An Open Letter to Time as it Relates to Flat Circles #YOLO
Dearest Poppets, how I’ve missed you! Our household is emerging from quarantine and nurse-dogs Teddy and Ellie, having labored hard this week with cuddles, are looking forward to a day off to chewing and destroying stuff without me there to catch them. So let’s get to it.
Headline I’d never thought I’d read: Fifty Shades of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ the New German Best Seller. Should be noted that, until last year, the State of Bavaria owned the copyright for the book, and "would not permit any new editions.” The “best seller” publications are writing about the recently-released scholarly edition.
By now, you’ve probably read some of the millennial open letters floating around Medium. If you haven’t, pat yourself on the back this weekend and cherish your maintained connection to reality and decency. A mere week ago (#killmenow,) a guest services employee at Yelp wrote An Open Letter To My CEO, describing the dichotomy between her employer’s plush, hip, start-uppy environment and her own difficulty to make ends meet as a minimum-wage employee in the Bay Area.
Let me say off the top that I am NOT surprised she was let go - first rule of fight club is don’t write a scathing open letter to your CEO on Medium suggesting they divert their coconut water budget to you. But sweet lord, the scolding and schadenfreude of those responses. So to recap the responses:
The parry: An Open Letter to Millennials Like Talia…
And the jab to that parry: Debunking that Millennial's Open Letter to that Millennial Who Wrote an Open Letter to Her CEO
And the jazz hands alongside that jab to that parry: A Millennial’s Open Letter to Millennials Writing Open Letters (clutch line: “Opportunity will fall into your lap with a little luck and serial-killer persistence” brb, getting that tattooed on my back)
And finally, the face palm to the jazz hands alongside that jab to that parry: A self-righteous open letter to people who write self-righteous open letters to people who write self-righteous open letters
On another rant, as I tell you often, I am not, in fact, a lawyer *phew.* I am, however, fascinated by SCOTUS, and consider myself a one-issue Presidential voter: that is, for the person who will appoint Supreme Court Justices.
So in reading about Justice Scalia’s death, from rumors of his membership in a "secretive society of elite hunters” founded in the 1600s, to the Democratic PR campaign to get the Senate Republicans to vote on his successor, I’m reminded of just how critical a role the next POTUS will have in shaping American law, culture, and soul.
Slate has an excellent take by Mark Joseph Stern on what the court will look like until that replacement is chosen. In his report on the hearing on Utah v. Strieff, he describes a SCOTUS changed, with Justice Sotomayer invoking Ferguson, Justice Kagan jumping in with "a mischievous grin” to support her colleague’s argument, and Chief Justice Roberts essentially gritting his teeth and tolerating newly-unmuzzled liberal justices.
Speaking of SCOTUS blog, they ran a big-name oped this week. In my mind, this guest commentary is more exciting to President Obama than The New York Times, given his constitutional and general nerdiness.
Phew, I think that’s all I’ve got. Have a very merry Friday, y’all!