Many of these seemed to be bellwethers when I collected them...
1xi25
Dr. John and 'pareidolic digression'
The Cory Doctorow Doctrine Hobbledehoy
The Scientists Who Want to Rewire Your Past to Fix the Present gizmodo
...the fast-growing field of memory manipulation, which is being explored as a treatment for depression and other mental health conditions.
Broken Promises: Deceptive Marketing Practices in Medicare F Douglas Stephenson at Informed Comment
The Myth of Willpower David Milgrim at muddyum via Medium
...We all have agency. That's the whole point of having a brain. But it works only within the boundaries of what's possible. The fact that humans are individually capable of stunning feats, conjured by focus and intense preparation, doesn't mean that anyone can do anything....Still, we buy the pitch and then thrash ourselves when we fall short of impossible expectations. We lash, trash, bash, and slash ourselves for things over which we have no control. And if we see any actual evidence that we might have possibly done it better, we go at ourselves with reckless fervor.
The shame that festers in this horrible myth-understanding of human agency prevents us from seeing what we're actually up against, so we can plot a reasonable path through it. The shame blinds us to the things we can tangibly affect over time, including our own habits, thoughts, and behavior. It keeps us trapped inside the worst narratives we can write about ourselves and the world around us. It's pointless, debilitating, and tragic.
Margaret Atwood The Guardian
...When Atwood was nine, the family moved to Toronto after her father got a job at the university. Her sister Ruth was born. She attended a proper school for the first time. In her handed-down pinafores, she was unprepared for the "unpredictable, oblique, underhanded, and byzantine nature of the power politics practised by nine- and 10-year-old girls", she writes in the memoir. It was here that she met Sandra Sanders, who, 40 years later, would become the fictional tormentor Cordelia in her novel Cat's Eye (often described as Lord of the Flies for girls). She learned never to be afraid of bullies again.
Bert Jansch 'Needle of Death' Hobbledehoy
Lunedi Lunacy — More Shakespearean Jackanapery Willym
On the universal structure of human lexical semantics Hyejin Youn et al. (2016)
Dreaming in Gamelan Bill Brennan & Andy McNeill at RootsWorld
2xi25
Juxtaposition: Heather Cox Richardson today:
...F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby skewered the immoral and meaningless lives of the very wealthy during the Jazz Age who spent their time throwing extravagant parties and laying waste to the lives of the people around them.3xi25
Mark Twain, "The War Prayer" (ca.1904-5) The American Yawp Reader
Now available in Zotero for iOS: EPUB and webpage snapshot annotation and PDF metadata retrieval zotero.org
4xi25
Perfect Imperfection Andy Ilachinski
Old people playing on phones Adam Tooze
Lucy Dacus and Rufus Wainwright Talk with Amanda Petrusich
In the eyeball waiting room Charlie Stross
Cymatic Urphänomen Andy Ilachinski
Fragments Christopher Hobson
For those mindful of American and Chinese socio-political change over the past sixty years, the recidivism of the 2020s is without question tedious, troubling and tenebrous.Words: Pablo Neruda's Love Letter to Language Marginalian
"Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer... feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote. Words are the invisible hands with which we touch each other, feel the shape of the world, hold our own experience. We live in language — it is our interior narrative that stitches the events of our lives into a story of self.6xi26
Israel's Politicians Rebel for the right to Torture H Scott Prosterman at Informed Comment
Zohran Mamdani's Proposals to Help New Yorkers Are Surprisingly Affordable Informed Comment
The Bloomers Paradox austral codex ten (re: Jason Pargin's I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom)
The American Health Reckoning Angus Peterson at Medium
Public health does not fail all at once. It frays in familiar places — in supply chains, call centers, and underfunded data dashboards. It breaks in the gaps where families make the best decisions they can with the information they have. The week's headlines, from a deadly listeria outbreak to a five-day doctors' strike, from AI chatbots stepping into care to a federal shutdown threatening food aid, read like separate stories. They are not. They tie together around three themes that keep repeating through history: the need for trustworthy information, the importance of systems that work before the emergency, and the moral cost of inequality when the shocks arrive.Start with something as ordinary as dinner. A growing listeria outbreak tied to recalled, ready-to-eat pasta has spanned eighteen states, causing illnesses, hospitalizations, and several deaths. Food safety is one of those invisible places where trust either holds or breaks. A routine recall is a bump; a recall with fatalities shakes public confidence. Families with tight schedules and limited budgets rely on convenience meals, and when that safety net tears, it's not an abstract problem. It's Tuesday night and the refrigerator looks emptier than it should.
