Natterings From Nepantla

Even though doctors no longer thought menopausal women were murderous lizard people, cultural ideas about them did not improve.

From this NYT article on perimenopause.

Well, that was certainly a big chunk of commercial cinema product. Many lines were said, many things were blown up, and many stuntpeople were gainfully employed. The costume and set people are at the top of their game once again. As for the story, well.

It is highly emblematic of where this movie sits in the franchise that every time it needs to add a plot point, it hauls out another corpse.

( Mild spoilers )

When it's not doing that, it's trading hard on nostalgia for the first trilogy in many other ways. Unfortunately, much like the Ghostbusters reboot, the combined effect of every shout-out and every cameo is to remind you that the original was a lot better.

Tim Kreider has an opinion piece in the NYT looking back at the first movie and the sense of fun that made it stand out in a time of depressing movies. (Also helpfully explaining some of the subtext for those of us who were to young to catch it at the time.) (Yes, also proceeding from the assumption that sf is for children, but bear with him, he's got interesting things to say later on.) And I think he has a point there, that Lucas achieved a sense of adventure that nothing under J. J. Abrams's watch has managed to recapture.

Anyway, now I give myself permission to stop paying attention to whatever else Disney does with it. I still love the movies, and if that's not enough, just about anything anyone wanted is filled in by the radio drama of A New Hope. Fuller story, more fleshed-out characters? It's got that. A strong role for women? Leia is basically the main character. And for you sf pedants, it may still have some fantasy elements but it's the only work that's ever come up with a plausible reason for why there is sound in space.

Here's an argument I haven't seen before for the US to adopt universal health care. The thesis is that the risk-pooling principle underlying all insurance fails when it becomes possible to estimate individual risk too well.

Per the New York Times, here's what makes LinkedIn the best social network of our time:

Considering its size and social footprint, LinkedIn has been a notably minor character in major narratives about the hazards of social media. The site hasn’t proved especially useful for mainstreaming disinformation, for example, nor is it an obvious staging ground for organized harassment campaigns. It is unique among its social media peers in that it has not spent the last five years in a state of wrenching crisis.

And perhaps even more importantly, LinkedIn is not, in the popular imagination, a force for radicalization, a threat to democracy, a haven for predators, an environment that encourages mob behavior, or even a meeting place for pot stirrers.

I really should start posting stuff there occasionally.