Defiant Sloth

Kirstie Kimball (of Beyond Beurre Blanc) on the extremely difficult nature of writing about food in Minnesota right now:

I want to also say that almost every single writer I know has received a lot of flak right now for not covering things the exact way specific individuals want us to. So much of that is that we are balancing getting you to go out to restaurants, covering tragedy, and also making sure that restaurants stay protected. Most of my interviews right now have been off-the-record. I’m going to assume that’s true for everyone else.

She has been doing extraordinary work (as well as many others she highlights in her post). In the face of immense adversity to this state and her own well-being, she has (as I commented on her post) a “ seemingly unending energy to provide support for neighbors and promote food shelf/hospitality urgencies, and being a voice of reason, a voice of hope, and a voice of truth in these times.”

I’m simply calling out one of many heroes in the moment right now.

Racket’s piece on neighbors who turn a nearby restaurant into a field hospital on Jan 24:

Within seconds of treating our first patient, throngs of neighbors begin filing into the restaurant, choking on tears and snot from the blocks-long cloud of tear gas. The two bathrooms past the coffee bar are now filling up with our team, who instruct the new patients: First, gargle with water, then spit. Repeat. We each take a comrade into our hands, gently tilting their heads to the side so that water flushes the irritants down and away from their eyes. Turn the head in the other direction. Repeat.

Preceding another tragic murder in Minneapolis on Saturday, the first general strike in the USA for 80 years occurred in Minneapolis on January 23, 2026. (The last one was the women-led 1946 Oakland General Strike.) This was planned over the span of a mere week, across all forms of communication — social, messaging, and stapled paper to neighborhood lamp posts. The turnout was a show of unity — an estimated 50,000+ citizens came out in -9 degrees Fahrenheit (with harsher wind chills) to the backdrop of hundreds of closed businesses, schools, and unions. It was a massive, peaceful exercise of human togetherness for the good of community in the face of injustice.

First, links to Stand With Minnesota and Minneapolis Mutual Aid, two well-curated lists for mutual aids, materials purchasing, donating, and support. There are many surrounding cities here organizing help for their neighbors and community members who are unable or fearful to leave their homes, and I want to acknowledge this isn’t just a Minneapolis-St. Paul situation, it’s state-wide, suburb-wide, rural-wide. People continue to be incredibly active and intentional in organizing support, a testament to Minnesota’s strength, resilience, adaptability, and resolve for action over words.

On the day of the strike, it was hard to discern just how many people marched together, through a twisting route westward along the avenues stemming from The Commons park adjacent to US Bank Stadium to Target Center (a nearly mile-long trek, lasting over three hours for participants). But what was easy to discern was the united front of people, together against a fearful and dire situation in their cities, and wholly bundled in winter gear and signage. There were homemade coffee carafes propped on car hoods, folks handing out hand warmers, bright-vested volunteers (or city-mandated traffic controllers, hard to tell) helping direct traffic amongst the swell of moving bodies.

A smattering of buildings and business were open. As the march wound through the city, the skyways were packed with observers. The Hennepin Public Library was permitted open as a midway reprieve of donated coffee, cookies, a spot on the floor to rub warmth back into your toes. Various small businesses along the route, shutting down their own commerce for the day, offered open doors as places to stop in for warmth. Some offered free hot dogs.

The strike was both quiet and loud, in so many ways. A scarcity of professional media added to the curious feeling. It should be said that several local outlets also went on strike. As such, I’ve curated a fair list of mainstream media and journalism coverage that reported the strike in some capacity.

In lieu of another tragedy yesterday, we hope the light that was lit here finds others across the way, and helps bind the bonds we have as people caring for the well-being of others and our country.

• The Guardian
• Minnesota Star Tribune
• The Wall Street Journal
• Minnesota Reformer
• MinnPost
• Minnesota Public Radio
• The New York Times
• Status Coup’s recorded livestream was one of the few, possibly only, realtime capture of the entire thing, amidst a few mechanical malfunctions due to the weather.

A well-documented piece from The Guardian on the situation here in Minnesota. It’s been difficult to discern from our local vantage how the rest of the country and world see it.

