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Nice day to everyone too! I will be going to school in a minute.
Yesterday the press department intern walked into my office and handed me the freshly printed visiting cards. I said that I hadn’t asked for any, but apparently they just went ahead and did it anyway like they do every year (no matter what I say). There are like 500 of them on a stack. I will not ever give out 500 visiting cards, and it’s not like the others that I got expired or something. Besides, it makes me think of American Psycho.
Do you guys have visiting cards? I guess they can still be useful for some people. I usually collect them during conferences or visits to other institutes and throw them away after I forgot who the person is.
So there’s this travel Youtuber I used to watch a lot called Drew Binsky. His main shtick used to be trying to visit every country in the world and bringing along his slightly annoying American overpositivity with it, but once he’d done that he shifted more towards stories of people from remote tribes with weird customs, poor African slums, dangerous favelas in Latin America, street food in East Asia, remote places in extreme environments, you know, the usual slightly exoticising clichés you get from travel vloggers.
So along comes the YouTube algorithm recommending me a new Drew Binsky video that just came out and it’s a 20 minute vlog about…*[Jaywick](https://youtu.be/W-W0_VjcGV8?si=-foOJleFqIarCH5-)*?
For context, Jaywick is known in the UK for being one of the most deprived towns in the country, and it’s only really known for that because it was featured in a TV series 10 years ago about poverty in the UK. The story of Jaywick is a pretty common story of an old seaside town that fell into serious decline when package holidays to Spain became more affordable to British holiday-goers and the old seaside towns could no longer compete. Most of this context was, however, barely touched on in this Drew Binsky video, whose audience is mainly made up of non-Brits who know nothing about the relevance of Jaywick in British media. Instead, we had this very obviously media-trained guy taking Drew around the town, telling him that actually Jaywick’s not that bad really and the people are nice when you get to know them and are just trying to get through life despite all the deprivation, and then all the YouTube comments were like “Omg bro poverty in England ain’t real poverty bro Brits are pussies bro wtf is this”.
I’m just incredulous that you can even do a documentary about a declining seaside town, barely even mention *why* it’s in such a sorry state and not even mention the fact that there are many, many towns like it all over Britain. I mean, isn’t that an interesting story in itself for international viewers?