The Q&A Landline, Weekend Whats, Feel Good Friday
Let’s take a brief break from our infinite scrolling of toxified social media-infused rage bait and return to a simpler time when, if you wanted to know something, you could just pick up the phone and ask someone—when any of your queries came with a pre-gameshow version of the lifeline, “I’d like to phone a friend.” Auburn University perfected this ideal version of the help-desk model 70 years ago and, amazingly, the students manning the landline are still on call. What kinds of questions do they answer? Here’s one example: “If you died on the operating table and they declared you legally dead and wrote out a death certificate and everything, but then you came back to life, what are the legal ramifications? Do you technically no longer exist? Do you have to be declared undead by a judge?” But the questions can be about anything. While the large stacks of reference books have been replaced by a few computers, two things have remained the same. The phone number. And the fact that a human will take your call. Oxford American: The Alabama Landline That Keeps Ringing. “During the day, the phones ring about ten to fifteen times an hour. Most of the calls are from the general public. Occasionally, an Auburn student calls to ask about basketball tickets or whether their brown jacket ended up in the lost and found. As classes wrap up for the afternoon and the sun sets, the big windows that filter sunlight turn into mirrors. Calls become less frequent, so students working at the desk settle into their homework. It’s a perk of the job. By nine o’clock, the student center is quiet. That’s when people like Beulah call…”
+ After you’re done talking to Beulah, you can check out this story to ease yourself back into our modern reality. Mother feeling lonely? Pay for an AI app to give her a call.
As Sobering as a Judge
The battle between the Trump administration and courtroom judges just crossed a new threshold. “F.B.I. agents arrested a Milwaukee county judge on Friday on charges of obstructing immigration agents, saying she steered an undocumented immigrant through a side door in her courtroom while the agents waited to arrest him in a public hallway.” NYT (Gift Article): Wisconsin Judge Arrested, Accused of Shielding Immigrant From Federal Agents.
+ Pam Bondi: “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me. The [judges] are deranged is all I can think of. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today. (The administration must think the SCOTUS justices are deranged, too, because they’re doing everything to avoid following their orders.)
PhD Day
“The announcement followed a wave of individual lawsuits filed by students who have said they were notified that their legal right to study in the United States was rescinded, often with minimal explanation. In some cases, students had minor documented traffic violations or other infractions. But in other cases, there appeared to be no obvious cause for the revocations.” Trump Administration Reverses Course on Student Visa Cancellations.
+ The policy has been halted, but the fear it and other measures have engendered will likely live on. WSJ (Gift Article): Fearing Trump’s Visa Crackdown, International College Students Race to Scrub Op-Eds.
+ We’re scaring away the best and the brightest people, one of the key imports that gives America its competitive advantage. This XKCD comic sums it up pretty well: PhD Timeline. And Fareed Zakaria fleshes it out. WaPo (Gift Article): Trump is destroying 100 years of competitive advantage in 100 days.
Weekend Whats
What to Watch: You don’t need to be a StarsWars nut to appreciate the excellence of the series Andor on DisneyPlus. The first few episodes of season two are already out, but I’m still catching up on, and really digging, season one.
+ What to Movie: Lake George on Hulu gives strong indie movie vibes and pacing as we follow the criming adventures of a woman (Carrie Coon) and the man being strong-armed into killing her (Shea Whigham).
+ What to Wear: Sometime clothes that are in style become even more in style. And so it is with the Pro Democracy Shirt and Hoodie.
Extra, Extra
National Security Councigliere: Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff is ousted, in the latest sacking at the Pentagon. But it’s not just Hegseth. The whole national security apparatus is breaking. “The disorder at the NSC, officials told me, stems from Trump’s impatience with process, disregard for the law, and insistence on loyalty in place of expertise. They also said it reflects the president’s distrust of Waltz, a former Florida congressman and Green Beret who served in the George W. Bush administration as an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.” The Atlantic: Inside the Fiasco at the National Security Council.
+ Buyer Beware: “The companies that make our food and home essentials are officially sounding alarms about what lies ahead for the U.S. shopper.”
+ Cost of Savings: “Federal law and previous government shutdowns offered Mr. Musk a legal playbook for reducing the federal work force, a goal that most Americans support. But Mr. Musk chose similar lightning-speed, blunt-force methods he used to drastically cut Twitter’s work force after he acquired the company in 2022.” An expert on the federal work force estimates that the speed and chaos of Mr. Musk’s cuts to the bureaucracy will cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year. (And this is an account we can’t delete.)
+ Getting a Case Lift: “Federal prosecutors said at trial that former Nevada state lawmaker Michele Fiore, 54, had raised more than $70,000 for the statue of a Las Vegas police officer who was fatally shot in 2014 in the line of duty, but had instead spent some of it on cosmetic surgery, rent and her daughter’s wedding.” Trump just pardoned her.
+ Spurious George: Ex-US Rep. George Santos sentenced to over 7 years in prison for fraud and identity theft. (Harkens back to a time when politicians committing crimes was illegal…)
+ Tunnel Vision: “Most underwater tunnels – including the 50km Channel Tunnel between the UK and France – burrow through bedrock beneath the seafloor. Here instead, 90 individual elements will be linked up, piece by piece, like Lego bricks.” The record-breaking tunnel being built from Denmark to Germany.
Feel Good Friday
NYT (Gift Article): Penn Station’s Not-So-Secret Other Life: The People’s Dance Studio. “Smooth floors. Public restrooms. A built-in audience: The lower level of Moynihan Hall doubles as a rehearsal space for a variety of dance groups, including K-pop, salsa and Brazilian Zouk.” With a restroom and a built-in audience, it also could soon double as NextDraft HQ.
+ Bridgette and Paula Powers are the twins from Queensland, Australia who went viral for saying the same thing at the same time. The best part of the whole thing was Jimmy Kimmel interviewing them. It can’t be real. But it is.
+ Pedro Pascal wore a Protect the Dolls t-shirt on the red carpet and called out JK Rowling. It’s a reminder, especially now, not to be afraid to be a decent person. “I can’t think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorizing the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist.” My friend Nish Nadaraja explains it well. Pedro Pascal is already Mr. Fantastic. “Protect the dolls. Protect the humans. Protect the people who have already spent too much time trying to earn the basic courtesy the rest of us get for free.”
+ “Hearing aids and cochlear implants have been getting better for years, but a new type of device—eyeglasses that display real-time speech transcription on their lenses—is a game-changing breakthrough.” The New Yorker:
Subtitling Your Life.
+ At These Grocery Stores, No One Pays.
+ WaPo (Gift Article): You can read with a cat on your lap at this bookstore, then adopt the cat. (I sometimes go to my local bookstore just to get a break from my cats.)
