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.
6xi25
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.
7xi25
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.
6xi25
Canada's Quiet War Against America Has Begun Shubhransh Rai at Medium (9x25)
...99% of Canada's energy exports go to the U.S. — a weakness that could become its greatest weapon....Without infrastructure and unity, it stays the quiet neighbor powering America's success — without sharing the credit.
Carney's betting that this time will be different. And if he's right, Canada's transformation could reshape global energy flows.
The Roman Empire's Entire Road Network Just Got Mapped, and It's Mind-Blowing gizmodo
The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world Cory Doctorow
Dungans at Penn Victor Mair at Language Log
7xi25
Preserving the Past & Sharing It Today: A New Partnership with the University of California Joe Bussard collections
8xi25
A Pattern is a Message Andy Ilachinski
Nick Drake's debut gets its due with Grammy nomination Hobbledehoy
Deepfakes, Layoffs, and the New Reality War Angus Peterson at Medium
It's a strange feeling, realizing how many of the systems we trust to keep the world spinning now depend on code written by someone we'll never meet. That same software might be patched, revised, or exploited before the week is out — and somewhere, the fallout will land on a family like yours or mine. The gap between what's possible and what's stable is widening, and it's being filled with algorithms, automation, and anxiety.Over the past year, the speed of technological disruption has started to feel less like progress and more like acceleration without traction. Regulators scramble to keep up, markets cheer or panic, and the rest of us watch the gears spin faster.
...We're watching power shift from institutions to infrastructures, from people who make decisions to systems that make suggestions. And those systems, for all their sophistication, are built atop fragile networks.
Declared dead last year, the Anthropocene is very much alive Aeon Essays
... because anything you polish with attention will become a mirror, I have come to see that lichen knows many things we spend our lives learning — about adversity, about belonging, about love
9xi25
Facebook's fraud Files Cory Doctorow
Fake Indian accents (by an Indian) Victor Mair at Language Log
June Tabor and Quercus Hobbledehoy
None of Us Know the Words: Lessons from the Mid-20th Century Monocultural Americana Ian Nagoski at The Attic
10xi25
The Mapping Revolution Alistair Bonnet (pdf) [laptop download]
Electric Universe Andy Ilachinski
André Gregory's Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity Marginalian
11xi25
The Microchip Era Is About to End George Gilder at discovery.org (via Stephen Downes)
abstand und ausbau 2 Victor Mair at Language Log
How the Web Was Lost James Gleick at NYRB
...Here are some of the things the optimists failed to foresee: the erosion of privacy and, as Berners-Lee writes, "the industrial-scale harvest of user data." The emergence of ruthless giant corporations—Google, Meta, Amazon—mightier than nation-states. The creation of a powerful new oligarch class. The collapse of the aforementioned old media; the loss of a consensus reality; the rise of clickbait and deepfakes. "The utopian para-universe of the early net didn't pan out," observes Walsh—another understatement....What Doctorow means is that the bright, shiny objects of the Internet have become spy tools, surreptitiously collecting information about us—our habits, our desires, our health, our political inclinations—and using it to manipulate our behavior. The platforms that appear to serve users hungry for information—and did serve them, at first—now go to extreme lengths to seize attention. Algorithms designed to maximize "engagement" amplify anger and sensationalism at the expense of truth.
...As Facebook put it in a marketing pitch:
Has it occurred to you that MySpace is owned by an evil, crapulent, senescent Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, and he spies on you with every hour that God sends?Come to Facebook, where we will never spy on you....The ironies are abundant, and chief among them is that the early Internet thrived on cutting out the middleman. If people complained about the markup charged by their brick-and-mortar bookstore, the upstart Amazon promised to eliminate the overhead of shelf space, store rents, and clerk salaries and deliver the merchandise straight to their front door. Or straight to the eyeballs—cut out the printers and paper mills, too. The buzzword was disintermediation. Another master of disintermediation was eBay, connecting buyers and sellers directly, cutting out the antique dealers and flea markets. Napster did the same for music lovers, cutting out the record stores; it began enabling song downloads in 1999, operated for a year and a half, claimed 80 million users, and devastated the recording industry.
12xi25
War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Grocery Prices Are Way Down Paul Krugman
...We all know that many media organizations have long had a habit of "sanewashing" Trump, downplaying the craziness of his remarks. What we're seeing now is "truthwashing," pretending that there is some factual justification for bald-faced lies....As that left-wing rag the Wall Street Journal points out, the only people who seem to be feeling good about the economy right now are those who own a lot of stock.
Beware of predators bearing "gifts" Shay Stewart-Bouley
.....And why do we have this crisis?Because our particular flavor of capitalism is as out-of-control and dysfunctional now as is our brand of democracy. Houses have been bought up over the years by companies and financial operations that turn them into outrageously high-rent units, AirBnB properties, and so on, basically removing them from the general pool for average people. The "value" of housing—even at the rental level—has been increased dramatically and artificially.
Well, 47 and gang have an answer: The 50-year mortgage.
Yes, you too can own a home, even if you're Gen Z, if you just go into debt for half a century. Or so they say. Because, naturally, if a 20- or 30-year mortgage used to keep monthly payments manageable, 50 years should handle things even better at the current level, right?
Except according to an article at Fortune magazine you would only save about $120 a month, while doubling your interest payments over the long run. Basically, whatever the initial value of your home, you will have more than paid it off long before the loan is done, meaning the house is paid for, the bank is in the clear, and you still don't really own your house for two or three decades more probably.
