Intermission for the invalid
Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s Jumpstack! Let’s jump in!
Hurry up please, it’s Standard Time
We’ve ventured into the dark season once again, even if winter doesn’t officially start for another month-and-a-half.
Dinner now comes after dusk, and the sun has gone anemic, for we operate on Standard Time, and not Daylight Saving Time, which I admit I wasn’t clear on before I read this:
(Total honesty: I have to consciously not say or write Daylight Savings Time.)
Mark Joseph Stern vents his frustration with me, and the general population, over our ignorant tendency to blame the wrong concept for our seasonal complaints:
Our collective failure to grasp this basic terminology has led to a lot of confusion. Every November, countless Americans condemn DST because they conflate it with Standard Time. They think that the dreaded winter months of early sunsets and seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, are the fault of DST. I understand why: It is not obvious why daylight is “saved” when it is backloaded toward the end of the day. The terms are ambiguous, which leads would-be critics of Standard Time to unleash their anguish on their true ally, DST.
If Daylight Saving Time is the phantom that chases the members of Mystery Inc., then Standard Time is the corrupt businessman they find under the mask.
And who is the diabolical man who invented Standard Time? Well, we have a whole Heritage Minute devoted to the villain:
Installing a flawed system and then letting attempts to solve inherent issues within it take the blame for those same issues: truly, a part of our heritage.
Champion of a lost world
My father was a boxer, for a time, when I was very young.
The impossibly dense punching bags and gloves like fat red berries entranced me, the explosive expression of power restrained by such thick padding—and in the early 1980s it was everywhere: an endless stream of Rocky movie sequels, and the rise of Mike Tyson as a household name.
Little did anyone know that we were watching the end of an era, helped along by the same forces that originally brought boxing to prominence, as Michael Socolow considers the lessons that boxing may have for football:
Keep your network broadcast partners happy, rather than moving to more exclusive distribution models — tempting as revenue streams spurred by cable subscriber fees might be or future proprietary apps might be. Don’t mistake the premium consumer for the casual fan. Closely monitor and clearly address the public’s perception of violence both on and off the field. And perhaps most important: Never take public opinion for granted because someday — strange as it may seem now — the American public’s interest could simply vanish.
Perhaps it’s not just football that would benefit from heeding such warnings: it seems like these concepts are also the painful lessons learned by the media in the past decade.
Crime in the library
Everyone has at least one book they neglected to return to their school library and have held onto over the years, either as a memento of their youth or residual guilt or a mixture of both.
At least I hope everyone does, as I have quite a few, and I don’t think my old high school is waiting on me to return a 30-year-old poetry anthology.
But not every theft is so benign: in fact, some of the most egregious thefts come from people entrusted with the collections themselves, as revealed by Erin Thompson in this fascinating review of the subject:
To prevent people from noticing that items were missing, Weber physically rearranged the collections storage area and instituted a new numbering system. He also made new policies that appeared designed to protect the collection, like declaring storage areas closed to anyone but archival staff and working with materials in private offices rather than public spaces. But in practice, this meant that Weber was usually the only member of the Museum’s staff who knew where anything was or who was authorized to access it.
As Thompson notes, the majority of this type of theft is committed by old white guys, and an upheaval of the systems in place—plus more diversity in the sector—can combat it.
While insiders may use their status and power to conceal their scams, it falls to the outsiders to proclaim the emperor has no clothes, and he’s selling a valuable vellum on eBay.
The Jumpstack is like Reader’s Digest for eccentrics
A fun, mouthy, peanut-shell throwing essay on the State of Online is a rare find, and Rosa Lyster is a master of the genre:
In this one, Lyster takes to task our curious habit of applying new labels to people, actions, and situations in an attempt to seem more worldly and knowledgable. But, in the process, we leave comprehension behind:
What does describing Machiavelli as an incel do other than indicate that you know what an incel is, vaguely, and you have read something somewhere about Machiavelli not being too keen on women? What is the purpose of connecting those two things, other than to drag historical figures and contexts and events kicking and screaming into the present day and insist that we are all best served by analyzing them through a lens that only accommodates things we have learned in the last two weeks or so?
(Lyster has the admirable quality of making you laugh out loud while feeling shamefully complicit in what she’s railing against.)
A note about me, about last week
Sometimes life comes at you fast, leaving you light-headed and off-balance, and if you don’t stop what you’re doing right now, you’re gonna collapse in this grocery store.
You get home, and you sleep, but it feels like it did no good, and since this keeps happening for no obvious reason, you go to the doctor and he says very seriously, “You should have told me months ago.”
That’s why there was no newsletter last week: I was attending to myself. I am getting the requisite medical attention, so please don’t worry—I’m far more receptive to being admonished for ignoring it.
But isn’t that what I cautioned against in a recent Twitter thread? Click to read the whole thing:
Jumpsuit, heal thyself.
And that’s it for The Jumpstack! If you enjoyed this issue, how about hitting that heart—which not only delights me, it helps promote the newsletter.
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