This week, my thoughts have been a little bit scattered, so for this quickfire round we’re giving into it. Brains are fun!

Quickfire Round ⚡️

• Had a weird lunch experience; I will never understand why some people just refuse to gender others correctly. If this is you, you are a Bad Person™️
• Ding, dong, the witch is guilty 🧙‍♀️
• If you’re prone to mouth ulcers, check if your toothpaste contains sodium lauryl sulfate 🪥
• “It’s corn!” is wearing itself preeetty thin 🌽
• File this under “memes that no one above the age of 30 will understand.” 🎼
• Forgiveness and letting go can be very satisfying.

Watch This 🎥

Nope by Jordan Peele 🚫

Nope is wonderful. Jordan Peele’s work, in general, has been pretty great — Get Out is a modern classic, and Us is terrifying, if a little messy. Nope sets itself apart from those two films by being pure spectacle — it’s sci-fi horror put together with masterful technique, and just immense amounts of care put into the craft of it.

Get Out and Us are also very much “about something”. They wear their allegories on their sleeve, an approach that’s worked well for Peele. In Nope, though, he’s willing to let the story and the “about something” unfold by itself. The themes, the social commentary, they’re all there. The difference is that you could read this straight if you really wanted to. You shouldn’t, but you totally could.

Listen to This 🎧

Climate Trauma – InsideKini Podcast 📰

Some amazing people over at Malaysiakini, one of Malaysia’s longest running independent news publishers, have started the Insidekini podcast, where host Wan Irdina talks to journalists about their big stories, and gives us an inside look at the news reporting process.

The third episode above is a conversation with Malaysiakini’s special issues reporter Aidila Razak on her article When the water rises: A Malaysian climate change story. One talking point that stood out to me was that a lot of climate reporting in Malaysia is stuck reporting the trees and not the forest — we see individual reports on floods and wildfires, but not many articles tying these separate events into climate change. The climate crisis is a massive issue with widespread effects, but because it’s so massive it’s also very hard to effectively communicate it.

Lots of interesting things covered, including the effects of climate change that we’re feeling already, but also the challenges of climate reporting in Malaysia and the struggle to even get the data necessary to report on it accurately.

First Errand – 99% Invisible 🗼

Unless you live under a rock, I‘m sure you saw the Old Enough craze when it hit Netflix a few months ago. TL;DR – in Japan, many kids are expected to go on a first errand by themselves when they’re very very young. Here’s a snippet.

There was a lot of talk at the time about the cultural differences between Japan and the rest of the world, and how those differences allow this kind of thing. One thing that the discourse was missing, though, was a look at how Japan’s urban development also helps this. That’s where this episode of 99% Invisible comes in.

In summary: (1) Most cities have mixed zoning, where residences and businesses and workplaces all exist in the same block, making everything be near each other. (2) Narrower streets disincentivise car use. (3) Pedestrians come first.

Read This 📚

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi ☕️

This book is short. It’s also got a wonderful premise that’s so simple, but works so well: there’s a café in Tokyo where customers can travel back in time, as long as they return before their coffee gets cold.

Everything is short and concise, but the four stories in the book are rich with characters and relationships that will stick in your mind. If you’re not a fan of sci-fi time travel, don’t worry — it’s less Primer and more magical realism. The time travel is something the characters find puzzling, but ultimately accept as just natural, a thing that is.

For a book that you can knock out in about 2 hours, it packs a lot in.