Many people, by the time they buy a house, may not even live long enough to pay off a 50-year loan. You'd think this would be bad for the banks, right? Nope. Again, the initial loan amount will have long since been paid off so the bank is already happy. And if you don't have a proper will or any heirs at all? Well, now your death comes with them foreclosing your property for an "unpaid" loan and they get to sell it off at 100% profit for them.
This is candy-coated dog poop. This is a solution offered by the very same people who made the problem as bad as it is and probably wanted it worse by now actually. This is not so much a 50-year mortgage as a 50-year trap. They want you in debt as long as possible and as deep as possible. They want you as financially unstable as possible while also teetering on that very narrow line between a desperate and dangerously poor population and one that feels just secure enough to not rebel. They want you needy and indebted to them while also vaguely grateful.
They want loyal wage slaves and debt slaves.
Lake Clifton in Western Australia is home to living fossils called thrombolites boing boing
Small Pieces [Still] Loosely Joined Alan Levine
Archiving as you go AlanLevine
A tale of three customer service chatbots Cory Doctorow
13xi25
For-profit healthcare is the problem, not (just) private equity Cory Doctorow
Gen Z and Meme Viruses: Can Things Get Any Worse? Matthew at Medium
15xi25
Morrphic Resonance Andy Ilachinski
The Cyber Signal We Keep Ignoring Angus Peterson at Medium
...the sense that the ground under us is softer than it used to be and we are all trying to pretend the floorboards will hold.Then the news breaks in. Layoff trackers showing another wave of cuts, thousands more pushed out of steady work after being told automation would help them, not replace them. The Challenger, Gray and Christmas charts circulating online show October hitting job cut numbers not seen in more than twenty years, and AI sits right at the center of it.
Commentators keep repeating that companies are not even hiding the motive now. Verizon, Synopsys, Vista Equity, SKT. The explanations read the same. "AI adoption." "Automation gains." "Operational restructuring." You realize that the jobs your friends counted on, the jobs your kids might one day need, are being surrendered to systems designed to cut labor before anything else. We were told this would free us. The reality looks more like a slow erasure.
And it is not just work. It is what fills the space where truth should be. You have seen the way the news reads lately, the strange sameness creeping in. Reports about wire services leaning on AI to churn out templated copy. "Robot journalism," they call it, as if the name makes it harmless. But when major outlets roll out machine written stories with thin oversight, the cost is not style. It is confidence. It is the sense that the line between fact and frictionless output is dissolving. <> ...You talk with friends about all this and someone always says the same thing. "How much longer can we pretend this is normal?" Are we supposed to treat the collapse of information integrity as a minor nuisance? Are we supposed to trust that companies who trade in personal data will protect it better next time? Are we supposed to believe that a digital economy running hotter every month will stay balanced when the incentives push every player toward extraction? <> ...So what ties all of this together? What runs under the layoffs, the breach of truth, the cyber weakness, the surveillance creep, the bio risks? It is the same pattern you have seen in every other stage of decline. Systems built for profit over balance. Speed over wisdom. Control over consent.
Coleridge
How Literatures Begin: Chinese languagehat.com
16xi25
Practicing Social Ecology: From Bookchin to Kurdish Rojava and Beyond Peter G. Prontzos reviews Eleanor Finley
Murray Bookchin was one of the most significant thinkers — and activists — in the 20th century, beginning with his pioneering ecological analysis, Our Synthetic Environment, which was published over six decades ago (1962)....He coined the phrase, "social ecology" to denote the central element in his world view: that the ultimate source of humanity's domination and exploitation of nature is based on the continuing domination and exploitation of human beings by those in positions of power in society.
…since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the four borders of Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey have split their homeland. Nationalism in these countries has led to government policies of cultural erasure and genocide against the Kurds. Kurdish repression is one of the many ethno-nationalist conflicts in the Middle East tied to capitalist development, growing socio-economic inequality, and ecological degradation (Finley)
... One of Bookchin's primary insights is that, due to the unprecedented productive power of modern technology, all scarcities in the world — food, medical care, education, even free time — were all artificial and unnecessary.
Vibecessions, Part I Paul Krugman
..."vibecessions," a term coined by Kyla Scanlon for periods in which people feel lousy about an economy that according to conventional measures seems pretty good or at least not so bad.
America isn't a blood-and-soil nation Colin Woodard at NYT OpEd
...Nations are, as the Anglo-Irish historian Benedict Anderson put it, "imagined communities"; they only exist because we collectively believe they do. Every nation is defined and shaped by the stories its members have come to accept about where it came from, what its purpose is, who belongs to it and who does not.
17xi25
The UN's Acquiescence in Trump's Colonial Plan for Gaza Betrays the Palestinians yet Again Ranjan Solomon at Informed Coment
...The West continues to speak of Gaza as if it were a property problem. A place to be rebuilt, administered, secured, fenced, or leased. A space to be redesigned through "development packages" and "security compacts." But Gaza is not a zone of crisis management — it is one of the oldest, most continuous communities of the Palestinian people. Gaza is, in poin5t of fact, an ancient historical entity with a continuous history of habitation spanning over 4,000 years, functioning as a vital trade hub and a crossroads of civilizations between Egypt and the Levant.For the West, real estate thinking comes naturally. Land is property. Property is power. And power belongs to those who can enforce it. It is a capitalist notion of tenure and tenants.
