The Adam Project (2022)

Rotten Tomatoes

The Adam Project (2022): Pilot from 2050 travels back to 2018, teams up with himself as a kid to destroy the time machine and prevent the bad history to come. Steals from other sci-fi. It's really all about reconciliation with dad. Family-friendly fare. Smart aleck kid stars. B-

POTD: The Swing

The Swing, by Robert Louis Stevenson

How do you like to go up in a swing,
   Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
   Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
   Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
   Over the countryside—

Till I look down on the garden green,
   Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
   Up in the air and down!

Source: The Swing.

Review: Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

From Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. Choose just about any metric you want and it tells the same story. People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains."
	Amazon

Kolbert opens her book with the prophecy of man's dominion over all the earth. Until very recently, that fact was considered an unalloyed good thing, a sign of God's favor, a sign of human progress. Only recently have we recognized the downsides to our dominion. Kolbert closes her book with this summary, "This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems." Those problems were originally introduced by us exercising our dominion.

Playing "Follow the Money" with History

Source: Boston Seaport.

Boston Tea Party or Amusement Park Ride

The culture wars being waged in state legislatures around the country are making teaching an impossible profession.

There’s a rock, and a hard place, and then there’s a classroom. Consider the dilemma of teachers in New Mexico. In January, the month before the state’s Public Education Department finalized a new social-studies curriculum that includes a unit on inequality and justice in which students are asked to “explore inequity throughout the history of the United States and its connection to conflict that arises today,” Republican lawmakers proposed a ban on teaching “the idea that social problems are created by racist or patriarchal societal structures and systems.” The law, if passed, would make the state’s own curriculum a crime.

Source: The New Yorker.

This all reminds me of when I used to "help" my sons with their history lessons in elementary school.

Lucy and Desi (2022)

Rotten Tomatoes

Lucy and Desi (2022): Amy Poehler's documentary about DesiLu, the original power couple in Hollywood. Talented, ambitious workaholics. Doesn't shed much new light on the well-publicized famous couple. This homage pairs nicely with last year's drama "Being the Ricardos." B-