links harvested during December 2024
some are paywalled
(stuff I might get back to someday, traces of encounters)
❧ ❧
Passage of Time Andy Ilachinski
Wabi is about finding beauty in simplicity, and a spiritual richness and serenity in detaching from the material world. Sabi is more concerned with the passage of time, with the way that all things grow and decay and how ageing alters the visual nature of those things. It’s less about what we see, and more about how we see....A wabi sabi inspired world view opens up a space for love. Just as we're not perfect, neither is anyone else. What difference would it make if you saw others with your heart instead of seeing and judging with your eyes and mind? If you let go of the judgement and frustration and accepted who they are, without trying to change them, if you don't like what you find, that's useful information and you can choose what to do next. But just maybe that acceptance will give you a perspective and remind you of what really matters.
...Put simply, wabi sabi gives you permission to be yourself. It encourages you to do your best but not make yourself ill in pursuit of an unattainable goal of perfection. It gently motions you to relax, slow down and enjoy your life. And it shows you that beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places, making every day a doorway to delight.
Beth Kempton (1977 - )
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation Missing Puzzle Piece Ricky Lanusse at Medium
Componential Analysis and Ethnoscience Wikipedia
Componential Analysis Encyclopedia.com
Swarms of cyborg cockroaches could be manufactured by robots New Scientist
and Cyborg Insect Factory at archiv.org
Tom Gauld on an unexpected new stand-up comedian New Scientist
From Keynote in Brisbane Australia to Rye, Arizona via a Wikipedia enabled rabbit hole cogdog
Creoles: The Languages of the Plantations in the Pacific Sara Relli at Medium
On Identity Ian Fritz at Medium
...as Flannery O'Connor said: "Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place."...In A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand's brilliant disquisition on the idea of 'being' in the black diaspora, she writes that "Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary. This is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are essentially coercive and indifferent." I don't know that they were nurturing, but certainly my origins were (are?) coercive and indifferent. Growing up poor and religious in the rural South of these our 'United' States has long been a coercive existence, one that confines you to a life of penury, racism, and mis — or even, these days, dyseducation. Certainly, I was defined by these things, and most certainly did I identify with them, consciously or not...
Gravitational Logic Andy Ilachinski
Prompt: "You are a photographer, physicist, and are well acquainted with the history of art, particularly abstract art in the style of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. You also have a penchant for metaphysical and philosophical musings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Consider this reverse-negative photograph of ceiling lights. Write a paragraph-length description of what this image looks like, not what it is.
The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined Laura Cannell at Bandcamp
...The 12 track album is performed on bass recorders, a 12 string knee harp, delay pedal and sparse layering, conjuring a bridge to connect the centuries. The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined was improvised and recorded in single takes.
Imaginary Conversations Kevin Coleman at Bandcamp
Give this one a spin if you need proof that American guitar music is still fertile ground. - Joseph Allred
Black Swan Rapper home page
Breath-Space and Seed-Time David Hinton at Emergence
Banchō Sarayashiki Wikipedia (kaidan: the death of Okiku)
Behind the Brain Rot The Atlantic
Brain rot is marked by a "supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging." It has a symbiotic relationship with internet garbage, or, as shoddily made AI-generated content has been deemed, slop, some of which is created by spammers who find financial incentive in flooding social platforms. Brain rot is the symptom, not the disease: It stems from this daily avalanche of meaningless images and videos, all those little tumbling content particles that do not stir the soul.And yet these ephemera nonetheless seep into our skulls. Slop has a way of taking up valuable space while simultaneously shortening our attention span, making it harder to do things like read books or other activities that might actually fulfill us. Brain rot doesn't hurt; it's dulling, numbing, something more like a steady drip. You know you have it when you have consumed but you are most certainly not filled up. And the deluge of disposable digital stuff often feels like a self-fulfilling, self-deadening prophecy: Rotting brains crave more slop.
New brain mapping technique reveals insights into the brain's higher functions ScienceDaily
David Abram
Wikipedia
Coming to Our Animal Senses: A Conversation with David Abram resilience
UnitedHealth and sequelae
When a Shooting Spurs a Social-Media Cycle A conversation with Charlie Warzel about the internet's frantic search for a narrative By Lora Kelley in The AtlanticNews of the Times * Manhunt for Killer CEO Underway Tom the Dancing Bug
A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You're Laughing? What the death of a health-insurance C.E.O. means to America. By Jia Tolentino in New Yorker
...To most Americans, a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it. UnitedHealthcare insures almost a third of the patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage, a government-funded program facilitated by private insurance companies, which receive a flat fee for each patient they cover and then produce their own profits by minimizing each patient’s care costs.Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero The New Yorker
Florida Woman Arrested for Allegedly Saying 'Delay, Deny, Depose' to Her Insurance Company
In the center of the city where the tallest buildings rise
A sharkskin suit was bloodied as the bullets flied
A man from Minnesota with a family and a name
A man who made his millions off the sick and the lameAn empty street at sunrise, a stranger raised his gun
In cold blood calculation there the deed was done
He didn't sound a warning, the bossman's back was turned
A crime premeditated, 3 bullets carved with wordsDeny, depose, defend
They'll profit from the sickness of the people til the people make it endYou may preach to congregations, you may play the steel guitar
You may toil in sandy furrows an an eastern farm
You may walk the streets of midtown in your custom tailored clothes
But your life is weighed in three words: deny, delay, deposeIn this world so full of fortune where the richest rule the day
Do you think that money falls from trees and they grab it where it lays?
