Father's Day Gift Guide

Father's Day is nigh upon us and you will probably say "I don't know" when asked for gift ideas to commemorate the occasion, or maybe you don't know what to get one of the dads in your life.  This post aims to alleviate that problem.

Men in Love and/or the Trainspotting collection

If you read G:TB you were probably born between 1968 and 1978 which means you are of exactly the right age to have seen, and been absolutely blown away by, the movie Trainspotting when it came out in 1996.

Barry!  The book on which it's based is just as good and it got me into other works by Irvine Welsh including all the sequels and prequels involving the same group of radge jakeys which are available on Amazon as the "Trainspotting collection."  This does not include the latest installment, Men in Love, which takes place shortly after the end of Trainspotting and before Porno.  This means the new book is a sequel and a prequel.  As a fan of the series I enjoyed it greatly.  I guess you could come to it cold but I suspect you'll enjoy it more if you already read the other books, or at least Trainspotting.  I've cited some favorite Welsh quotes before--my top choice from Men in Love is from Sick Boy (natch) and it's at least tangentially related to Father's Day:

Pah-pah, Papa: even a broken clock is right twice a day.  I thank God that out of the billions of retard sperm that this miasmal mongol hound shot from those festering hee-haws intae my ill-omened mother (and countless Leith hoors), that it was the solitary, exceptional, perfect bastard that managed to penetrate her egg and furnish this saintly woman with her only son.

Onlae a dozy bam couldnae relate to that!

Syitren R300 CD player

zwoman got me one of these small modern CD players for my birthday.  It has AUX and optical jacks and Bluetooth so it works with AirPods or any other Bluetooth device.  More importantly, it justifies keeping all my CDs, especially the ones that are currently only on Notify (like Done By the Forces of Nature which was removed from Spotify because I suspect it includes exactly zero cleared samples).  I dig the Scandinavian vibe of the walnut version.  Who doesn't dig Scandinavian vibes?

Patagonia R1 Air Hoodie 

zson borrowed my softshell to clean out stables in the rain and a horse bit the zipper off (don't ask) so I went to REI to replace it during their recent 25% off sale.  They didn't have anything that fit the bill, but I spend a lot of time in fleece jackets and two of them are close to crapping out so I perused REI's selection and discovered Patagonia's new (at least to me) Air Fleece.  I'm not sure how it works but it keeps you warm without getting too warm (unlike their Better Sweaters) and the medium fit me perfectly.  They are wildly overpriced, even at 25% off, but it's replacing two fleeces (one of which I bought about 12 years ago) and zson is about my size so he can wear it too (so long as he avoids the zipper-eating horse) so I justified it to myself and I'm hoping it will last a long time.  I went with the hoodie version because who doesn't like hoodies?  

A subscription to The Atlantic

There might not be a better source of content outside G:TB than The Atlantic.  It's chock-full of think pieces from deep thinkers, cultural observations from cultured observers, and short fiction from non-fictional writers of all heights.  Notable writers include Tom Nichols, Anne Applebaum, David Frum, Robert Kagan, McKay Coppins, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Jonathan Chait, Adam Serwer, Derek Thompson, Annie Lowrey, Jamele Hill, George Packer, Eliot Cohen, Alexandra Petri and a boatload of other Washington Post defectors.  They put out new stuff online daily and offer a web-only subscription but for an extra $10 you can get also get the dead tree version mailed to your house along with a tote.

Gheorghemas Interlude: Journalismism

The calendar hasn’t flipped yet and already we have a candidate for Gassiest Journalism of 2024. Being a presidential election year, there will be no shortage of entries, but The Atlantic will be tough to beat. 

The venerable, respected magazine’s January-February issue shipped, and its cover theme is “If Trump Wins.” It features essays from two dozen staff writers on various topics related to the Orange Oaf’s possible re-election. There’s indisputable quality up and down the lineup – David Frum, Anne Applebaum, Adam Serwer, Barton Gellman, Caitlin Dickerson, Sarah Zhang to name a few – but it’s easy to view it as massive overkill, a journalistic vanity project geared toward reporters and commentators, policy wonks and true believers. 

Despite the mag’s longstanding motto, “Of No Party or Clique,” they’re preaching to the choir, for the most part, and unlikely to change a single mind. And twenty-four essays will wear out supporters and even the most loyal readers. It’s like a 6½-hour Scorsese movie. 

Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg attempts to make a case for the package and the decision to go all-in, pointing out Trump’s position as prohibitive GOP frontrunner, his recent inflammatory rhetoric, and ideas floated by supporters that a good deal of what he supposedly stands for is un-American. “Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term,” Goldberg writes. “I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.” 

I don’t disagree with Goldberg’s argument, but given that mags, newspapers, publications, websites, blogs should want to attract readers, it strikes me that the case against Trump could be distilled down to five or six more digestible points: preventing a White House built upon revenge and retribution, and by extension authoritarian structure; U.S. isolation and abandonment of allies; stacking of judiciary; grift and the Oval Office becoming a personal ATM; stripping down various Federal government agencies and erosion of citizen protections. Maybe one or two more. 

Some of the separate essay topics in the issue could be folded into larger points: climate change; misogyny; China; science; abortion; disinformation; the military; America’s character. I’ll give the Big Hats the benefit of the doubt that the issue springs from sincere motives and concern. Though it’s also worth considering that the saturation approach was an attempt to separate themselves from the slow drip of piecemeal reporting about a possible second Trump term, that they wanted to present a one-stop shop of “Yikes!” and “Can you believe this effin’ guy?” 

Unintentionally, it also represents a level of haughty and an indirect dig at the present state of journalism. Publications everywhere are turfing staff, The Atlantic included, and the implied message is: You can’t cover stuff the way you used to? Well, we can have 24 people riff on one topic if ‘We’ decide it’s important enough. Knock yourself out, Sparky. If folks read and heed, then the effort was valuable. If The Atlantic’s work launches other outlets to do their own reporting, that’s a win, as well. But presentation matters. Overwhelming the audience can be as detrimental as silence.