Tell all the people that you do not know

It’s been very sad to read about the death of Marjane Satrapi this week, at the age of only 56. She was a remarkable writer and thinker, and for me her most famous work, Persepolis, has some personal resonance. My sixth-grade teacher, whom I adored, was an Iranian refugee following the revolution. At the time, I didn’t really understand what that meant, being pretty young still and with no direct experience of revolutions. Reading Persepolis many years later helped me understand some of what it must have been like.

Much of the commentary I’ve seen concerning the lawsuit of Patagonia™, the clothing company, against Pattie Gonia, the drag performer, has argued that Patagonia, the region, is beside the point. Based on my own understanding of trademark law (I am not a lawyer), that’s true. But Heated’s Emily Atkin wonders whether the question is worth asking from a broader perspective. After all, it’s hard to argue that Patagonia, the corporation, wasn’t relying on people’s impressions of Patagonia, the place, in choosing its name.

From 2024, an interesting article in Slate by Bill Pruitt, former producer on The Apprentice who reveals some of what really went on on the set of one of the most popular reality TV shows ever made—a show that arguably set Donald Trump up for his successful run at the White House.

I’ve never watched The Apprentice, and never wanted to. I’ve known what Trump is since 1989, and it still appalls me that he was elected.

That Slate article references “A Pickpocket’s Tale,” a 2013 New Yorker profile of Apollo Robbins, who made the kind of career out of pickpocketing that doesn’t land you in jail. It’s worth reading; if you hit a paywall, see if you can get to the article through your public library.

What does a professional pickpocket have to do with Donald Trump? The joke kind of writes itself, but it’s more complicated than that: at the heart of what Robbins does is the manipulation of attention. So too did the producers of The Apprentice.

Speaking of manipulation of attention, Vanessa Irena’s “magic is real if you want it” surfaces some insights similar to what I’ve had brewing under the surface of my own consciousness for quite some time. I’ll freely admit that I never quite got Disney, and was always indifferent at best to Harry Potter. Conversely, as I touched on in this post after my most recent return from Namibia, the reciprocal relationship to both human community and the rest of the natural world is something I’ve been trying to build for awhile, and one of the reasons I visited the Ju/’hoansi community in Namibia twice was to learn in a cultural context so different from my own that it allowed me to perceive those relationships more easily—also because in that community, they are inextricable and omnipresent.

I’ll have more to write in relation to Irena’s essay, which as I said tugs on several threads that I’ve also been working through.