When you look into your mirror, when you lay down in your bed
Do you ask yourself, who suffered as I made my daily bread?Deny, depose, defend
They'll profit from the sickness of the people til the people make it endMaybe parkinson's or cancer or a ladder where you fall
Maybe three swift golden bullets, something gets us all
To the widow and her children, Iam sorry for your pain
We appreciate your feedback, print this form to submit your claimWoman's "delay, deny, depose" threat lands her in jail, but MAGA nuts can threaten with guns Carla Sinclair 11:12 am Fri Dec 13, 2024 at Boing Boing
Blue Cross denies life-saving drug Ellsworth Toohey at BoingBoing
Conservationists are collecting semen from endangered wild sharks New Scientist
scelerocracy sesquiotic.com
Elvis and the Edge of Reality Hobbledehoy
The Appalachian Trail, the Hermit, and Burl Ives by Jeffrey Ryan at Medfium
She's obsessed with chicken! The tests revealing my dog's inner life New Scientist
Game-changing archaeology from the past 5 years — and what's to come New Scientist
Gloves On! Anne Carson at LRB
So, your life. There it is before you — possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map — let's say you're 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.
11 of the Best Music Documentaries Ever Made Jason Kell at Lifehacker
Full list of International Booker Prize winners, shortlisted authors, translators and books
What's Going On With Those Drones Over New Jersey? John Hendrickson at The Atlantic
Hire the wrong people, misfile important documents, remove batteries from remotes, and other suggestions for corporate sabotage Allen Rose Hill at BoingBoing
Bricolage Wikipedia
Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor. The word is derived from the French verb bricoler ("to tinker"), with the English term DIY ("Do-it-yourself") being the closest equivalent of the contemporary French usage. In both languages, bricolage also denotes any works or products of DIY endeavors......In art, bricolage is a technique or creative mode, where works are constructed from various materials available or on hand, and is often seen as a characteristic of postmodern art practice. It has been likened to the concept of curating and has also been described as the remixture, reconstruction, and reuse of separate materials or artifacts to produce new meanings and insights.
Homochirality Wikipedia
In biology, 19 of the 20 natural amino acids are homochiral, being L-chiral (left-handed), while sugars are D-chiral (right-handed)......This term was introduced by Kelvin in 1904, the year that he published his Baltimore Lecture of 1884. Kelvin used the term homochirality as a relationship between two molecules, i.e. two molecules are homochiral if they have the same chirality.
Here's a great new thing to worry about: "Mirror life" could destroy life on Earth Ruben Bolling at BoingBoing
Magical objects in Harry Potter Wikipedia
Everyone (Sort of) Loves a Disrupter: Time to Boycott the US? John Feffer at Informed Comment
Deplore violence. Then ask why it's happening Anand Giridharadas
Survival of the wittiest: Could wordplay have boosted human evolution? New Scientist
Interior Chinatown Is a Fun and Heartfelt Adaptation of Charles Yu's Amazing Novel Leah Schnelbach at Reactor
Enigmatic writing from the Republic of Georgia Victor Mair at LanguageLog
Apple Finally Got a Permanent Replacement for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator Jano le Roux at Medium
Seeing in black & white: the monochrome photographer Steve Mansfield-Devine at Medium
"AI Won't Take Your Job, a Person Using AI Will" — Yes, You Using AI Will Replace You Not Using It
Let's end this conversation once and for all. Alberto Romero at The Algorithmic Bridge
The Gist
- Neither AI nor other people will take your job: While fears have shifted from AI taking jobs to people using AI replacing others, the reality is that you will most likely replace your non-AI-using self by adopting AI tools.
- You don't have to like tech; it likes you: You'll inevitably use AI—often without realizing it—as it becomes integrated into everyday technologies, leading you to outperform your previous self who didn't use AI.
- "My life is fine, I don't need this": We often resist new technology with "My life is fine, I don't need this," but history shows we're "powerless children" who bow down to it, just as writers moved from quills to keyboards.