Turdopoesis smallthingsconsidered
Building A Knowledge Graph of a Music Collection Mark Burgess at Medium
...let's consider how to model music as a semantic spacetime, using the SSTorytime project
"Senescence," D. A. Powell at The New Yorker
Just as I come to know a thing it's gone again.
What's in my heartwood in my head, brashy, ashy, friable, crumbled colors.
Dormancy. Of matter, of leaf, an orderly degradation.
I have come to measure the dark, not just the frost and not
the lack of light. The uninterrupted dark
of which the winter is a small part. A contraction of the corona, catch
in the windpipe of the old organ, organ of the old windpipe, pipe
of the pileated woodpecker pecking a whole hole in me.
Yellow, orange, brown. The greens break down, the chloroplasts
depart. Each leaf losing its factories from the outside in, its faculties
I seem to mean, from edge to artery, the last gold somewhere
in a vein of no use now. Abscission is a nice way to say
the natural cutting off of things. A wounded limb where leaf scar
gives way to bud scale, safeguard, night nurse, attending orderly
of the tender leaf below. It comes again the assent of spring first
leaf first bloom first fiddle of the fiddle fern. I hated to lose
the light, right when the frost and the xanthophyll make shatter
lightning so plentiful wind shaking the old boughs tambor style
I do not gentle into any any. Any one leaves
and another moves in. New twigs. New nest. Sometimes
a whole new tree in another life in another fall
from another book in another tongue and what
world, this one? This one? This one, maybe. Maybe
the last page torn off so it can't be read
so it cannot happen (have happened) yet
Solving The Social Problem David Milgrim at Medium
...I just realized, through the tears of my last therapy session, how life-changingly large it was that I never made the social transition from my elementary class of 20 to my middle school class of 500. I went from being seen, known, and looked after to being unknown, even to myself. I didn't know how to make friends who didn't come from proximity and a lack of choice. In the big pond, suddenly, I didn't know how to swim.
The Role of Intent and Context Knowledge Graphs With Cognitive Agents Mark Burgess at Medium
Raise your glasses to the Knowledge Age! Learning has been repackaged as a commodity, the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy has been flattened by the bulldozer of Deep Learning, and we strip-mine original content mainly for indulgent trivia. But it's not all prompt-and-paste; thanks to the very advances in Large Language Models, and the desire to cash in, people are getting interested in important problems again! The quest to patch up LLM magic tricks seems to be drawing people back into an old but unsolved problem of great importance: that of how to represent the semantics of learning, scalably and usefully, not just for posterity, but for actual day-to-day use....If you don't do it yourself, you won't know it yourself, and you won't care. In the Information Age, we claim to know something too easily. If you look up a fact on Wikipedia, you might say, "yes, I know that. I read it on Wikipedia". But if you looked up a person in the phone-book, or company register, you wouldn't claim to know them just because you'd seen their phone number and address. We don't really know someone unless we know them like a friend: we've interacted with them enough to experience good, bad, when to approach, when to stay away, how to use, etc. Knowledge and hearsay are different things.
...As soon as we force people to jump through bureaucratic hoops of defining types, then allocating and registering objects and so on, they quickly lose sight of the original goal and become blinded by the process. Keeping simple things simple is surprisingly hard. It's a design problem, not an algorithm problem.
What Happened to Web3 Anyway? Giles Crouch
...As anthropologist Margaret Mead showed in her work, technological change fails when introduced by top-down outsiders who don't understand local culture....When you're using Amazon, Twitter (X), Facebook etc., they control the platform, the algorithms, your data and the whole transaction. You own nothing and have zero control. Your photos on iCloud or Google? They own the infrastructure. So they extract rent from you. Use iTunes or Spotify? Same. Technofeudalism essentially.
Web3 was going to change all that.
18xi25
Auden on the dialectic Adam Tooze, from NYRB
We get the Dialectic fairly well,and more from Tooze:
How streams descending turn to trees that climb,
That what we are not we shall be in time,
Why some unlikes attract, all likes repel.
But is it up to creatures or their fate
To give the signal when to change a state?Granted that we might possibly be great
And even be expected to get well
How can we know it is required by fate
As truths are forced on poets by a rhyme?
Ought we to rush upon our lives pell-mell?
Things have to happen at the proper timeAnd no two lives are keeping the same time,
As we grow old our years accelerate,
The pace of processes inside each cell
Alters profoundly when we feel unwell,
The motions of our protoplasmic slime
Can modify our whole idea of fate.Nothing is unconditional but fate.
To grumble at it is a waste of time,
To fight it, the unpardonable crime.
Our hopes and fears must not grow out of date,
No region can include itself as well,
To judge our sentence is to live in hell.Suppose it should turn out, though, that our bell
Has been in fact already rung by fate?
A calm demeanor is all very well
Provided we were listening at the time.
We have a shrewd suspicion we are late,
Our look of rapt attention just a mime,That we have really come to like our grime,
And do not care, so far as one can tell,
For whom or for how long we are to wait.
Whatever we obey becomes our fate,
What snares the pretty little birds is time,
That what we are, we only are too well.(written in 1940 and never published)
...The American economy is deeply split, with those at the top enjoying unparalleled prosperity and the rest of the country struggling to make ends meet. The top 10 per cent of earners now account for almost half of all spending, up from about a third in the 1990s...a growing section of US society no longer feels plugged into that upwardly mobile vision. The share of Americans who describe themselves as middle class has dropped from 85 per cent a decade ago to 54 per cent. Over 40 per cent of Americans consider themselves lower or working class, suggesting that many of the finer things feel completely out of reach.
