Monthly Archives: October 2020

Sarah Cooper

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One of the few bright spots of the last 8 months is Sarah Cooper and her brilliant videos. Nice piece in the Washington Post.

In a medium where teenage gamers become instant multimillionaires, Cooper is the strangest kind of overnight star. She has earned a master’s degree, written three books and developed more than a casual understanding of John Maynard Keynes. She was in her 30s before she did her first standup set, and spent the bulk of her adult life working at tech companies, most recently Google, where she led the team that redesigned the company’s popular word-processing program, Google Docs.

Gotta say it… I’m impressed by the Google Docs thing. She went from doing gigs in a pizza place in January to a Netflix special on October 27.

It is not your standard Netflix comedy show. For one thing, “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine” is not standup. The special is a darkly hilarious and political sketch show filmed on the covid-claustrophobic set of a fictitious morning program hosted by a needy and desperately cheery character named Sarah Cooper.

If you’ve been living in a cave (or watching nothing but Fox News) you can check out her work on YouTube.

In praise of attic fans

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We’ve been hyper-vigilant since the beginning of the pandemic. No friends or family in our home since late February. But we have had a couple of service people in to repair broken appliances. No way to avoid that. Fortunately, our house has a big-ass attic fan so we opened a couple of windows and turn the fan on high. It sucks a huge volume of air (and virus) out of the house.

Reality

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My current view of Reality is a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces, scattered across a table of infinite size. I can see only a few nearby bits of the puzzle’s image. Pieces snap into place by some unseen cosmic hand but I only see those close to me. I am overwhelmed by the number of pieces and the impossibility of finding where each fits. But they do and, in time, a little more of the picture can be made out. And I think, “Of course. It couldn’t have been otherwise.”