ghosts are real

I. Ghosts Are Real
There is no better history of ghosts than Japan's, and the last decade has seen a significant addition to the field.

A massive earthquake on 11 March 2011 sent a towering wall of putrid water surging inland from the Tōhoku coast. [...] Survivors of the disaster soon began seeing and feeling ghostly presences. Men and women dressed in warm clothes at the height of summer, hailing taxis and then disappearing from the back seat. A toy truck, belonging to a young boy killed in the tsunami, pushing itself haltingly around the room. One woman answered her door to a sopping wet stranger, who asked for a change of clothes. She went off to find something. When she came back, a whole host of people were standing there, all of them soaked to the skin.

II. Soccer is Quantitatively the Beautiful Game
Sports can be great, and when firing at capacity, soccer is still the greatest. As Brian Phillips once said, "Soccer is beautiful because soccer is hard. [...] It prohibits the nimblest part of the body [the hands], and then it says, 'Be nimble.'"

While big data propagandists risk sinking even sports with their appetitive and numb-inducing graphs, the below article is still a fun read on definitively measuring which teams are the most watchable soccer clubs in Europe.

A strong relationship exists between aesthetic quality and winning [...] The correlation between team watchability and team success (as measured by league points per match) last season was 0.78, on a scale in which 0 means no relationship and 1 a perfect link.

III. Semantics Create Massacres
It's the fortieth year since the My Lai massacre. Bookforum did a whole issue on the year 1968, including a retrospective on My Lai and William Calley, the soldier who took the brunt of the blame regarding the incident (at least initially). C.S. Lewis talks in a few places about the ways language is a flag for political violence - once the euphemisms are total, the violence is likely to be the same. That seems accurate:

“We never use kill,” Calley told [a psychiatrist]. “We don’t use that word. Kill refers to our teachings that we are brought up with ever since childhood— Thou shalt not kill. If you use the word kill with the troops, it causes a very negative emotional reaction, so you use the word waste, to get rid of, to destroy.” [The psychiatrist] concluded that Calley “did not conceive of these acts as killing but as destroying, and I am using killing in the sense of killing a human being as opposed to destroying an enemy.” Calley, he said, “lacked the capacity to have will, to consciously conceive that act.”

IV. Ottessa Moshfegh is Great

The day before I left home for college, I made a phone call to the publishing house of a writer I’ll call Rupert Dicks. Dicks had a reputation as one of the most audacious and brilliant minds in literature in the last century [...] My ambition was not to be successful – to publish books and be renowned, rich and powerful, like Dicks; I wanted, truly, to use my writing to rise up to a higher realm of existence, away from the stupidity I saw in my classmates, teachers and parents, or on television and on the subway.

I would amend that the stupidity I actually hope to escape is my own. To quote another great mind: "My momma was all right, my daddy was all right, I'm just a shithead." (Even when that's not true, I don't think writing will help anyone escape the idiocy around them. Not sufficiently, at least.)

V. Opinion
Frasier is a good TV show. I highly recommend it.