I’m watching an Apple TV show called Echo 3. It’s not brilliant and it’s not terrible. I think it is trying to be something more than it has actually achieved. There is lots of politics and plenty of characters all exploring their morality. It reminds me of The Honourable Woman, a BBC thriller from a few years ago. It was also very ambitious with its weaving of storylines and complicated characters, but ultimately was just a better than average bit of telly rather than anything truly memorable. One of the key things I’ve got from the series is learning to tell the difference between Luke Evans and Dominic West.
I put the Southampton vs Aston Villa match on earlier as a fit of background telly. There wasn’t a great deal to command any more than a passive level of engagement. I was interested to hear chants of ‘We’ve got Super Unai Emery’, the same chant as Arsenal fans sing for ‘Super Mik Arteta’. I still have a lot of time for Emery. His achievements before and since Arsenal prove that he is a good coach. Following twenty two years of Arsene Wenger was always going to be a challenge. From what I recall reading, I gathered that he’d lost the dressing room before losing the board room. This makes some sense as the same board were very patient with Arteta; a patience which now seems to be paying off. I really hope that he does well at Villa.
I was pointed towards an article in The Atlantic this week and, as with many similar publications, it is sat behind a semi-paywall and I’d ran out of free articles. I’ve quite enjoyed the articles I’ve read so I thought I’d try the subscription offer. As a result, I got a welcome e-mail today from the editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. It told the story of The Atlantic‘s origin, which is pretty impressive stuff. The names of the writers who have been featured down the years is impressive. What stood out the most though was the magazine’s manifesto stated that it wished to be a ‘conductor’ of the ‘American idea’. I’ve come across the notion of America as an idea before and I find it fascinating. One of the reasons I enjoy the era of American history around the revolution and the creation of the federal constitution is the people and processes behind how you build a brand new nation ‘from scratch’. It was a similar fascination which piqued my interest into the early history of independent India and how it created it’s own constitution. Of course, there is more to the founding of a country than the creation of a constitution, but the discourse and development of a country’s values and story is intriguing. More on that story later…
Final one for this piece in bits, I have come across a wonderful independent stationery store in DC called Jenni Bick. They had me at the huge Leuchturm 1917 display as I walked in. It was a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of notebooks, pens and all kinds of other goodies. I picked up one of the Leuchturm pen’s, which is a nice little writer. I also saw the Stalogy set, which I seem to recall a former colleague had. It’s a Japanese brand and the squared pages feature a neat little grid to record the date and then the squares have the times spread down the side in case you want to use it for scheduling.
Commonplace 