Hey ,

I hope you had a good week! Mine went by pretty fast, I had work on for a pitch nearly all week, followed by some exam grading for the school, which I've mostly had to push back to next week.It was a beautiful sunny week nearly every day in Paris, I managed to take a break and walk around Paris while listening to podcasts before the 6pm curfew pretty much every day. I went on a nice long walk around to Montmartre yesterday, and took a few photos. Police emptied the banks of the Seine mid-afternoon because they deemed too many people were hanging around to be socially distanced. I noticed the queues were as long for people getting their vaccines at a hospital (I'm presuming, I don't think there was another pressing reason for so many people to be queueing at the hospital on a sunny Saturday), as they were at the trendy Boneshaker doughnut shop. The main noticeable difference seeming to be overall demographics, given VOCID-19 vaccinations shots available are prioritising older / at risk people in France. I had a great conversation with my friend James D'Souza for Teaching Tangents last week. The question was: "Do you think there will be a knowledge gap in the future - because of inflated teacher grades allowing more people into uni who might not deserve to be there? future productivity?"That's about it for now, enjoy the rest of your weekend and have a great week ahead!Cheers,WillemPS: I'm currently (and still) reading:

• Surveiller et punir: la naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish), by Michel Foucault

• The Fool: His Social and Literary History, by Enid Welsford.

• Criminal: The Deluxe Edition, Vol. 2 by Ed Brubacker & Sean Phillips 

• I also found a bunch of second hand Dragon Ball in manga for my nieces, of course I'm (re)reading them beforehand though, double volumes 13 to 19.

Paris, le Sacré-Coeur, Montmartre.

 Weekly Combo Typically a mix of playful and strategy flavours. 

Miami Bass: 2 Live Crew performing "Face Down, Ass Up" at the Phil Donahue Show in 1990 | Mogul Season 2 (2 min on Youtube | 6 30 min audio episodes - warning: super explicit lyrics!!)I can't remember why I hadn't listened to the second season of Mogul - Gimlet Media's podcast about the history of hip-hop (first season about the life and death of Chris Lighty), but in the midst of the Bon Appetit  Reply All series and I suppose scandal, and because one of the previous Gimlet employees who spoke about Reply All worked on Mogul I went back to it and listened to all the second season episodes about the beginning of the Miami Bass subgenre of hip hop (also called Booty Bass), and the story of 2 Live Crew. Their songs are ridiculously sexually explicit, and the 2 Live Crew band were sued for obscenity, it's a large part of the podcast series story. Looking at people's reactions in the audience of the Phil Donahue show from 1990 is just amazing. And the whole series on the Mogul podcast is brilliant. The story, music, sound design, and engineering are fantastic. As the host says in the beginning, it's totally worth listening on the best speakers you have, with the bass on high! It's a lot of fun to listen to, and I just didn't really know much about the whole topic. And warning: it's extremely explicit / sexually graphic.Rare 'locked' letter sealed 300 years ago is finally opened virtually (CNN Style, 5 min read)Reading this, I learned there were different ways of sealing and "locking" letters with special ways of folding them in order to avoid them being opened in the 17th and 18th centuries. Given I've been reading and watching some history related topics, this story also makes me wonder if or what people in the future will think when coming across songs from the 2 Live Crew sited above (or a wide variety of explicit songs, across the musical spectrum, really).Using a highly sensitive X-ray scanner and computer algorithms, a team of researchers have managed to "virtually open" locked letters that are part of an undelivered bundle of mail in the Dutch Postal Museum in The Hague. Some of these letters, as cited in the short article, are providing fascinating insight in to the day to day lives of the people who wrote them back then. What is also super interesting there, is right now given everything is easily recorded (cloud data, emails, files, photos, etc), I tend to forget that it wasn't the case with remnants of history (letters and books fade away, are destroyed, etc); and that nothing is eternal. All the personally related data I take for granted now can quite easily be lost - or at least that it's unlikely it'll last forever. And it's another reminder I should gather all my photos on the new external hard drive I bought and haven't backed up all my files and photos on just yet!