SL 762

~ Laura

David Brooks’ column about evil twitter commenters is trending on Twitter. Based on the chatter, I’m guessing that a lot of people have never read Notes From the Underground.

I’m really into stacking lots of small studs on my ears lately. It feels very 1980s.

“Just A Construction Guy” on Instagram is a fake? OMG.

  • So, we’re at a restaurant in NYC and I’m loving the plates.
  • They’re solid and textural.
  • You flip over your plates in restaurants and google the prices, right? That’s totally normal, right?
    https://www.vietri.com/collections/incanto

Books on the shelf: How to Be A Family by Dan Kois from Slate looks interesting. Next Year in Havana was a nice summer book. I should have been tackling a new project this morning, but work just isn’t happening today. Some days are like that. I gave up at some point and read this. Then I went for a two mile walk, while chatting with my BFF on the cellphone. And now, I need to get my white streaks covered up, a haircut, and a blowout. Because it’s Friday, and we’re going out later.

Hope y’all have a good weekend. I’ve got a trip to Botanical Gardens on the calendar on Sunday. Saturday afternoon, I’ll be doing all the work that I didn’t do today.

Published by Laura

12 thoughts on “SL 762”

  1. “David Brooks’ column about evil twitter commenters is trending on Twitter.”

    What a wonderful coincidence!

    I was just meaning to leave this twitter quote from Jess Dweck, as I know David Brooks has a fan club here:

    “It’s weird that David Brooks is worse at understanding millennials after leaving his wife to marry one.”

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  2. I had never heard of “Just A Construction Guy” before this post, but as someone with over 30 years in the trades, the only thing that stood out to me as “might be fake” is the stogie break. Most jobsites (north of the Mason-Dixon line anyway) ban smoking (and have been doing so for the past decade and a half). There’s a designated smoking area on my jobsite, but it is located far away from the building itself.

    Just sayin’…at least half of my FB feed is of brothers posting pics similar to this. Most of us are food snobs. And we travel a lot, so feel free to get good restaurant recommendations from us! You won’t be disappointed.

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      1. I don’t have an instagram account. I am on Facebook, and I post restaurant reviews there as a public service to my fellow tramps trying to make it out on the road. I probably should post those more often (I don’t always think to “check in”).

        If you’re ever in Omaha, I highly recommend the Twisted Fork and the Railcar. OMFG you can throw a dart at the menus and hit something wonderful. And the tamales at Jacobo’s on 24th street (a mom and pop grocery) are worth the long line. The Laka Lono tiki bar in the Old Market pours ’em strong, so go eat afterwatd. (I recommend their signature “Going Nowhere, Getting There Fast”). It’s in the basement, so if you drink more than one, be careful going up those stairs!

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      3. 24th and Jabob is by where the stockyards used to be? My dad lived around there as a small child and talked about his mom buying tamales from carts in the street. And how the booze man would make home deliveries. This would have been in about 1938 or so.

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  3. One of my brothers from Peoria has an instagram account. He’s a gourmand and serious beer enthusiast. He and his wife have a little farm. Big, bearded, Heathen dude. I love his food posts.

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  5. OK, I’ve made it through the George Packer piece, and I’d love to talk about it if anybody is up for it.

    A few thoughts (these are my conclusions rather than Packer’s conclusions):

    –The “good” public elementary school that they put their kid into was academically pretty marginal, even if it was a lot better than other city schools and initially safe and friendly. They sent their kid to a so-so school and were happy because their kid was happy–and then the schools started doing stuff that made the kids unhappy.
    –The “good” public elementary school was superficially a success (because it was diverse and also orderly and happy) but it was failing the non-middle class kids, because they didn’t have the kind of social capital at home to make up for gaps in their formal education at school (like spelling or the multiplication table). The school produced a sort of Potemkin village version of educational equality.
    –The fact that the school attempted to twist parents’ arms to boycott standardized testing suggests that the school administration was aware of the differences in results between their different students–but wanted to make sure that parents and outsiders didn’t figure it out. (Packer says that the school produced a 95% standardized test skip rate, largely through leaning on parents.)
    –This is my 14th year of having a kid in school (pre-k to senior), and I think that the ideal is for there to be a partnership between school and parents with shared goals and vision. I think that one of the problems with the schools featured in y81’s Quillette article by the NYC teacher was a lack of a shared vision between parents and teachers. Likewise in George Packer’s article, their elementary school failed to treat them as equal partners and there was a general lack of transparency. When school and parents are on the same page, both can be very effective, but if school and parents disagree on basic values and goals, both are going to struggle to get any sort of positive results.
    –I’ve started reading Spotted Toad’s excellent teaching memoir, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip, which is about his experiences teaching middle school and high school science in the Bronx and elsewhere from 2000-2010. Usually teaching memoirs are by people who lasted two years and then bailed, so this is really excellent.

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