Weekend Whats
What to Book: “As the passengers were contemplating which of these qualified women and men could take the helm of the ship, one of the passengers spoke up. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said loudly with a voice at once high- pitched and hoarse. This man was large and lumpy, and a bit hunched over, and wore a yellow feather in his hair. All the passengers knew him well. They knew him to be the guy who sold cheap faux-gold souvenirs near the putt-putt golf course, who had borrowed money from all of the ship’s adults and some of its teenagers, who swindled rubes via three-card monte and pig-in-the-poke, who stayed inside on windy days (the effect on his feather was catastrophic) and who said pretty much anything that popped into his head.” The always-excellent Dave Eggers with a biting satire about a ship called Glory and “the loud, clownish, and foul Captain who steers it to the brink of disaster.” The Captain and the Glory: An Entertainment. (Dave has written some of America’s most insightful and prophetic literature, so I’m relieved that the captain only steered the ship to the brink of disaster…)
+ What to Fix: “In every other industry, a company can be held liable when their product is defective. When engines explode or seatbelts malfunction, car companies recall tens of thousands of vehicles, at a cost of billions of dollars. It only seems fair to say to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter: your product is defective, you are obliged to fix it, no matter how much it costs and no matter how many moderators you need to employ.” You absolutely need to watch Sacha Baron Cohen’s keynote address at ADL’s 2019 Never Is Now Summit on Anti-Semitism and Hate.
+ What to Read: “I parked beside an open sewer full of black, seething water, and walked down a trash-choked alleyway and knocked on a wooden door. It opened into a spacious compound, eerily quiet and green, with rosebushes in bloom … Wahida had worked for many years as a teacher, and barely spoke. She seemed to communicate by slapping people, hard, across the face. She wandered from one of us to the other, looking for someone to slap. Once, it was me. Mostly it was my interpreter.” Ellen Barry in the NYT: The Jungle Prince of Delhi.