Positive momentum into 2026 with regards to the prices of renewable energy:

Today, wind and solar are cheaper than coal and natural gas, and increasingly, they are boosted by ever more affordable batteries, which have gotten 90 percent cheaper over the last decade.

Generational context of invasive structure (via Racket):

Today, Fort Snelling is doing what it was designed to do: acting as a site from which Washington can project violent power over anyone who gets in its way. Dakota people saw this in the US-Dakota War of 1862, when the U.S. deployed soldiers from Fort Snelling to do battle on the Dakota. When it forced Dakota women, children, and elders into a concentration camp down the bluff from the fort. When it expelled the Dakota from their homelands and oversaw the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

And we are seeing it today as federal agents fan out from Fort Snelling into neighborhoods, seizing peaceable people, and reserving the right to shoot anyone, like Renee Nicole Good, who gets in their way.

Mobilizing for the truth.

Throughout those four minutes, almost every civilian — dressed in puffy coats and plaid flannel and fluffy knits — eventually takes their phone out to record. They are filming the cars, ICE agents, each other. One woman is walking her dog on the sidewalk at the start. She appears again to ask, “What’s happening?” to the filmer; later, she shows up in the periphery, this time with her phone out.

Short clip from Christopher Nolan on the defense of the physicality of movies, both shooting them and rewatching them.

Accurate.

A grand way to start the year: “Dedicated to bad writing… and other irregular tributes.”

Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s manic daydream of totalitarian pandemonium and comic dystopia, holds up marvelously after forty years (obviously, more on the nose than ever). Criterion recently released a new 4K version (not pictured) that I would hope irons out a few crummy scans in this one, but still a good watch either way. Having grown up spinning the 480p DVD, anything is better.

Does one need to get their mind out of this rot, or is it accurate:

… the endless death declarations tell us something about how we process cultural change, which is to say, very bloody badly. We’re nostalgic creatures who mistake our own diminishing capacity for wonder as evidence of external decay. […] Am I describing the world, or am I describing what it feels like to have been young once and not be young anymore?

In watching Criterion’s 2025 4K release of Eyes Wide Shut, my immediate thought was that the grain and contrast is spectacular. And evidently, this was a major part of the release: they went back to the actual original 35mm celluloid for scanning, and it has yielded a film-like master. Bravo.

The Disney and OpenAI licensing partnership seems like a terrible idea, insofar as controlling IP representation and the risk of diluting branding — unless, of course, there are critical limitations for usage and context.

Tad alarmist of an article, but good effort for a warning bell against the generational risks of children using AI:

Social-media feeds have already created echo chambers where people see only views they agree with (or love to hate). AI threatens to strengthen these echo chambers and lock children into them at an early age. […] Yes-bots threaten to create children not used to taking turns, who grow up into colleagues unable to compromise and partners unfamiliar with the give-and-take required in a relationship.

This tracks for adults, too.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but I just discovered that the WSJ has a specific app that digitizing the print experience (aptly named WSJ Print). Having been an off/on subscriber for years, I missed its release in 2020, but love it. Can’t imagine there are many users, but appreciate it exists.

In light of the Warner Bros dilemma, Jason L. Riley writes on the movie theater’s inevitable, unfortunate decline. And as much as we dread the day… it’s likely coming. Only a few generations will remember:

The ticket lines could be long. You had to arrive early for evening showings, particularly on weekends. But what resonated more than the setting was the shared experience. Watching “E.T.” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “Superman” on a giant screen in a dark theater with total strangers offered a visceral thrill that could never be replicated in my living room.

Speaking of the Mad Men debacle on HBO Max, special effects wizard Todd Vaziri has an analytical post up about this.

It appears as though this represents the original photography, unaltered before digital visual effects got involved

The Verge on HBO’s poor execution of the “remastering” of Mad Men in 4k for streaming. It exemplifies bad stewardship of assets and ill-advised processes (missed cropping-out of production crew from scenes we’ve already seen properly sized for TV?). All the more reason to own a Blu-ray version.

