitivo, lamenting Italy’s political drift to the far-right. At a certain point this friend turned and asked me “so why can’t I get excited about Elly Schlein? She’s young, left, green, progressive, feminist, everything I care about. So what’s going on?” I couldn’t answer. I was speechless. As a staunch supporter of Schlein in the PD primaries, I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while now but haven’t yet had the time to interrogate the matter in any depth.