...If you've ever fought with a billing department, you know how a mistake can snowball into lost coverage or canceled appointments. People don't experience "the health system." They experience letters that land on their kitchen table.
...The term "polycrisis" can sound academic until it lands on your dinner table or in your doctor's waiting room. Bird flu spreading across Europe may seem distant, yet every poultry cull ripples into grocery prices and trade routes. Each disruption, however small, tests the thin layer of predictability that holds modern life together.
Brad DeLong
...Thune, Johnson, and Roberts do not enable Trump. They enable Trump, plus all the people who claim he gave them the baton. They give them the power to break things. And Trump breaks things too, as a result of his own senile demented chaos-monkey nature. Trump's outsized influence is less a solitary force than a system of delegated disruption. Falling guardrails green‑light a wider cadre who claim his mantle to smash procedural norms, weaponize institutional choke points, and flood the zone with bad‑faith claims: House committee chairs amplifying election‑denial narratives, state officials drafting legally adventurous schemes to nullify certification, or activist attorneys pushing fringe constitutional theories now dignified by proximity to power. Each takes the baton and runs. Trump's own chaos—agenda whiplash, loyalty tests, and performative grievance—magnifies breakage by making opportunists the decisive actors, while professionals exit or go quiet. The macro lesson is that institutions fail not only when leaders misbehave but when veto players choose passivity; the enabling coalition converts one man's appetite for transgression into a distributed capacity to break things—and keeps breaking them even when the original instigator wanders off‑script.It is very unclear to me why they are acting as they do. It is not that Trump is popular. It is not that Trump is successful.
7xi26
Main Character Energy, Nonplayer Character Anxiety, Culture of Death — open future PC at living together, somehow
The elusive question of agency in a world of systemic involution...This is a structural feature of 'how things unfortunately are'. Elusive individual agency can feel especially difficult for those of us — like me — who internalised the wish to make a difference in the world, tied to a belief that the work we did 'could make a difference'. The late 20C meritocratic ideal here — incredibly ideological, totally bogus, but still very sticky and hard to overcome — often congeals in the fantasy scenario of a job in which we get to demonstrate our individual merit by going out there agentically. In the script that ensues from this ideological position and its normative unconscious, we get to go out and act, and when we do, it makes a 'real' difference. In exchange, we get buckets of meaning and recognition, while also experiencing job satisfaction, great pay and conditions, and even 'work life balance'. This is a whole shebang in which the individual agent shows their merit among likeminded, like-endowed 'friends', and is rewarded with entitlements, security, 'career', happy first and third world children, and the ability to afford EVs and organic groceries. Or something. Fill in your blank (receive your super [enjoy your agency]). I would say, nearly all of gliberalism is still trying to enact this fantasy; what makes it tragicomic is just how over it all is. Interpolating Kafka: there is hope, just not for individual gliberal agency.
... Marvel's broad cultural resonance also indicates that the less agency we have in our actual lives, the stronger the super powers have to be, and the more popular super heroes become. So the more powerless we actually feel, the more gratifying it feels to watch superheroes do all the things we have to fantasise about doing to our enemies — because in fact we are tiny and helpless in the face of the world as it actually confronts all of us these days
...This is one thing we should notice about the rise of populism, autocracy and involuted fascism: it's all an appeal to the idea of agency, while also adding the additional appeal of getting to have someone fight our battles for us, and getting to enjoy domination as spectacle. If we can't go Fight Club and smash the reviled status quo with our own mind and fists, then we can bestow power on a group who'll do it for us. Sadly, this is something Freud and Adorno were right about, and it applies to ICE in Chicago or the IDF in the West Bank: there are people at home who love the idea of some bully dominating their loathed monster, and they like the idea that the dirty work is being done for them. Team sport, on this level, is no different: we want to watch our team smash and destroy the enemy team, and we enjoy this spectacle, as well as enjoying our position of clear visibility and relative safety.
