Joe Stracci's blog. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: writing, art, technology, Apple, food, fatherhood, parenting, and music. And photography. And design. And sports. Oh, and probably some politics too.
Posted in: Links
Chauncey Alcorn & Leonard Greene, writing for The New York Daily News:
Cruz was scheduled to speak at Bronx Lighthouse College Preparatory Academy until students wrote a letter to the principal asking her not to let Cruz come, prompting staffers to cancel the appearance.
New York Value #1,954: Telling chumps: fuck outta here.
I've never been prouder to sport a tattoo of the Bronx.
Jay Caspian Kang, writing for The New York Times Magazine:
Baseball used to be seen as a reflection of the country’s progress on race. Its 1947 integration, which predated the Civil Rights Act by 17 years, has been upheld as a sign of the sport’s essentially democratic spirit; generations of writers and thinkers, like Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Chris Rock, found in baseball an embodiment of America’s great experiment, contradictions and all. But there was always a saccharine dimension to the idealism about the game: Baseball represented a very particular, buttoned-up version of American identity, and players who deviated from it were often subject to harsh criticism.
I came of age during the reign of Ken Griffey Jr. My god, was he cool. And as all of my teammates were flipping their caps around and wiggling their shoulders and hips at the plate and perfecting the art of nonchalantly catching fly balls, I was being instructed to disregard all of it—wearing your cap backwards was akin to wearing a sign on your chest that said, I Don't Take Baseball Seriously; trying to emulate Griffey's stance would ruin your swing; not catching a fly ball with two hands would surely, at some point, lose a game for The Team.
Kate Bolick, writing for The New Yorker:
When I was in college, I asked my mother if she believed in an afterlife, and she said no. This didn’t surprise me—she’d finished Catholic school an atheist—but it bothered me. I reasoned with her: “None of us can say for certain there’s no life after death because we’re still alive,” and, “What if there is an afterlife and, by refusing to believe in it, you lose your right to send signs from beyond the grave?” and, “How about this: let’s just agree to agree that there is an afterlife, and if there is, when one of us dies, we can send signs, and if there isn’t that’s that. But at least we’ll have the option.” She laughed and said no, thank you.
A year later, after her cancer had reëmerged and killed her more swiftly than we’d ever thought possible, I thought of this conversation often, and was annoyed. Thanks for leaving me alone in this cold, echoing void, Mom. Would it have hurt her to humor me? To at least be on the lookout for signs from beyond would have been a comfort. I envied people who deluded themselves by visiting mediums or psychics, and I bridled at those who said my mother was “watching over” me. Maybe other mothers did such a thing, but not mine.
I promise you that this piece isn't nearly as negative as the above excerpt makes it seem. I just didn't want to spoil anything.
Dominick Dunne, writing for Vanity Fair:
At nine o’clock we walk into the courtroom and take our places in our assigned seats, and then the door to the holding room opens and in comes O. J. Simpson himself, usually surrounded by Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, and Carl Douglas. We all stare at O.J. to see what kind of mood he’s in or to which lawyer he’s talking, and we watch him say good morning to members of his family. When Judge Lance Ito comes in, we do not rise, but we do rise on the bailiff’s order to do so as the jury enters. Then the trial begins again, and all day long we watch it, except for our lunch break, when we talk about it, saying things such as “Did you notice if O.J. looked when they showed the picture of Nicole lying in the blood?” The other night, after watching a segment of Hard Copy devoted to O.J. and a drug dealer, I went to a friend’s house for dinner. I had hardly gotten inside the front door when I was confronted by people who wanted to know what had happened in court that day. I had hoped for a little respite from the topic. I wanted to talk about something else for a change, and volunteered that Ethan Hawke was in the room across the hall from me at the Chateau Marmont, and that Keanu Reeves was in the room next to me, and that I had just seen Johnny Depp being interviewed in the lobby. But nobody cared. Polite nods were the most my movie-star name-dropping got. They all wanted to talk about nothing but O. J. Simpson.
If, like me (and many others), you've fallen hard for FX's American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, you've got some reading you'll want to do. As the show has portrayed, Dominick Dunne covered the trial in-person for Vanity Fair, and the VF archives has all 9 pieces linked up and ready to go. The writing is exquisite, Bret Easton Ellis meets Ernest Hemingway. Dunne is somber, charismatic, funny, and inquisitive. It doesn't get any better than this. The excerpt above is from Part 2, 'All O.J., All the Time.'
Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis, writing for Bloomberg:
According to Sepúlveda, his payments were made in cash, half upfront. When he traveled, he used a fake passport and stayed alone in a hotel, far from campaign staff. No one could bring a smartphone or camera into his room.
Most jobs were initiated in person. Sepúlveda says Rendón would give him a piece of paper with target names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers. Sepúlveda would take the note to his hotel, enter the data into an encrypted file, then burn the page or flush it down the toilet. If Rendón needed to send an e-mail, he used coded language. To “caress” meant to attack; to “listen to music” meant to intercept a target’s phone calls.
