ICYMI this week ...

A round-up of the Daily News podcast plus a short few thoughts

Nov 05, 2023

On Friday, I finished just over 1400 minutes of recording the audio book for my 2021 book Spin Doctors. It took some time to arrange and we were able to do it thanks to a grant to ensure that books are available in accessible formats. It was an interesting experience coming back to a book that I haven’t read since September 2021. I’m pleased that the analysis remains correct. I would re-word many sentences and probably slash a solid 5000 words from the 135,000 word text but, all in, it’s a good summary of those early days of COVID-19 life. Please buy it when it’s out.

But, dear reader, know that a full quarter of the recording is me reading the endnotes. Yes, every single URL, every single upper case, lower case, forward slash, underscore and dash. Dash in dash every dash long dash ass dash headline dash that dash you dash can dash think dash of. Not easy stuff. And I think to myself — who would listen to all of this? And then immediately know — the same people who would type out a URL to find a web page rather than typing in a title into a search bar: no one.

Let’s stop printing URLs in our books.

But onto things that matter. It’s been another difficult week. Another week of war and death and a death toll that now pushes past 10,000.

This interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates is worth your time. Ta-Nehisi talks about his time in Palestine and how familiar it was to see a society where certain people don’t have access to rights like voting or going to certain places.

But most interesting for me is his reflection on non-violence and how violence is always a corrupting force. I had never thought of violence in this way. I’m not someone who opposes violence in principle — I think violence becomes necessary under certain circumstances — but Ta-Nehisi makes a pretty compelling argument that even if violence becomes necessary it still, always corrupts.

I think we can see that pretty much everywhere we look in the world right now.