LITTLE RED PILL #6 - THE CHRISTMAS EDITION
An R-rated Christmas song, planet Earth's new manmade era and a gringo iPhone
Hi All!
Here is your weekly Little Red Pill, a culture hit of things I’m enjoying and exploring. Please feel free to forward this along to friends who are naturally intelligent, or could use a dose.
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Watching
I’m not sure if it’s because of choice paralysis or if Netflix really has hit a wall, but I’m just not digging a lot of their new content, including The Recruit, which has been getting lots of hype (in my circle at least) because much of it was shot in Montreal (where I’m from) and its depiction of Beirut (where I lived for a few years and became Lebanese at heart) is supposedly quite accurate. The storyline by Episode 2 has me wanting to go to bed early. And don’t get me started on ‘Emily in Paris’. I think she should probably go home. Bah humbug.
So, I’ll use this opportunity to highly recommend Olivia Wilde’s epic mind-bender ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ in case you haven’t seen it yet. I don’t care what the critics say. The underlying themes, flawless aesthetic and Oscar-shortlisted soundtrack make this a must-watch film, on any holiday.
Reading
No one could blame you for missing the memo in 2014 when the word “Anthropocene” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. After all, that was the same year “selfie” made the cut. Anyways, better late than never and now’s a good time to take note: Apparently we’ve manhandled the planet so badly that our current geologic epoch, the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago with the end of the last big ice age, has ended. Over the last few decades, we have entered the Anthropocene, an era characterized by human-induced, planetary-scale changes that are unfinished but very much officially underway. At least that’s what a panel of roughly three dozen scholars will vote on this Saturday, when they decide on whether this should be an official thing for geological timekeepers.
Regardless of the outcome, there’s no denying that our cutting of forests to make space for farmland, city sprawl and our burning fossil fuels that have formed over millions of years, have changed our planet. The New York Times’ For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age is a must-read article if you’re a human and you’d like to ‘download’ the latest version of human history into your brain.
Track On Repeat
In the spirit of this week’s recommended article on our new era, the Anthropocene, I found this haunting track from Nick Cave, the genius who brought us Peaky Blinders’ soul-shaking theme song, Red Right Hand.
Podcast
Are Apple and China Breaking Up? asks the Wall Street Journal in this podcast episode. Every single Apple product is made in China by a company called Foxconn, including their most prominent product, the iPhone, which is 50% of their overall revenue. During the latest Covid outbreak, China’s lockdown disrupted the supply chain, causing iPhone shortages all over the world (insert shocked emoji). While many manufacturers are moving to Vietnam, that country’s population is simply not big enough to replace the millions of workers who make our gadgets. Could next gen Apple products be made in Mexico? To be continued.
Quote
“I don't wanna be christmas forever @elonmusk please help i've made a mistake.”
BONUS TRACK (Merry Christmas!)
In the spirit of Christmas I give you a second track this week. It’s the Anglo-Irish Celtic punk band Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’, a jolly vintage song that has just been censored by BBC Radio 2 following BBC Radio 1’s previous censoring of the song in 2020. As a stocking stuffer, I’ll even send you straight to 2:02, when the fun really starts: the use of the homophobic slur “faggot” and the word “slut”, which become more and more offensive each year since that song came out in 1987. Trying to cancel this holiday masterpiece is an annual tradition in the UK, apparently.
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