This Is a DANGER Signal For The World Economy Shubhransh Rai at Medium
...Gold is sending a signal.
The economy is in serious trouble.
Historically, when gold sends this signal, the economy listens.
And it usually crashes hard shortly after.
We could be weeks or months away from something breaking.
Or we could muddle through somehow.
But the signal is clear if you're willing to see it.
Gold never lies for very long.
The Hidden Grammar of Photography M. H. Rubin at Medium
...We apply the word "composition" (borrowed from painting mainly) to photographs. This does not describe the action of a photographer isolating a picture on a ground glass or through a view finder with any accuracy whatsoever. Is there a word that will really describe what goes on?...the cryptic image is unknowable, or nearly so. It's vague or indistinct or removed from too much context. Sometimes this is used for great effect, a Rorschach test: sometimes we imbue meaning when we can't see it. Cryptic photos might just be textures or shadows. A viewer might say, "What is this?" or "I don't get it." These images also engage viewers to think, without being told what they should feel or see.
Save a Sliver of Flickr with Data Lifeboat
...Data Lifeboat is a first-of-its kind flexible archiving tool that allows you to safely and ethically preserve a selection of Flickr photos with their technical metadata (like the stuff in EXIF) and "social metadata" (like comments, faves, location, tags... everything Flickr members add to a photo once it's published in Flickr). This archive is a downloadable zip file that can be stored locally, shared with friends, passed on to relatives, or maybe even donated to a cultural institution! It's yours to save and use as you'd like.
Seven Easy Ways You Can Edit PDFs Directly From Your Mac lifehacker
my first 'logfile' (March 1998)
19xi25
Reminder: Crypto Is a Trump Trade Paul Krugman
...crypto has become a Trump trade. An industry that's still having very little success in finding legal use cases for its products basically bought itself a president. For a while that looked like a great investment. But with Trump's power evaporating, it's starting to look like money down the drain. And I believe that the crypto crash in part reflects a realization that the political patronage the industry was relying on may not continue.
20xi25
Photographic Art: The Path Forward In An Oversaturated World Curtis Alexander at Medium
...Back in the 1800s, people had to go see a specialist called a "photographer" if they wanted to have their photograph taken. Cameras were, at the time, a specialized tool that only those who had the know-how could operate. There was a whole process of setting up the shot, focusing it, making sure the subjects were still, and preparing the flash powder (a workplace hazard!). Photographs of people from this time are special, in that there weren't a million angles of them. There was no social media or commentary. For some individuals, it was often just one still shot, frozen and preserved in time.
...On November 6, 2025, the Central Asian presidents gathered in Washington D.C. That's never happened before — in fact, most of the Central Asian leaders have never made a formal visit to the U.S. capital, much less all at once. The summit is the crowning achievement for a little-noticed format.For a decade, U.S. foreign policy in Central Asia has been channeled through the C5+1. Centered on nearly annual meetings of the six countries' foreign ministers, the C5+1 has enabled the United States to approach and deal with the distant region collectively. This is particularly important as the region's place in U.S. foreign policy has evolved beyond the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the five Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – have deepened regional cooperation on their own in the face of a revanchist Russia and an ever-expanding China.
21xi25
Frtom this week's Science:
...China has promoted dams as mutually beneficial, providing hydropower for China and "flow regulation" for downstream countries. Yet, the natural pulse of rivers is critical for maintaining ecosystems, as exemplified by the impact of dam projects in the Mekong River, where upstream dams trap sediments, reduce life-giving flood peaks, and drown downstream forests with increased dry-season flows. In addition, the power generated by the Lower Yarlung Tsangpo Hydropower Project will be carried away to China's sprawling industrial centers, while local Tibetan communities might face resettlement and construction-related impacts....Pop a few human stem cells into culture, provide the right molecular signals, and before long a mock cerebral cortex or a cerebellum knockoff could be floating in the medium. These neural, or brain, organoids, typically just a few millimeters across, are not "brains in a dish," as some journalists have described them. But they are becoming ever more sophisticated and true to life, capturing more of the brain's cellular and structural intricacy
Could these globules of human neurons and other cell types feel pain, exhibit intelligence, become conscious, or even dream—and how would we know whether they did? Is it OK to transplant the blobs into the brains of animals—or into people? Could they challenge what it means to be human?
...combining organoids to form so-called assembloids, for example, scientists can boost their complexity. Earlier this year, researchers led by Stanford neuroscientist Sergiu Pasca, the conference's other organizer, reported in Nature they had produced four neural organoids that represent different parts of the brain and spinal cord. When the scientists linked the organoids in sequence and then chemically prodded one end, the organoid at the opposite end of the chain responded, indicating the structures had formed a sensory pathway that could detect stimuli and share information.
...Coca comprises four distinct taxonomic varieties, each associated with specific regions and cultural histories: Yungas coca (Erythroxylum coca var. coca) of the eastern Andean foothills of Bolivia and Peru, Amazonian coca (E. coca var. ipadu), Colombian coca (Eythroxylum novogranatense var. novogranatense), and Trujillo coca (E. novogranatense var. truxillense) of northern Peru and western Ecuador, which is the natural flavoring of Coca-Cola (2). Each of these taxonomic varieties is, in turn, represented by regional landraces, often with many local names.
