I put a toaster in the dishwasher. I know; some of you have just decided that I am a total moron, and won’t read further. That’s OK. I learned two very important lessons from this little experiment: (1) It is very difficult to discern the difference between Conventional Wisdom and Conventional Ignorance; (2) When Conventional Ignorance is challenged, things can get nasty.
For the Japanese, the Indonesians, and the Savosavo there is no distinction between what Anglophones call “foot” and “leg”. They’re just the same part of the body for those cultures, with a single word to refer to both together. The Lavukaleve speakers of the Solomon Islands don’t even need a distinction between arms and legs, they’re just limbs after all. Hands are just arm segments. But then they would laugh at the Indonesians, because obviously feet are separate from the rest!
Rich Clarkson’s photo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then named Lew Alcindor, in the 1968 NCAA Men’s National Basketball Final Four semifinal game in Los Angeles is a masterpiece of composition, timing, and exposure. The square format is the result of shooting the game action with a Hasselblad – a practice that continued into the early 2000s. But that isn’t what makes this photo historically interesting.
To Watch
Dick Van Dyke dancing and singing? I don't care what you think about Coldplay, this is delightful.
If you want a period drama that has a happy-ish ending but is a little morose at the same time, try North and South from the BBC (not to be confused with the PBS Civil War one). According to Emily—according to something she read on the internet once—it has one of the best onscreen kisses? I wouldn't know because, fun fact, I don't like watching people kiss, including on screens.
Emily and I found watching media about the pandemic during the pandemic a little too hard. But now that we're some distance from it, David Tennant and Michael Sheen try to get through U.K. downtown in Stagedis weird, quirky, and hilarious.
To Parent: We pay for a Good Inside membership for parenting, and it's worth every penny. We've done workshops on anxiety, deeply feeling kids, and more and we always come away feeling hopeful that maybe we're not the worst parents in the land.
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Read Next
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Certain ideas get so deeply embedded in the tradition—repeated so often, sung so confidently—that no one stops to ask whether the original actually says what we think it says.
The Perch - March 2026
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The Kingdom of God
When most people hear "Kingdom of God" or "Kingdom of Heaven," they think of the afterlife. They think of where you go when you die. They think of clouds, harps, and a gated community in the sky. That's not what Jesus was talking about. Not even close.
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Hosea looked at a massacre the Bible said God ordered and declared: no, that's not what God wanted. The lens gets better. The picture gets clearer. What we thought God was like five or fifty years ago doesn't have to be what we think forever. Color was always there. We just needed better tools.
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