Waking up to the first snowfall of the season up here. It’s been tardy for the last several years in a row now, for whatever that’s worth.

Author Robin Sloan’s suggested gift guide is a reprieve from the usual banality and homogenous offerings found elsewhere. Focused on uniquely consumable, durable, and cosmic gifts (including, of course, books), this is probably one of the few relevant lists to pay attention to.

As a film lover and, particularly, an enthusiast for film criticism – one of the best ways to truly immerse yourself and re-evaluate your perspective on a given piece of work – I enjoyed this small but important note in Racket’s bi-weekly membership newsletter from their resident film critic, Keith Harris.

Why does a hyperlocal website need movie reviews when you can find them everywhere online? Because a regional criticism scene matters. The coasts shouldn’t totally dominate the way we talk about art.

While I can’t link to the newsletter since it’s only via email, the point of this is that Keith has an important sentiment about film. In an era where it seems very few people have the time or attention to indulge in deep dialogue about films anymore, let alone read reviews, folks need to be reminded that [most] of this art isn’t something to simply pin against aggregate ratings or a singular, outspoken voice from New York or California. Regional, contextual perspectives and attitudes are welcome and warranted here.

Perspective and interpretation is the flip side to creation, and that’s the beauty of human connection through art. We may connect magically over a line, an image, a sound, or the intricate unification of all of them, or have a widely different connection to a piece of music used to the backdrop of a scene that resonates because of known experiences, regional differences, or a wholly unique memory. One of the most notable pieces I’ve ever read on this was Geoff Dyer’s Zona, a wildly opinionated, sarcastic, and thoroughly sardonic take on Tarkovsky’s Stalker. When I read that, it reminded me at a critical age of film appreciation that not everything needed to be interpreted “correctly”. You can absurdly over-analyze a film that can be interpreted in a myriad of ways and still come out the wiser.

I only wish there was even more accessible film criticism for newer generations, because cinema is a rich culmination of so many complementary art forms, its endless in the ways of reward.

Valve’s Steam Machine and controller are legitimately one of the more exciting hardware announcements in a long time. Beautiful baseline models, customizable aesthetics, obvious integrations into a well-established Steam media library, and SteamOS ecosystem operability make this compelling.

Always funny to see emails from software products seep back into the inbox after years, and I mean years, of silence. Been getting a steady drip from Maintain the last few months, who have had a Mac OS maintenance app out since 2004 called Cocktail. Used to have it to customize the dock, I think?

Fascinating interview with Helen DeWitt on the highly improbable methods and circumstances leading to her latest, 25-years-in-the-making novel, Your Name Here. Looking forward to cracking this open after The Rose Field.

Told by agents that the book was hard to follow, DeWitt’s response was to make it even more disorienting. She added a series of second-person narrators. She wove in a novel-within-a-novel by her fictional doppelgänger Rachel Zozanian, titled “Lotteryland,” which used chapters from one of DeWitt’s unfinished works, a satire about a country where everything is distributed by lottery. She made difficulties that she and Gridneff had writing the book, and their arguments about where it was going, part of the story.

Though Dan Brooks’s take down of the “new, lonely vices” reads as more of an opinion piece, it certainly feels like a practical way to assess:

I hope some readers will agree that although the old vices had net negative effects on some people’s lives, their benefits—for those who pursued vice in moderation—went beyond instant gratification to something more valuable. To spend Saturday night at the bar is, in many cases, to spend time with friends and meet new people. To give in to one’s carnal urges is to experience increased oxytocin levels in the short term and, in certain cases, to find lasting companionship. And gambling at a casino, while it is almost never a smart investment, is at least an excuse to get out of the house, chat, and experience the particular type of empathy that comes from losing alongside strangers. Vice can bring people out of themselves to be with others, even if that means coming together to do what they probably should not.

That the new vices are so uniformly solitary suggests that the national character might become more solitary, too. This trend is unsettling, but perhaps more alarming is that large numbers of people could become so oblivious to the upside of vice as to decide that it is better pursued alone. I would hate to think that, in our collective understanding of sex and gambling and getting wasted, so many Americans would conclude that the endorphins are the only point.