22xi25
Magnum Photographer Shines a Light on Spain's Alienated Youth PetaPixel
23xi25
The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It Greil Marcus at The New York Review of Books
24xi25
Undersea 'storms' are melting the 'doomsday' glacier's ice shelf New Scientist...Up to 10 kilometres wide — making them "submesoscale" features — these storm-like vortices start swirling when waters of different density or temperature collide in the open ocean, much like hurricanes forming through the mixture of air bodies in the atmosphere. And like hurricanes, some of them barrel towards the coast, which in Antarctica is largely made up of ice shelves — the floating extensions of glaciers that stick dozens of kilometres out into the sea."They have so much motion, and they're really hard to stop," says Mattia Poinelli at the University of California, Irvine. "So the only way they could go is just get trapped under the ice."
...In the waters around Antarctica, several hundred metres of colder, fresher water sit on top of warmer, saltier deep water. If a storm becomes trapped in the cavity under an ice shelf, its whirling pushes the cold surface water outwards away from the centre of the vortex, drawing warm deep water up into the resulting void and melting the ice shelf from the bottom up.
This sets off a feedback loop, in which the cold, fresh water released by that melt interacts with the warm, salty water to intensify the spinning of the underwater storm, causing even more melting.
The Coming Ecological Cold War Nils Gilman
— the direction of travel is clear. The world's energy map is being redrawn. But as China races forward, a counter-alliance is forming around the defense of hydrocarbons.Call it the axis of petrostates: the United States under Donald Trump, Russia under Vladimir Putin, and Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman. What unites them is not shared governance models — the first is a democracy of sorts, the second a personalist autocracy, the third a dynastic monarchy — but their mutual dependence on fossil wealth and their determination to resist decarbonization.
For America, the shift is stark. Under Joe Biden, Washington passed the Inflation Reduction Act, its most ambitious climate legislation. But the country is also the world's biggest oil and gas producer, and with Mr. Trump's return the pretense has dropped. His administration embraces an unabashed fossil-fuel nationalism: "drill, baby, drill" elevated to raison d'état. The green transition is cast as a globalist conspiracy, an assault on sovereignty and livelihoods. Fossil fuels are woven into an identity of rugged independence and divine entitlement.
Russia's motives are clearer still. Hydrocarbons underpin its budget, its patronage networks, and its great-power pretensions. Energy exports give Moscow leverage over Europe and influence across the global South. A decarbonizing world threatens to strand its assets and neuter its relevance. The Kremlin consider petro-sovereignty an existential matter.
Saudi Arabia, too, is doubling down. Despite talk of post-carbon "Vision 2030," the kingdom is continuing to invest in oil capacity, hoping to be the last producer standing as others phase out. Cheap extraction costs make it the swing supplier in perpetuity. Oil rents sustain its domestic order and foreign clout. Green transition, in this view, is a direct challenge to dynastic survival.
Together, these regimes are building not only an economic coalition but an ideological one: a petro-populism that treats hydrocarbons as both material base and cultural bulwark. Fossil fuels become emblems of sovereignty and resistance to cosmopolitan elites. The green transition is denounced as neocolonialism—an attempt by China or Europe to dictate energy futures and entrench hierarchies.
...Thus the stage is set for a new sort of global contest. On one side stands a Sino-European entente, built less on shared values than on metabolic interests. Europe, scarred by dependence on Russian gas and wary of American unreliability, sees in China's industrial muscle a partner for energy autonomy. China, for its part, will welcome an affluent market with a stable political commitment to greenery.
On the other side stands a petro-axis determined to defend carbon-based industrialism. America supplies political cover, Russia strategic mischief, and Saudi Arabia financial clout. All three have an interest in obstructing climate agreements, destabilizing green supply chains, and spreading disinformation. Expect cyber-attacks on renewable infrastructure, resource-wars in mineral-rich regions, and relentless culture-war framing of decarbonization as tyranny.
This is not a replay of the 20th-century Cold War. Then, the divide was between liberalism and communism, democracy and autocracy. Now, both camps include authoritarians. The true cleavage is between those who see ecological modernization as a planetary imperative, and those who view it as an existential threat to sovereignty and identity.
As in the first Cold War, the non-aligned world will be pivotal — with India and Brazil as particular bellwethers. Countries in the global South will weigh offers not just of ideology but of infrastructure: solar farms versus oil rigs, AI data centers built on Chinese tech stacks versus American LNG terminals. Their choices will tilt the balance of the emerging eco-order.
...At heart, this ecological Cold War is not about emissions alone. It is about competing visions of modernity. For one side, modernization means aligning with planetary boundaries, harnessing technology to live within ecological limits, and embracing prevention over remediation. For the other, modernization spells boundless energy, fossil sovereignty, and defiance of planetary constraints.
Is Venezuela the New Iraq?Informed Comment
...As Nils Gilman and others argue, geopolitical alignments are increasingly structured by underlying energy systems. Trump's wager on a hydrocarbon future reflects not inevitability but willful materialism—a political alignment between fossil fuel corporations and the backlash politics of the West.Within both Iraq and Venezuela, oil also shaped internal political orders. Venezuela nationalized PDVSA in 1976. Under Hugo Chávez, oil became the backbone of a redistributive, politicized development model. In Iraq, the Baathist regime likewise used state oil revenues to consolidate power. In each case, resource nationalism obstructed U.S. and multinational corporate access, generating recurring calls for "regime change."