...we are all governed by mad, clueless septagenarians; the whole culture in a terrifying proximity to ageing and death (I'll return to this). We are dommed by what is old and dying, but does not die, not even when it's shot. Again: no agency, no control, and all of us just tiny pink writhing pupae, baby kangaroos before the AI-powered steamroller of precarious planet slop.
...By 'romanticising our life', we get to be — and stay — at the centre of the drama, the action, the crux. The lens' aperture is always wide open, the foreground focus is always on us, and everything in the background is either the pretty dimpling of bokeh, something there to support and serve us — or it intrudes as an obstacle to enacting the wish, and must be destroyed.
...What I find interesting to notice is that some of the most Titanic male egos of the contemporary United States all show signs of Main Character characterology: Tate, Diddy, Kanye, Trump, and Musk all emanate M©E, and could easily be pop diagnosed and dissed for forcing everyone around them to suffer through their Main Character Syndrome, all served up with big lashings of toxic individualism and patriarchy.
In terms of individual agency, each one of these people, as obnoxious as they are popular, are imbued with the 'superpower' qualities of genius, which permits them to break all the rules afflicting everyone else — in a way that we identify with, and admire. Elon gets to do DOGE (and then leave DOGE, and then get a trillion dollar pay check?); Trump gets to wreck everything, including the White House, and can haz the Nobel Peace Prize. But for their supporters: 'He's playing four dimensional chess — he's a geeeenius'. At heart, again, this is a swollen dark twisted fantasy of individual agency, but one that goes further by granting that violations, even/especially grotesque violations, are okay for them. Thanks to their genius and uniqueness, these protagonists get to grab the world by the pussy, just like you — if you identify with them — would really love to do.
...taking the position of 'Main Character' tends to render 'everyone else' as a sidekick or a villain. What's notable here is how gaming culture — actually, 70s Dungeons and Dragons, so it's been with us a while — stepped in and supplied the social imaginary with the idea of the NonPlayer Character (NPC) as an immediately legible way of describing this. This is how it goes.
...leaving aside the popularity of involuted fascist and autocratic morons, what characterises the government of the world is that it is a gerontocacy: we are governed by old men. We are governed by nasty old men, edging closer to senility and death, but never quite dying. If the new struggles to be born, in no small measure, it's because the old refuse to hand over the mic, refuse to retire, and never quite die
...Trump is 79, Modi 75, Putin 73, and Xi 72. These are all men several years beyond retirement age. All of them, except ?maybe? Modi, are extremely wealthy. Yet they insist on remaining the protagonist in their own cultural variant of M©E, and all of them are totally fine with millions, or billions, suffering, or dying, as long as it means they can remain the centre of the story, a story almost entirely rooted in their own twentieth century struggles, a century that ended a quarter of a century ago. If they have individual agency it only exists by virtue of the fact that, for some reasons intimated in this post, groups of people identify with their domination, in order, perhaps — this is the question — to feel a little agency of their own, in a world where this is so very elusive. Maybe, their supporters hope, they are strongman enough to have the agency to bring back that twentieth century, breathe a little life into its corpse. In a world of involuting systems, where individual agency is elusive.
...not only live among half dead but still stubbornly living gerontocrats and a dying middle class, we live in a culture of death. The most pervasive evidence of this is data centres themselves, places where life, like moisture, has to be evacuated
...Right now, if you pump enough dead dino-powered electricity, enough to power a city, into this blank and dead space, you can teach an algorithm 'to guess the next word' with enough accuracy to have an LLM appear to you, in your browser, and return you a sense of individual agency — in a world of involuted systems.
