This is Slow Cooked, a collection of weekly musings, ongoing projects, and the media I’m consuming; delivered every Thursday.
Hey there, happy Thursday! 🌻
In No Particular Order 🐣
Here’s what I consumed this month.
When Helen Posner posed a question to director, Morgan Neville about a line voiced by Anthony Bourdain, on whom his biopic Roadrunner is based — he told her it was computer generated.
Surprisingly, Neville chose not to disclose this in the film or when doing press for it. Which put into question the ethics of deepfakes in documentary film and in popular culture at large.
We’re barely scratching the surface of the implications of this technology, especially in the hands of a bad actor.
Here are two interesting takes on the matter:
I stumbled upon this incredible story a week ago.
There’s a wild story about the women’s gymnastics at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, which I think is very relevant to what we’re hearing about Simone Biles, and the wider point of how the top level of elite sport is just as much mental as it is physical.
In the women’s all-round final in 2000, the organisers set the vault at the wrong height. Two inches too low. This was a pretty huge deal.
For competitors who have done thousands, maybe tens of thousands of vaults at a specific height, a two inch difference is night and day.For whatever reason, I’d never paid enough attention to gymnastics to consider the danger these athletes put themselves in — until now.
One former US elite gymnast I talked to said that if it was someone other than Simone Biles who had made that same error, they would have certainly blown a knee, at minimum. Another said if it had happened to her instead of Simone, “I probably would have ended up paralyzed.”Or how it can be fatal.
Neeraj Chopra won India’s first gold in track and field, and only its second ever individual gold. Here’s an interview with his coach, Uwe Hohn, the only man to throw javelin over 100 metres.
It’s a reminder that “our athletes win despite the system not because of it”.
With India celebrating its 75th independence day this past Sunday, here’s a story worth diving into — Meet The Man Who Drew The Borders Between India And Pakistan.
Radcliffe personally summoned Nehru and Jinnah and posed the same question - “Was it absolutely essential to have definitive partition lives, however defective, drawn by 15th August?” The two South Asian stalwarts, who rarely agreed on the same ideas, insisted that it was. “Jinnah, Nehru and Patel told me that they wanted a line before or on 15th August. So I drew them a line,” Radcliffe would later remark.
When he was ready to finally draw this line, a single thought haunted him,” I am going through this terrible job as fast and as well as I can and it makes no difference because in the end, when I finish, they are all going to start killing each other anyway.”
An estimated one million people were killed and twenty million displaced.
Comedian, Sean Lock passed away at 58 yesterday. I was introduced to him because of 8 of 10 Cats Does Countdown and then sought out his work over the years.
Here’s a video that I often return to.
Or this gem.
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Talk soon,
Vihan Shah