The Hot Tub of Death? Bill Gates, Hurricane Melissa, and a Civilization Under Threat Juan Cole
...A decade ago, many of the companies in Silicon Valley seemed willing to take on the role of climate champions. Microsoft, where Gates made his career, pledged to be carbon negative by 2030. Jeff Bezos's Amazon has already put more than 30,000 electric vehicles on the road and has pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. In general, you would think that Silicon Valley would be pro-science and hence willing to combat the use of fossil fuels and so the worsening of climate change. After all, the industry depends on basic scientific research, much of it produced by government-funded scientists.As it turns out, though, the high-tech sector that has produced so many billionaires is instead simply pro-billionaire. This year, we were treated to the spectacle of future trillionaire Elon Musk, while still working with Donald Trump, firing 10% to 15% of all government scientists under the rubric of "the Department of Government Efficiency," an act that, in the long run, could also help destroy American scientific and technological superiority. Climate scientists were especially targeted. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency is now so understaffed that the carnage of Hurricane Melissa had to be monitored by volunteers.
The high-tech world's abrupt turn to a rabid anti-science stance is likely the result of the emergence of large language models (also known as "artificial intelligence" or AI) and a consequent new romance with the burning of fossil fuels.
...The AI phenomenon may functionally print money for tech billionaires, at least for the time being, but it comes with a gargantuan environmental cost. Its data centers are water and energy hogs and are poised to use ever more fossil fuels and so increase global carbon emissions significantly. MIT researchers estimate that "by 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers is expected to approach 1,050 terawatt-hours," rivaling that of the energy consumption of whole countries like Japan or Russia. By 2030, it's estimated that at least a tenth of electricity demand is likely to be driven by new data centers. MIT's Noman Bashir concludes ominously, "The demand for new data centers cannot be met in a sustainable way. The pace at which companies are building new data centers means the bulk of the electricity to power them must come from fossil fuel-based power plants."
COP30: 5 Reasons the UN Climate Conference wasn't the Promised "People's Summit" Simon Chin-Yee at Informed Comment
...1. Indigenous groups were present — but not involvedLocated in Amazonia, this was branded the summit for those on the frontlines of climate change. Over 5,000 Indigenous people were there, and they certainly made their voices heard.
However, only 360 secured passes to the main negotiating "blue zone", compared to 1,600 delegates linked to the fossil fuel industry. Inside the negotiating rooms it was business as usual, with Indigenous groups remaining as observers, unable to vote or attend closed-door meetings.
The choice of location was nicely symbolic but logistically tough. Hosting the conference in the Amazon cost hundreds of millions of dollars in a region where many still lack basic amenities.
A stark image of this inequality: with hotel rooms full, the Brazilian government even docked two cruise ships for delegates, which per head can have eight times the emissions of a five star hotel.
The Ultimate Gaslighting Continues Ignacio de Gregorio at Medium...Quite Possibly a New Frontier
Yesterday, Google launched what is unequivocally the best model on the planet, at least in terms of benchmarks...most models are mostly identical and only differ in data, so whether a model is better or worse for you heavily depends on the tasks you use it for (i.e., the data it was trained on).
...Definitions of intelligence are like opinions; everybody has their own. Personally, I always gravitate toward Jean Piaget's definition:
"Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."This definition resonates with me for an obvious reason: it clearly separates the outcome from the source. Which is to say, intelligence is the act of solving problems when experience or memory isn't of any help.
What is the haiku-photography connection? M. H. Rubin at Medium
...5-7-5 is almost all people know about haiku. Oddly, it's one of the least important attributes....Haiku comes from old Japanese word games, centuries before a shorter modern form was shaped in the 1700s. Trying to write haiku in English is awkward because the parts that matter don't translate cleanly. Still, people try. And it's fun.
Haiku have 3 lines. They also have two elements that are important: kireji and kigo. Technically, the kireji is a “cutting word” — and in English it's usually a punctuation mark, like a hyphen or exclamation point. What I originally missed was that it's not about the inclusion of a kireji, but that the kireji's purpose is to break the 3 lines of the haiku into two parts, the 2 lines and the 1 line. A big part and a little part. That's the role of the kireji. Creating two uneven elements.
...Moreover, it's not enough that there are these two parts, but the parts have an unusual relationship to each other. The big part is what you THINK the haiku is about; it seems to be moving in one direction, then the small part is a sort of twist, which introduces a non-obvious shift. The nature of this shift is widely discussed, but many call it "a leap." It changes the poem in important ways, from what you think the poem is about, and then what it is really about. (And the quality of the haiku is often about the cleverness or nuance in the leap.)
...The other element was the kigo—a "seasonal word," and I was told all haiku had to include one. Kigo don't just say "autumn" — haiku avoid saying things directly or obviously, and the kigo allow them to say "it was autumn" without using such obvious language. So "moon" is a kigo for autumn.
...There are historic kigo — a list of terms used by the masters from which you need to select. Then there are new kigo that more modern poets use, that do the same thing, but aren't classic. Poets can decide if they are traditionalists or modern. But there's always a kigo.
And a more nuanced understanding of kigo is that it's not just about the season, but it is designed to allude to the passing of time, the cycles of life, and the almost comical way we're only in this world for a brief, transient period of time. It's about time and us in time.
...as I read more and more about haiku, digging in and curious about the poetic form, I found that if I took the word "haiku" out of the discussions, and replaced it with "photograph," that oddly, all these lessons about haiku described very neatly what I felt about my photos, and the photos I had grown up learning from; things I didn't think could be articulated. Of course, none of those classic photographers did this on purpose; no one was "making haiku," but inexplicably, the things that describe haiku, and make for good haiku, also described photographs I liked.
