Am I just putting myself in a position where, in four years’ time, I’m going to be earning significantly less money than people I went to school with? -Sazi Bongwe, Harvard freshman The recent New Yorker article “The End of the English Major” first came to my attention on Twitter. The responses rapidly rallied to deny the thesis, but The New Yorker presents compelling numbers to back up the clickbait:

Ever since the start of the consumer drone boom in the early 2010s, serious people have been seriously worried about the prospect of drones crashing into the bodies of the innocent. The FAA’s drone regulations include wording that directly addresses the danger of drones coming down on people’s heads, including specific rules against the waiver-less flight of drones over people and motorways.   If we take all this modern-day public concern over drone crashes into account, then it’s shocking to read about a 1979 incident where a flying remote-controlled lawnmower killed a man and seriously wounded another.

“There was an uproar in the IRS offices here over canceling an upcoming Thanksgiving office party potluck,” the artist Edward Gallagher told a reporter, “when the straights said they wouldn’t share food prepared by gay employees.”  This was in 1984, mid-November. Gallagher had built a piece of street art in the plaza outside the Federal Building in San Francisco: four open coffins, each stuffed with a mannequin—a businessman, a housewife, a little kid, a cliché gay—all linked by transfusion tubes connected to blood bags in hospital IV hangers: a protest of Reagan’s policy of silence and neglect and slashing health agency budgets; that AIDS was righteous retribution from a vengeful God, not a public health crisis.

I called this my Scrooge year. A liminal space between: The Ghost of Christmas Past : Wrapping and grieving the end of Summer Camp Island The Ghost of Christmas Present : Not fretting too much about being productive, and spending time with my friends and family and pretending I would cook more. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come : Starting to work on what’s next. We’re in self reflection season, or what I will forevermore be calling ‘The Scroogies’ so let’s start at the very beginning:

Hello, Today we have something a bit different for you. TTSG goes a bit Melvyn Bragg with a history episode about Bay Area Filipino DJ culture. Our guest today is Oliver Wang, professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach, one of the co-hosts of theHeat Rocks podcast, and the author of Legions of Boom, a fascinating book which tracks the history of Filipino immigrants into the Bay Area after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act — first into San Francisco and then out into suburbs like Daly City, Fremont, and Vallejo.