If you really respect Trump voters, tell them the truth
An interesting piece, given that I come from a one horse town and live in one of those places that's mentioned for reinventing itself.
The lede: A wave of recent columns argue that what Trump superfans — or at least some hazily imagined, hard-pressed Northern working-class version of them — really want is respect. By all appearances, though, the opposite is the case. Those voters want what most voters want from politicians: to be disrespected, via shameless pandering and the occasional blatant lie.
Video Games Are Better Without Stories
I've been known to knock back a few 50 hour immersive video games now and then. I've also been known to never really know if I enjoy them. Part of what pushes me along is the girlfriend's love of the stories. The Atlantic takes a different, very Roger Ebert friendly tack.
The lede: A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. It would be like living in a novel, where the player’s actions would have as much of an influence on the story as they might in the real world.
50 Years Ago, This Was a Wasteland. He Changed Everything | Short Film Showcase
OK, so I didn't read this. But it's still worth 8 minutes of your time.
The lede: Fifty years ago you couldn't hardly walk on this place. It was wall to wall brush. There wasn't any grass. There wasn't any water. Nobody wanted it.
Mike Judge, the Bard of Suck
I know this came out last week, but I've had it open in a tab in my browser ever since and just now finally finished it. Don't judge me.
The lede: As we took a seat in the back of the Commissary, a restaurant on the Sony Pictures Studios lot, Mike Judge pointed out a man seated two booths away. It was Tom Rothman, the chairman of Sony Pictures and former head of Fox’s film division, where he oversaw the rocky release of Judge’s 2006 film, “Idiocracy.” The movie imagined America 500 years in the future, populated and ruled by absolute morons, its infrastructure crumbling, its cities piled high with trash, everyone anesthetized by impossibly stupid television like the hit show “Ow! My Balls!” Though the film finished shooting in 2004, the studio mothballed it for more than a year. When “Idiocracy” was finally released, it wasn’t screened for critics or promoted in any other way — there wasn’t even a trailer — and it was shown in only seven cities, New York not among them. The studio, it seemed, was fulfilling the bare minimum of its contractual obligations, as if hoping that the movie would just go away.
HAMTRAMCK STADIUM: PRESERVING DETROIT’S NEGRO LEAGUE BASEBALL HISTORY
Did you know there are only 3 remaining Negro League fields left? Did you know I can probably see one from my office and I somehow haven't been there? New life goals.
The lede: Just five miles north of Detroit’s Comerica Park — home of the Tigers — sits a relic of baseball history. The pitcher’s mound is barely detectable, the base paths are long gone, and all is silent but the chattering birds making nests in the roof of the 87-year-old grandstand.