Happy Friday! So this weeks links can be divided into two categories, Paris (and Paris adjacent articles) and everything else. I’m going to start with Paris.
Actually I’m going to start with Beirut and Iraq…Did the media ignore Beirut or did the readers?
But unless the victims are either children or Christian, I have never really succeeded in getting readers to care about such bombings that happen outside of the Western world.
It’s a sure sign that I’m getting older when I find myself agreeing with Peter Hitchens. I’d like to think he’s changing not me. Really want to beat terror, then calm down and think.
What I discovered from interviewing ISIS fighters.
Terror can only succeed with our cooperation.
John Oliver has it about right.. ..and hopefully I will be eating a French freedom tower very soon..
Everything else.
Why we shouldn’t trust bankers. I think that’s about right.
When your friends are having babies and your not. Oh yeah. I had this moment at my brother’s 40th when my aunt was all “give me the baby, I’m his great aunt” and I thought “yes but you’ve had your babies and grandchildren and nieces and nephews, Oli and Joe are the closest I get to any of that”. Sometimes it’s difficult all ways round, I love my nephews but looking after them is not a treat for me because I’m childless, I don’t want those children, they have parents, I want my children and the realisation that that isn’t gonna happen is tough. Looking after the nephews and assorted other children is something I do because I can but it doesn’t fill the child shaped hole in me.
What happens when you live with your friends and when you don’t anymore. I’ve lived with two of my friends. Christelle and Sarah. There is an adjustment when you don’t live with them anymore but I think that depends on the friendship and that you need to both make time for it and be forgiving when either of you can’t make the time.
We betray the young and their futures by pricing them out of London. There’s another thing here too, what about the working class kids who grow up in London? If I move out of London, I lose my support system. If Ma didn’t live in Surbiton, how would I have dealt with the last three weeks of not being able to walk, who would have shopped for me? For working class kids, the support system of friends and family is pretty much all they have going for them, if we take away social housing and make private housing really unaffordable, what happens to them?
A different way of sleeping. I’ve always wondered about this and whether doing it would help with my sleep problem.
Fascinating. How burgers and fries are killing your microbiome
Hannah Betts lives as a Tudor for the day. I love that period of history but I really wouldn’t trade now for that or my other favourite period of history not even to meet Johnny Kincaid…
Finally and this is my favourite…
This came via Kate – The Sequel To The Philadelphia Story That Katharine Hepburn Deserves.
TRACY: And then he capped it all off with “You have a good mind, a pretty face, a disciplined body that does what you tell it. You have everything it takes to make a lovely woman except the one essential. An understanding heart. Without that, you might as well be made of bronze.”
MIKE: Is that actual dialogue from the movie?
TRACY: Fucking WORD FOR WORD, Mike. Ver-goddamn-batim.
DEXTER: Your dad told you that you had ‘a disciplined body’?
MIKE: Christing hell.
DEXTER: Tracy, I think I get it now. You don’t have to marry any of us.
MIKE: But you really should not have to live within a hundred miles of your father. If you ever need help finding, like, an anonymous apartment in the city, please let one of us know. We would be more than happy to help out. Platonically.
DEXTER: With no expectation of a relationship. Or anything. Just…if you need anything, you call us. Okay?
Nic Dempsey 