...So here is a brief review of the key attributes of haiku, and how I see them reflected in photographs.
- Two uneven beats — usually executed as a big part (the first thing you see) and a smaller part (the aspect you notice a moment later) — it's not always two things — it can also be created with a single thing that isn't immediately clear what it is, then a moment later you understand it ("huh? oh!")
- Kigo, usually experienced as a photo being more moment than object. It leans into the transience of things. I'd say the image could only have been taken by me, in this moment, noticing something fleeting.
- Structure. A haiku is rigorously defined as 5-7-5 sounds ("on") in Japanese. In English, this is usually translated into 5-7-5 syllables, although it's widely understood that a syllable is much larger than a sound, and English haiku are "bigger" than their Japanese counterparts. So some English poets don't follow this rule and just make their poems very, very short and simple. In a photo, this means two things to me: very simple (almost unnaturally simple, but not unnatural), and a formal structure, but not heavy-handed or stiff.
- Indirect. A haiku doesn't just say "it was raining." That would be considered poor form in haiku. They say things in more oblique ways, quieter. I find many photos, while beautiful, are too "on the nose" and just say what they want to say. A haiku photo would be more oblique and quiet about it.
- Authentic. Haiku are real moments from real life. They articulate their poetry without trickery or artifice. To me, while it's hard to precisely say what authenticity is in photography (see this essay), the haiku photo would certainly present authenticity.
- Wabi-Sabi. There are many ways wabi and sabi can be expressed in photography. But in the end, I'd say that they are perfectly imperfect. There's a penchant in photography for a sort of perfection, of sharpness and clarity, and none of these are essential in the haiku photo. I find that perfection is usually the opposite of authenticity.
- Everyday Life. Haiku are a single moment of real life. They aren't set in exotic locations with rarified topics. So when I see amazing photos from the top of Everest, or an insane explosion, I tend to think they aren't that haiku.
- A practice. Haiku stand alone. They aren't part of a "body of work" (except as a body of haiku). They are self-explanatory — and in fact, they demand to live without titles, without commentary, without anything other than the poem itself. (Haiga are haiku combined with photos, a very different art.) Haiku is the most democratic poetic form — playfully executed by emperors and peasants alike. They have to be understandable to the general public (although cleverness and wit are encouraged), so very cryptic photos that require study and time to understand are also not particularly haiku.
The End of Personal Websites Burk at Medium
...Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, a personal website was your identity....People stopped typing URLs. Entirely. No one goes to "juliawrites.com" anymore.
...Readers don't browse homepages
They search.
They click recommendations.
They follow email links.
They tap on socials.
The homepage became... obsolete.
...Your site is an island.
...Publishing on a personal site is a very long game.
In the grip of 'horror and anger,' Gawande grows more determined Harvard Gazette
A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life Quanta Magazine
10 ways to die from electricity other side of a nobody
Trouble Transitioning Adam Tooze at LRB (reviewing More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz)
...Coal, gas and oil will have to be replaced with clean energy sources. In the language of climate policy, this is known as the green energy transition and is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions that have shaped modern history. The first was from organic energy — muscle, wind and water power — to coal. The second was from coal to hydrocarbons (oil and gas). The third transition will be the replacement of fossil fuels by forms of renewable energy.The transition narrative is reassuring because it suggests that we have done something like this before. We owe our current affluence to a sequence of industrial revolutions — steam engines, electricity, Fordism, information technology — that go back to the 18th century. Our future affluence will depend on a green industrial revolution, and to judge by the encouraging headlines, it is already well underway. The standard estimate is that energy transitions take about half a century; if that were true of the green energy transition, it could still be on schedule for 2050.
This is the way that many governments and experts think about the future of energy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change takes advice from specialists in 'transition theory'. Analysts touting S-curves of technology adoption benchmark the take-up of electric vehicles against previous phases of technological change. Figures such as Elon Musk are cast as the Edisons of our day.
But history is a slippery thing. The 'three energy transitions' narrative isn't just a simplification of a complex reality. It's a story that progresses logically to a happy ending. And that raises a question. What if it isn't a realistic account of economic or technological history? What if it is a fairy tale dressed up in a business suit, a PR story or, worse, a mirage, an ideological snare, a dangerously seductive illusion? That wouldn't mean that the transition to green energy is impossible, just that it is unsupported by historical experience. Indeed, it runs counter to it. When we look more closely at the historical record, it shows not a neat sequence of energy transitions, but the accumulation of ever more and different types of energy. Economic growth has been based not on progressive shifts from one source of energy to the next, but on their interdependent agglomeration. Using more coal involved using more wood, using more oil consumed more coal, and so on.
