Because I drove a friend down to Rockport for an appointment and had some time to kill, I got to visit the contemporary marquetry exhibit at the wood school's Kessler gallery where Jim Macdonald teaches. Jim makes art guitars. At this Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, there are buildings full of people at woodworking stations making things out of wood.

The Netflix series Adolescence will probably win a lot of awards. It is brilliantly done and not like any other series we watch. It starts out like a lot of homicide detective stories, but doesn't stay there. Episode 2 is an indictment of public schools, where old school bullying is multiplied and made inescapable by the addition of social media. As a high school teacher in the nineties, I always felt that I was in an adolescent ghetto, where there were just too many of them forced together and pitted against each other. And that was before social media. I'm glad the series brings into the open the malicious online "manosphere" community, with its misogny and glorification of violence against women.

If you were to watch only one episode of the 4 part series, it should be episode 3 which is one single continuous shot of the interview of Jamie by a female psychologist. In a way she is all women watching the frightening transformation of young men by malignant social media influencers.

Each episode of Adolescence is shot in the same seamless style, without a single edit. It’s not only a stunning technical accomplishment – exactly how does it flow from overhead crane shot to in-your-face closeup, from corridor to car interior to play park, without us seeing the joins? – but it lends an immersive, unflinching immediacy to proceedings. --Michael Hogan in The Guardian.

a tragedy about how in the 21st century, a child’s bedroom can be the most dangerous place in the world for them to be...how unprepared the schools are to attend to the needs and problems of students at this moment in history -- Alan Sepinwall in Rolling Stone

Adolescence is about male rage and how our young people are becoming radicalised by a digital world their parents don’t understand (this great piece from Thorne explains how Jamie is like him – “but he had the internet to read at night, whereas I had Terry Pratchett and Judy Blume”). Eddie and Manda spent their formative years dancing to A-Ha; their son spent it in his bedroom discovering Andrew Tate. This is the truly terrifying part of Adolescence: how do we really know what’s going on in our children’s lives, and how do we protect them? -- Tara Ward in The Spinoff.

With the change to DST today, the Thursday 5 to 7 slot will no longer be the night shift. The "campus" -- library and community center -- looks bright in the March melt, with only the Ukrainian flag marking our resistance to the dismantling of government and the betrayal of our allies. Inside the library, it's good coffee, kids learning that owls don't poop, people hanging out for comfort.

Andrea Muehlebach:

Antonio Gramsci’s reflection on interregnum, written from within a Fascist prison around the same time:
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Interregnum was the term used in ancient Rome to refer to the moment of legal and political in-betweenness that followed the death of the sovereign and preceded the enthronement of his successor. The declaration of interregnum was accompanied by the proclamation of justitium, for it was not only sovereignty but also legality that was suspended... Old hegemonies were crumbling. The ruling order had lost its capacity to lead through consent. The masses had drifted away from traditional ideologies and toward a structure of feeling that awaited full articulation. The horizon was open.

From a FB page called Closer to the Edge: "There are moments in history where you can feel the tectonic plates of power shifting under your feet, the precise seconds when empires declare themselves rotten and ready to collapse. February 28, 2025, was one of those moments—-a grotesque display of unchecked narcissism, geopolitical idiocy, and the full-throttle transformation of American foreign policy into a goddamn mafia shakedown."

Anand Giridharadas: "The American spirit is not a fixed quantity but rather a contest between competing spirits. There is a generous spirit and a cruel one, a big heart and a small one, an earnestness and a cynicism, a forward-looking spirit and a spirit consumed with nostalgia and stewing in resentment. There is the America of abolition and the America of slavery, the America of Reconstruction and the America of Redemption, the America of civil rights and the America of the Klan, the America built of immigrants and the America of family separation, the America that endlessly renews itself and the America that clings, the America of inconvenient ideals and the America of mercenary calculation, the America of principles worth sacrificing for and the America that only knows and pursues raw power and domination."

David Brooks: “And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I'm in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It's a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”

The ambushing of Zelensky was sickening, like nothing we have ever seen before. The only hopeful thing is that the protests and lawsuits are growing, 400 people in Damariscotta (population 1700), Vermonters chasing Vance away from a ski mountain, protests at Tesla dealerships, the first no-buy day. It needs to ramp up a thousand fold.