Roundup

[jaggedwolf]

Reading

Nothing finished this week, but I am midway through a couple of books - the biography Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow, and the memoir The Education of An Idealist by Samantha Power, who was the 2013-2017 UN ambassador for the US. Power won a Pulitzer for her '03 book on US foreign policy responses to genocide, and indeed, that and human rights was much of her focus in the Obama administration.

It was an interesting switch from the Washington bio to this memoir, because it felt like switching from President to another, given how large Obama looms in the memoir. My mind's mostly on the memoir since I'm trying to finish it up for a book club at work next week. I am mostly left with the opinion that I don't know enough about the crisis discussed, nor do I have a thought-out enough opinion on American foreign policy to tell if Power's decisions are her equivocating, or if she truly made the most of her options.

The section on Obama capitulating to not using the word genocide for the Armenian genocide was very frustrating to read.

Theatre

I watched A Christmas Carol while I was in DC. It was a good time, Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present were especially great, and apparently I still quite like the story.

Talking Meme

'tis the time.

Day 6: NOTPs/Least favourite ships
Day 7: Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid

RL

My Thanksgiving week vacation was an much-needed break - it's almost like I can actually focus at work now. Ate lots of good food, had a couple of excellent bourbon cocktails, walked a ton, posted an annoying number of photographs on Instagram. A listing of what I ended up seeing is below.

Philly: Independence Hall, Tomb of The Unknown Soldier, The President's House
DC: Library of Congress (the current temp. exhibits are great too), Capitol Hill, National Portrait Gallery, American History Museum, Holocaust Memorial Museum, African American History Museum, Ford's Theatre

I think I'd like to go back to DC again and see even more of the museums I went to, along with the ones I didn't. My feet were very tired by the end of it though.

Finally, shout-out to the random white families on my Library of Congress tour that kept getting asked if I was with them because while I do look like a middle-schooler but that must have been very confusing for them. (Before this revelation, the tour guide was very delighted that I gave an accurate description of Medusa. What a time.)

Random Links

The Vietnam Draft Lotteries Were A Scientific Experiments

The Vietnam draft lotteries took place at the cusp of the Information Age, and this timing could account for the wave of research focused on them, as contrasted with previous draft lotteries. The U.S. government had conducted similar drawings for mobilizations during World War I and World War II, but the infrastructure to track “subjects” consisted, at best, of paper forms slotted into cardboard folders. Merging those records, if preserved, with information about the outcomes of men eligible for the earlier draft lotteries would be prohibitively costly. Those lotteries, therefore, are hard to label “experiments”—their consequences can’t be studied. The Vietnam lotteries could, however, because electronic records and databases were appearing for the first time in the 1970s.

Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention

Books of the Year, as chosen by 42 Singaporean writers and artists

As Facebook caves to Singapore censorship, the writing is on the wall