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AL SMITH
6.3K posts
The Spotify algorithm always amazes me. Sometimes I play a song and it knows I want “slightly melancholy 1980s gay disco with undertones of the AIDS crisis followed by 90s Eurodance” for a few hours, and then at other times it just indiscriminately plays me anything from the 80s
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I read Chernow’s Rockefeller biography recently and it lacks both perspectives, ending up in the middle as a kind of family drama. If Caro had done it you would have had both eagle eye view of Standard Oil and a sense of what the man was like to talk to. Though he had the advantage of subjects whose contemporaries were still alive
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@ryiacy I think part of this is the little cinematic excursions and breaks he takes to describe elements like hill farming or senate history or little potted biographies. And conversely the detail - taking the time to find out how lbj used a telephone, or behaved while driving
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I've been reading a lot of biographies recently and finally got around to starting the Robert Caro LBJ trilogy. Absolutely insane quality of writing. Gulf between Caro and other high level biographers like Ron Chernow is the same as between those biographers and regular journo
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AL SMITH retweetledi
@slurplebrained Just found out my ai dishwasher has been roasting me on twitter
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@PigeonFeatherz Common features include red face, ears like pork scratchings, big drum-tight gut
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There’s a particular look of physical precarity - or possibly two that substantially overlap - that I often seem to spot on guest stars in the small cluster of early 00s BBC detective shows I rely on substantially for my wellbeing, often actors that were quite a big deal or at least very prolific in the decades prior, and it’s a look that always makes me (or Mr P or my mum, if they pass by and look at the screen) go “oh blimey is that [so and so]? God he’s not looking well there is he, he can only have been about 60? Drinker maybe? Perhaps he’d just been ill”. And then I’ll idly google and without fail, without *fail*, it will turn out they died within 12-18 months of filming the episode.
Never come up with an evocative name for this particular look but whatever you want to call it, Alan Brazil appears to have had it for at least 25 years.
Dobby Solano@DobbySolanoNUFC
Reminds me of this all timer tweet.
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Looking for a junior-mid developer for a 3-4 month contract! It would be a mix of BI dashboard and data pipeline and/or web development work as we build out a data portal. Fully remote may be possible but it’s useful if you can get into London on some days. Please share to relevant friends
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Thought experimenting: what are the *healthiest* parasocial relationships?
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AL SMITH retweetledi
An unpopular opinion of mine is that we should ban cameras in parliament.
Audio recording is fine. But video turns it into a circus, with everyone competing for views on TV or social media.
Daisy Christodoulou@daisychristo
I'm very sympathetic to the @j_amesmarriott thesis and I've also seen the same issues @b_judah talks about - select committees in the UK (and senate committees in the US) becoming content fodder for social media, very senior politicians apparently unable to focus without getting distracted by their phones. But there are obvious problems with the thesis too. Does anyone really believe that Britain was so exceptionally well-governed 1970s-1990s? Wilson & Macmillan were both very well-read - did that make them brilliantly effective leaders? Also, the peak of mass deep literacy probably isn't 70s-90s but pre-TV & post-universal schooling- so maybe 1890s - 1930s. There were two massive world wars then and public opinion did play a part in them. How does that fit the thesis? Plus do you know who else was a great reader? Hitler! He read a book a day and was apparently always quoting Shakespeare. Stalin loved literature and had a personal library of thousands of books. I don't want to completely dismiss the thesis because there is something going on here but it is not as straightforward as it first seems.
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This tweet just got lost in all of the other TWIRL tweets
croissant@almostnora
is this a good time to announce our engagement??
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