I understand the desire to be close with our friends, lovers, and families while enjoying a walk with them. What I don't understand is how it came to be that, while running on a popular path the other day, I made physical contact with someone because two separate groups of side-by-side walkers couldn't be parted from their companions for the actual second it would have taken for me to run past. 

I was running behind one group, and the oncoming group saw me, as I am visible. They were looking ahead, so I made eye contact with the man closest to me. I said to the group ahead of me, "on your left," like a human being who lives in a society with shared spaces. They did not separate or scoot over. In their defense, maybe I didn't give enough warning, maybe they didn't hear me, maybe they didn't understand me. Fair. But the oncoming twosome had zero excuse not to choose any evasive maneuver. When I ran around the other group (on their left), and the oncoming group made their choice to firmly hold their ground, I ended up shoulder-checking the man I had made eye contact with.

Apart from being surprised, I was pissed. This dude saw me coming, he saw the couple I was clearly going to have to run around, and there was time to react. Making a conscious choice to be rude is just rude. Do better.

And to all other side-by-side walkers: May you make better choices or be shoulder checked by people whose impact might make you rethink your co-walking formations. 

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In 1892, the French military decided to colonize big chunks of western Africa. That year, they rampaged across what is today Benin and engaged in a massive looting of that area’s amazing historical artifacts. The English, other Europeans, and the Americans were doing the same thing around the world, stealing stuff from all over the place to fill their museums. It’s gross and it’s a great example of how imperialism not only worked but continues to work. Because, see, the rich white nations don’t want to give any of it back.

But that’s getting harder to hold the line on. Nations want their historical artifacts back. And they have every right to them. Very slowly–painfully slowly, the European and Eurodiaspora nations and their museums are coughing things up. Benin has demanded France repatriate its stolen art. Mati Diop is perfect to make a film about the return of 26 major objects to Benin. She is half-French, half-Sengalese, full-excellent director. Her uncle is the legendary Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty, director of the astounding 1973 film Touki Bouki, among other films. So she filmed the return of these objects in her 2024 film Dahomey. This pretty short film, just a touch over an hour, has its slow moments. It starts with some static museum shots in France, the slow packaging of these objects, their return to Benin. She even put a camera in one of the boxes to show its closing in France and then opening in Benin. There’s some voiceover work from the perspective of the objects to think about what it was like for them in France, or their spirits anyway.

The best part of the film is in the second half, where for about 20 minutes, Diop films a conference of young people in Benin arguing over the return of the objects. It’s not that any of the students are unhappy about their return, but some see it is an outright positive and others see the fact that there are thousands of objects from Benin still in French museums and this just a drop in the bucket. In an era where the dreams of postcolonial liberation are long in the past, it’s fascinating to watch contemporary debates around this issue. So the film at its best ends up being about identity in a postcolonial world and the possibilities and very sharp limitations of that.

This film might not be for everyone. Film does not have to be “entertainment” after all. But it’s quite worthy of your hour.

The post LGM Film Club, Part 537: Dahomey appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

It goes without saying that there is a great deal of Psychology going on in Donald Trump's second term. None of it is especially complicated, because the people involved are without exception clammy, low-wattage sociopaths who universally dislike and distrust each other, see their hugely consequential jobs primarily as opportunities to make short-form video content and fly on private planes, and have not let their (correct) understanding that they will be going to go to hell when they die sway them from gulping down huge foamy draughts of humiliation every single day. But if none of it and none of them are very interesting, the volatility of the visibly decaying real-estate priss at the center of it all generally keeps it surprising.

For the most part, this is a matter of nausea and dread—a drawling executive digression revealing plans to invade "four or quite frankly five" new countries, the most powerful politician in the world either nodding along or nodding off as his chief health officials stammer through an endorsement of miasma theory. But sometimes it plays out as it does in this Wall Street Journal story about the president compulsively gifting pairs of Florsheim dress shoes to the underlings and supplicants that wind up sitting across from him at meetings. The Journal story quotes a woman who works in the White House saying "all the boys have them," and another laughing that "it’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them."

In one sense, this sort of behavior won't really be surprising to anyone who has spent time around a disinhibited and declining older person; thought processes become both less linear and much more legible in that cohort, and in this case Trump's interior progression from "bored with person talking" to "noticing that person's shoes" to "telling them to put on new shoes" is no longer interior at all. The Journal story describes Trump interrupting a lunch meeting with Tucker Carlson to start talking about "his 'incredible' new shoes" and pausing a December meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to point out their "shitty shoes" before "retrieving a catalog" and getting to work on crafting a presidential solution to that issue. If this habit had in any way distracted the president from dropping bombs on foreign schools or his ongoing domestic terror campaigns, it would be much easier to laugh about it. As it stands, it's just one of those stupid things everyone gets to walk around knowing about while all the bombing and terror stuff continues. There's very little surprise left in that, either.

Scrub kosher salt into the surface of your stainless steel pan, says Wirecutter, citing the French Culinary Institute: This is "a hack to create a slippery surface," by filling in all the little microscopic cracks and ridges in the surface of the pan, so that you can cook eggs in the pan and they will not stick.

This method is truly a boon for frying and scrambling eggs, though mastering it requires a bit of patience. Nailing it took me three tries, but once I got it down, I was shocked by the results.

Three tries! To master the technique of buffing kosher salt onto a pan! So that you can cook some eggs! This is lunacy.