Tom's Review #179 - FDR, Delicate Steve, Butterbean

📣 Update:

This is now a monthly newsletter.

📖 What I’m Reading:

Kim Jong-nam – Wikipedia

“Kim Jong-nam was the eldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. From roughly 1994 to 2001, he was considered the heir apparent to his father. He was thought to have fallen out of favor after embarrassing the regime in 2001 with a failed attempt to visit Tokyo Disneyland with a false passport, although Kim himself said his loss of favor had been due to advocating reform.”

Stop speedrunning to a dystopia – Erik Hoel

How we’re amusing ourselves to death.
“Spotify has been using a web of shadowy production companies to generate many of its own tracks; likely, it’s implied, with AI. Spotify’s rip-offs are made with profiles that look real but are boosted onto playlists to divert listeners away from the actual musicians that make up their platform.”
A culture adopts language patterns from its predominant forms of entertainment. US culture for a long time was “typographic”—we read newspapers and books. I think this is why reading what politicians said in the 20s and 30s sounds like you’re reading literature. Their language is full, formal, kinda stuffy. Then television came along, and now short-form video. And the way we talk has changed.
The governor of New Hampshire recently announced a ban on phones in school. Score +1 for the Haidters. Eight states have similar restrictions.

How to like everything more – Sasha Chapin

Enthusiastic tips for enthusiasm.

Book finished: Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life by Robert Dallek – 4/5

Impressive book. Learned a lot about the New Deal and WWII. Writing style was not entirely my jam. And I wish it covered some stuff more—e.g., end of WWII (albeit after FDR died) and Japanese internment (how?). But covered the hits very well: his family, upbringing, polio, cabinet, relationships with Churchill and Stalin. Pretty inspiring level of service and belief in America.

☝️ Word of the Month:

zygomorphic (adj) zy-guh-MOR-fik

Having a single plane of symmetry: divisible into two mirror-image halves along only one axis.

From Greek zygo- (yoke) + -morphic (shaped).

“The leathery leaves of Rhododendrons swaying to and fro in the gentle summer breeze, their large, showy, slightly zygomorphic flowers in beautiful bloom.”

💬 Quote of the Month:

In the face of the danger which confronts our time, no individual retains or can hope to retain, the right of personal choice which free men enjoy in times of peace. He has a first obligation to serve in the defense of our institutions of freedom—a first obligation to serve his country in whatever capacity his country finds him useful.

Like most men of my age, I had made plans for myself, plans for a private life of my own choice and for my own satisfaction, a life of that kind to begin in January, 1941. These plans, like so many other plans, had been made in a world which now seems as distant as another planet.

-FDR, in a radio address to the Democratic National Convention accepting the nomination for his third term, 19 July 1940