| | | | Dear News-alight-ers,
It may shock you to learn that while you are reading this newsletter on Thursday, we actually assemble it on Wednesday. Think of it as a kind of message in a bottle, hurled into the Ocean of Thursday Future by us, standing on the Shores of Wednesday Present. It's basically time travel.
This week is special, though. Because during the time usually reserved for panicking over effortlessly composing the newsletter, we were busy having a little holiday gathering and enjoying one another's company! Nog was sipped. Presents were opened. Cheese was enjoyed. Bob was involved. | | | Bob's Secret Santa/Snowflake was Leah Feder, who arranged a truly overwhelming supply of Peanut Bars for the co-host most known around the office for his repeated requests for "a [expletive] Peanut Bar." Doesn't he look delighted?! Careful what you wish for, Bob! | | | Leah, in turn, received presents — that's presents with an "s", to make up for the 2017 Gift Card Debacle, as described in the Ocean of Newsletters Past — from Micah Loewinger. Here we see a candid shot capturing the precise moment when Micah tuned the dial to our home station, WNYC. Also pictured: redemption, forgiveness, friendship. | |  | | Jen Munson is much more than a magnificent technical director for On the Media. She's also our resident Egg Nog Wizard, which is why our executive producer Katya Rogers tried to chug her viscous present right away. Ultimately, an unsuccessful attempt. But admirable. | |  | This is producer Jon Hanrahan and his adorable new succulent. Thanks, Samantha Maldonado the Intern! Not pictured: very groovy socks! Thanks again, Sam!
Also, not pictured because we didn't do a very good job of taking photos: beloved members of the OTM Family, including (but not limited to!) Charlotte Cooper, Sara Fishko, and Olivia Briley. And... | |  | SSSSSAAAAANNNNTTTAAA!!! Or, close enough: our former producer and still-very-good-friend Jesse Brenneman (pictured here with Alana Casanova-Burgess)! Jesse has left New York for his home state of Montana, but he came back for Jen's delicious egg nog — and also to inspect all the plants he left behind. We miss you, Jesse!
Okay, onward. | | [ In Case You Missed It ] | |  | | This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 1918 flu pandemic, a global catastrophe that infected an estimated 500 million people. When the flu began that spring, Americans were still just getting used to the idea that germs cause diseases; the ways in which viruses spread were remained highly mysterious. This week we had hosting help from WNYC's Amanda Aronczyk, who spoke with science journalist Laurie Garrett about the "mosaic of public health schemes all over health America." Bob also spoke with Stony Brook's Nancy Tomes about how public messaging worked during the outbreak — and how flu coverage competed for the front page with the First World War. Listen here. | |  | Bob: There's this podcast called Heavyweight, with Jonathan Goldstein. Episode #22 is called Marchel. It's about one brief moment in a famous/obscure Russian movie, a moment that has obsessed Goldstein for years. In this episode, he goes to extraordinary lengths to understand what took place in the moment, to assign blame and to ponder why the whole rest of the world is so indifferent. Actually, he knows exactly why the whole world is indifferent, so it's really, in the end, Jonathan Goldstein's psyche on full display. As someone who has personally tramped all over Vienna to locate the world's biggest corkscrew, traveled to California to debunk the Rice-a-Roni "San Francisco treat" myth and 30 years after high-school graduation journeyed back in search of my "permanent" record*, I can so relate.
*Permanent, my ass. They threw it out before I turned 19. | |  | | Last week, a swell of outrage erupted around YouTube's annual Rewind video, an advertiser-friendly celebration of the platform's biggest memes, content creators and trends from 2018. What seems to have upset viewers (it's the site's most disliked video of all time) was what and who were excluded: namely the controversial prankster brothers Jake and Logan Paul and PewDiePie, YouTube's biggest star. PewDiePie, a Swedish gamer known for saying anti-Semitic and racist stuff, is also about to lose his #1 most subscribed rank to an Indian YouTube channel called T-Series. This threat to Western hegemony has mobilized support from the likes of Jordan Peterson, a host of trolly hacker types and other netizens who want to maximize the drama around this monumental horse race. It's all part of a war for the identity of YouTube and the internet at large. Read about it on Vox! | |  | | In 1971, federal investigators convened two grand juries to investigate, among other things, the publishing, by major newspapers, of thousands of pages of secret government documents reviewing the history, from 1945 on, of the still ongoing war in Vietnam. Just this week, historian Jill Lepore asked to a federal court release the sealed documents from those Pentagon Papers probes. Clearly, almost a half-century after Daniel Ellsberg's mammoth revelations, questions still linger. For this podcast extra, we revisit Brooke's conversation earlier this year with Les Gelb — one of the drafters of the original Papers. Check it out. | | | The medium has a message. | | | Thanks for listening, and for reading. We love feedback, so please contact us with any questions or comments. We're busy, but we read them all, promise. | | | | | | |
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