Author: Bobbie Johnson

What can we learn from Liverpool?

July 1, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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Work

I’m a football fan, and watching Liverpool triumphant rise to Premier League champions over the last two years has often been utterly thrilling—even for somebody who is very committed to a different club. I love sport partly because it’s so kinetic, partly because it’s so in-the-moment, and partly because it’s about teamwork. Even individual sports like tennis are group efforts, with coaches and trainers and families and support networks. And football, to me, is one […]

Week 26, 2020

June 28, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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Things my friends have made / weeknotes

MONDAY WAS OUR 103RD DAY IN LOCKDOWN, but the century itself passed unremarked. There are fireworks at strange hours of the day and night, which paint a hallucinatory sheen on the days. There’s a man who screeches around the neighborhood at high speed in stolen cars, the photos. But whether these noises are evidence of life outside or not, I really I don’t know: I’ve become even more reclusive than usual—something I didn’t think was […]

“This is the world I let be created. They blame me for it.”

June 22, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media / Things my friends have made

Is there a better writer out there than Carvell Wallace right now? I’m not sure. His essay on parenting his teenage kids through the pandemic and the protests absolutely hit me in the gut. For the fourth (and final) issue of Anxy, I managed to convince him to go and interview Terry Crews. He turned around something great for us. One day I’m hoping I’ll get to work with him again.

Starting from scratch

May 2, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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In March, a couple of weeks before we were due to ship the May/June issue of Technology Review, something became extremely clear: we needed to throw it away. We’d already cleared a portion of the magazine for coronavirus coverage, but as the pandemic kicked in, everything seemed irrelevant. Nobody would want to read what we’d prepared for them, at least not now, not when all they could think of was covid-19. Everybody got behind the […]

May 2, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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“The protests demanding that states “reopen” after all are protests demanding that working people head back into jobs that risk their health. The now-infamous “I Want a Haircut!” sign brandished by a Wisconsin woman underlined the point: These people aren’t simply protesting curtailments of their own movement. They are protesting a lack of people to serve them. They are demanding other people get back to work. And when we look at that sign and flinch […]

April 7, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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“Why is it that the losers of the story always have to carry their loss on their backs when they didn’t choose it?” Louis often says. “Other people are responsible for the suffering of others.” Edouard Louis in ‘I Always Write With a Sense of Shame’, New York Times Magazine

BRB24: How to handle an apocalypse

March 11, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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Newsletter

It’s not panic, exactly. It’s almost–panic, a tremor of a fear that is beginning to surge but is not yet quite established. It’s hearing an echo, a whisper in a nervous crowd. One person coughs on the train, everyone stares. Reactions shaped by a lifetime of narratives about the End—the disaster that changes everything, the disease that triggers a cataclysm. We know how this story goes, right? A few weeks ago, before this became this, […]