Camera Work 1903-1917
25xi25
Poetic Imagination Andy Ilachinski
Central Asia
Escobar on China's Far west (2003)Demographics of Central Asia Wikipedia
Interethnic Tensions in Kyrgyzstan:A Political Geographic Perspective Andrew R. Bond and Natalie R. Koch Eurasian Geography and economics (2010) (pdf)
Genetic diversity and the emergence of ethnic groups in Central Asia Evelyne Heyer et al. BMC Genetics (2009) (pdf)
...Since the work of Frederik Barth in the 1970s [12] anthropologists have placed emphasis not only on presumed common ancestry and shared cultural traits, but also on the "boundaries" used by individuals in order to distinguish themselves from members of other ethnic groups. These boundaries can take different forms - racial, cultural, linguistic, economic, religious, and political - and may be more or less porous. The persistence of such boundaries implies rules. One of the most common rules around the world is an endogamous preference for mate choice. In conclusion, our analysis of uniparental markers lends support to Barth's hypothesis by indicating that ethnicity, at least for two (and marginally three) of the Turkic groups in Central Asia, should be seen as a constructed social system maintaining genetic boundaries with other ethnic groups rather than the outcome of common genetic ancestry. It further highlights the differences between Turkic and Indo-Iranian populations in their sex- specific differentiation and shows good congruence with anthropological data.Steppe peoples of Central Asia Patrick Patterson and Brian Parkinson
Ethnicity in Central Asia pkk (2008)
...the Soviet Union deliberately delineated the various Central Asian republics as to divide and keep subdued. The boundaries are not only peculiar and irregular but also at times seemingly illogical and nonsensical, with disregard for not only natural features but the ethnic makeup of various regions. At a purely geographical or cosmetic level, the epicenter of the odd boundaries is the largely Uzbek-ethnic Fergana Valley, which was carved up by the Russians among three countries, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrygzstan, in part due to the region’s reputation as a historical center of rebellion (apparently deserved—think 2005 Andijon massacre). Take a look at a map—the borders are comical. As if the general outlines were not strange enough, there are several enclaves/exclaves in the Fergana Valley resulting in little "islands" of Uzbekistan in Kyrgyzstan, and of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in Uzbekistan....In terms of history and present-day difficulties, I think that the Tajiks have the greatest complaint. Perhaps the two greatest cultural treasures of Central Asia and the Silk Road as a whole are the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, which have been important centers of Tajik/Iranian culture, from Sogdian and Achaemenid through Samanid times (see my posts of 6.12 and 6.19). Even though in later periods most of Central Asia was overwhelmed by Turkic peoples, and became part of Turkic states, the centers of Bukhara and Samarkand themselves remained culturally Tajik cities populated by Tajiks. Nevertheless, they are now squarely within Uzbekistan. Given that Samarkand and Bukhara are probably the second and third largest cities in Uzbekistan, this means that a substantial portion of Uzbekistan as a whole is Tajik—I have heard estimates of up to 50%.
...One of the most colorful pockets of Uzbek culture that we encountered was not in Uzbekistan but in the Uzbek village of Arslanbob in western Tajikistan and the best Uzbek market in Central Asia is in Osh in Kyrgyzstan. By far our most memorable and culturally dense Kyrgyz experience will have been in the eastern Pamirs in Tajikistan, and not in Kyrgyzstan. And, as I mention above, the great centers of ancient Tajik culture are located not in Tajikistan but in Uzbekistan. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it didn't matter so much that the boundaries were so odd—the republics were all part of the greater whole anyway.
...the large number of ethnic Koreans (around 500,000) living in Central Asia, primarily Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Koreans ended up in Central Asia by force, deported by Stalin from the Russian Far East (where they had been living not far from the Korean border) ...The Korean minority is quite visible in Uzbekistan. There are Korean restaurants in all the major cities and the Korean cold noodle dish naengmyeon is a common light meal in Tashkent, where it is called by the Russo-Korean name "kykcy," meaning noodles.
Kazakh in Uzbekstan Joshua Project and Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan
The Essence of Everything Andy Ilachinski quotes Hermann Hesse
The four dimensions of the photograph Steve Mansfield-Devine at Medium
...Aaron Siskind declared that as the language of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, "from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean". His work demonstrated that rocks could become sculptured forms, common ironwork could spring into rhythmic shapes, and fragments of paper sticking to a wall could become a conversation piece....Robert Frank observed that most of his photographs contained the "humanity of the moment", noting that while realism is essential, there also "has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph". His work deliberately rejected the notion that photography was a universal language easily understood by all; instead, he wanted a form that was open-ended and ambiguous — one that engaged viewers and perhaps left them with as many questions as answers.
… Robert Frank was explicit about this unpredictability: "My photographs are not planned or composed in advance and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind — something has been accomplished."
… Whatever framework we use to think about photographs, what remains clear is that they are far more than flat, rectangular objects. They are nodes in vast networks of meaning, shaped by technical choices, compositional decisions, contextual placement and viewer interpretation — all working together to create experiences that can inform, move, challenge and transform us.
Make Culture Weird Again W David Marx at The Atlantic
...Every enduring cultural movement—hip-hop, rock, punk, streetwear—began as an insular, tightly knit community of like-minded peers that formed out of a dissatisfaction with the conventional and a deep desire to create something new. Historically, these subcultures existed in real-world spaces—clubs, skate parks, dive bars, DIY venues—where ideas evolved organically.Today, such subcultures have largely migrated online. Although digital spaces allow people to find their niches more easily, the omnipresence of pop culture means that some of the most energetic subcultures are now fan communities devoted to existing mass-market entertainment—or nihilistic trolls whose innovations are unlikely to ever inspire worthwhile artists. Yet subcultures operating in the old model—such as drag queens, Chicago drill, and Atlanta trap—have profoundly reshaped culture at large. Mainstream consumers still crave the energy of subcultural innovation and enjoy seeing underground ideas fused with commercial styles. But the existing places to pull from are nearly exhausted, and reviving culture requires a new generation of outsiders willing to create their own movements from scratch.
At the Fishhouses Elizabeth Bishop at New Yorker (1947)
Cannabis-Induced 'Scromiting' Is on the Rise, Study Finds gizmodo