Rendón and Sepúlveda took pains not to be seen together. They communicated over encrypted phones, which they replaced every two months. Sepúlveda says he sent daily progress reports and intelligence briefings from throwaway e-mail accounts to a go-between in Rendón’s consulting firm.
Each job ended with a specific, color-coded destruct sequence. On election day, Sepúlveda would purge all data classified as “red.” Those were files that could send him and his handlers to prison: intercepted phone calls and e-mails, lists of hacking victims, and confidential briefings he prepared for the campaigns. All phones, hard drives, flash drives, and computer servers were physically destroyed. Less-sensitive “yellow” data—travel schedules, salary spreadsheets, fundraising plans—were saved to an encrypted thumb drive and given to the campaigns for one final review. A week later it, too, would be destroyed.
This piece is both terrifying and not. Politics has always been—and will always be—a dirty, dirty business. That the tactics stay apace with the technology of the time shouldn't come as a surprise. Keep in mind that the title of this piece is 'How to Hack an Election.' It isn't 'How to Hack an Election and Win.'
Bruce Schoenfeld, writing for The New York Times Magazine:
The N.B.A. demands that each franchise confer one owner, regardless of stake size, with nearly dictatorial power. Lacob wields his softly, just as he typically sits in the back of corporate board meetings without saying much, absorbing information, then guiding the discussion toward a decision. “I’m a professional listener,” he told me. “There’s a lot of smart people in the world, you know. I’m not the smartest. I’m just an integrator. The N.B.A. isn’t like the outside world. I can do whatever I want. But you don’t treat people that way.”
Even teams in small markets cost hundreds of millions of dollars these days. Unless you’re Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft chief who spent $2 billion on the Los Angeles Clippers without the help of outside investors, most potential owners don’t have the wherewithal, or the gumption, to finance a purchase themselves. But rather than money without strings attached — investors who would have little involvement beyond writing checks — Lacob and Guber purposefully sought out entrepreneurs and businessmen with attributes and access that complemented their own. “Everyone he’s partnered with has a strategic reason to be there,” says Dennis Mannion, C.E.O. of the Detroit Pistons, who has held executive positions with teams in all four major American sports leagues. “You have this phenomenal bullpen of talent.”
So after the shareholder Dennis Wong, the managing director of SPI Holdings, advised Lacob on the real estate purchase for the new arena, Walecka helped with the financing. When I spoke with Swinmurn, he reeled off rapid-fire opinions on the design of the Warriors’ branded attire, the type of food sold at the concession stands and other disparate topics. Occasionally, minority partners can even influence what happens on the court. John Burbank of Passport Capital, who uses a deep knowledge of mathematics in his own investments, contributes detailed memos applying complex metrics to potential acquisitions. “I don’t know if any of it has 180ed us on a player,” Bob Myers, the Warriors’ general manager, told me, “but it has certainly moved us in a direction, one way or another. And he’s done it enough that it’s just the course of things now. It’s part of the process.”
This is a fascinating, engrossing piece of writing. I'm really worried now, too—all three of my favorite sports teams stand to be left in the dust if this is the future of sports ownership.
I'm ready to say it for sure—Aesop Rock is back. So pumped for The Impossible Kid.
Dan Barry, writing for The New York Times:
A fist of nerves, he walked down the glazed-tile stairwell to the finished basement, a space used for church dances and wedding banquets, but now an open locker room. Chandeliers glittered above the fighters trying to warm up and calm down, while the crowds upstairs cheered on the amateurs, including a sleepy-eyed 11-year-old who would knock out his grade-school opponent.
Taylor had longed for this moment. All those years of being picked on because of his size, all those street fights, all that anger needing redirection toward something constructive — all down to this. He had his hair in ropy dreadlocks and his tiger-patterned shorts, custom-made for $300, pulled high on his hardened torso.
Portable curtains in the basement separated the hometown favorites from the out-of-towners, the A’s from the B’s. Someone smart about boxing could walk in cold and tell which side was which. The local fighters are usually a notch above, in better shape, expected to win.
But Taylor’s been-around trainer, Jack Loew, heard this hammering sound, a whap, whap, whap-whap, from the curtain’s other side. He peeked and saw a sinewy teenager in red-and-white shorts pounding the outstretched mitts of his trainer with uncommon discipline. Whap-whap.
“We got a fighter,” Loew said to somebody.
Taylor was on his own side of the divide, warming up, when the curtain briefly parted to reveal his opponent. They made eye contact.
“Nothing like anger,” Taylor recalled. “Both nervous. Just looking at each other.”
The curtain closed.
This piece is told in several parts, from two different point of views, so it was hard to excerpt it. But I had to post it because it's beautiful writing employed to tell a terribly sad story about a violent sport. Savor this one.
For a moment, take away the wall; take away the immigration policies; take away any policy-related issue that might be leading you to consider voting for Donald Trump. Watch this exchange and ask yourself: this is the man you want as our representative on the world stage?
/via Someecards (and in the event that the video gets pulled, the page has a transcription of the exchange.)
Jill Abramson, writing for The Guardian:
I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.
Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.
I can't wait to tell my daughters that I voted for the first female President.
/via John Gruber