The Horizon of Depressing Blogging

Opening night and illness make this a brief entry.

Mind you, there's no shortage of topics to blog about, even if I restrict things to "performance/theatre studies" lenses. I can imagine posts, presentations, papers, and even articles growing out of any number of events in today's news:

• The worldwide young people's climate strike.
• The Area 51 raid that largely fizzled.
• A book by journalist Mike Pearl about speculative apocalyptic scenarios.

These "fun" topics get pressed to the margins, however, by the bigger, less related-to-my-research topics of import:

• The whistle-blower report--apparently substantiated--that the President pressured Ukraine to act against Joe Biden in exchange for international relations. Related: the fact that the Administration's response consists, typically, of two steps: vociferous denial ("It's fake news!") and then unapologetic admission ("Of course I did it!"). Somehow I've not yet exhausted my capacity for surprise at how right-leaning media outlets pretzel themselves in defending actions they'd shriek about (and rightly so) if the parties were reversed.
• The fact that we seem, bizarrely, to be gearing up for yet another Middle Eastern war.
• How North America has apparently lost over a quarter of its bird population in the last fifty years.
• Heck--might as well note that the climate strike doesn't seem likely to move the needle much on what continues to be a grim and grimmer picture.

It may be the sick-and-tired talking, but I perceive a great deal of depressing blogging on the horizon.

More tomorrow,

JF