- Like the sun will rise again tomorrow: Resisting AI is futile—"If you don't go to AI, AI will come to you," but you should be optimistic because that's precisely what makes it unlikely that a random AI user will take your job.
The Albert-Kahn's collections on line Musée Albert Kahn
A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies Michael Moore
Here's a sad statistic for you: In the United States, we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country! That's all you need to know about America. We pay more people to deny care than to give it. 1 million doctors to give care, 1.4 million brutes in cubicles doing their best to stop doctors from giving that care. If the purpose of "health care" is to keep people alive, then what is the purpose of DENYING PEOPLE HEALTH CARE? Other than to kill them? I definitely condemn that kind of murder.
How did we Get Here? Excerpt from my new book "Gaza Yet Stands" Juan Cole
Im Not a Skin Doctor. I'm an Epidemiologist. Let Me Explain René F. Najera, MPH, DrPH at Medium
Why Books Are Still Powerful in the Digital Age Giles Crouch at Medfium
15 Observations on the New Phase in Cultural Conflict Ted Gioia
UnitedHealth Is Strategically Limiting Access to Critical Treatment for Kids With Autism Annie Waldman at Gizmodo
Waterway Map Maps Mania
The Year in Brain Rot Jessica Winter at New Yorker
High season for "skibidi" was the spring. It wafted up from Little League dugouts and from gaga pits; it drew chemtrails across trampoline parks. (At afternoon dismissal, one girl in our orbit would, if the spirit moved her, raise her face to the sky and keen, "Skibidi!") The word, as a floating signifier, stood apart from other omnipresent specimens of Gen Alpha lingo: "aura," which quantifies a person’s cool factor and may or may not correlate with their rizz; "Ohio," which means weird in a bad way; "sigma," which bubbled up from incel culture, and which denotes either a cool loner or a unit of surprise, as in, "What the sigma?" ("It's a Greek saying," my son clarified.)But "skibidi" has no fixed meaning or syntactic function—or, at least, none that a person born in the twentieth century could readily pinpoint. "Skibidi" could be an adjective, an interjection, an exclamation, a perseveration. If you know, you know. What is skibidi? I asked a third grader recently. "It’s a meme," he replied. And what is a meme? "It's something cool you find online."
...Oxford University Press, which named "brain rot" its Word of the Year, described it as "referring to low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet, as well as the subsequent negative impact that consuming this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society." Brain rot is thus a strikingly capacious term, enfolding the psychological and cognitive decay wrought by screen addiction, the bacteria-like content that feeds the addiction, and the argot of a generation for whom much of this content is made. When I asked my son, who is seven, to define "brain rot," he replied, "Skibidi Ohio rizzler."
Genocide
Genocide prevention Genocide watch
Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction 4th Edition Adam Jones
The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses
The Genuine Works of William Hogarth John Nichols, 1806 at Hathi Trust
Local Hero: Why the iconic Scottish environmental film was decades ahead of its time Hobbledehoy
You Might Be Worried About the Wrong Algorithms TM Brown at The Atlantic
You might have heard that algorithms are in control of everything you hear, read, and see. They control the next song on your Spotify playlist, or what YouTube suggests you watch after you finish a video... They dictate how TV shows are made and which books get published—a revolutionary paradigm shift that's become fully entrenched in the arts and media, and isn't going away anytime soon... cultural algorithms are only downstream of the larger, intractable forces that shape how art is made and supported. It's not that Spotify has made music more boring or that Instagram has made art more stale, but rather that skyrocketing rents and yawning inequality have destroyed many of the necessary components for culture to spawn and mature....People know that algorithms exist and often dictate how culture is disseminated to them—and that there's not much they can do about it, save for abandoning the platforms altogether and embracing a retro-Luddism about their consumption choices. (Not a bad outcome, actually.) But algorithms aren't just being used to feed you content. They're also employed to fix real-estate prices, make probation and asylum decisions, determine Uber prices during a hurricane, dictate whether elderly people receive potentially lifesaving medical care, assess the risk posed by an abusive partner, and decide who gets targeted in a war zone.
In the United States, algorithms are now embedded in companies and various levels of government, speeding along processes that used to be handled by humans. In the private sector, algorithms are attractive because they can automate such tasks as price adjustment in real time. Consider Walmart, which is replacing its price tags with electronic ones that can be changed remotely, ostensibly to save on labor costs...
Maybe the most worrying thing about algorithms is that they give institutional actors a degree of plausible deniability. If the decisions dictating our lives are being made by equations rather than people, then the blame for those decisions shifts from something concrete to something abstract. As consumers, we are inured to thinking of technology as the product of companies rather than a collection of individuals making decisions about what those companies do—and because these equations tend to be cloaked in logos and branding, we can lose sight of the fact that algorithms are susceptible to the biases of the people who create them.
Butchered bones tell of shocking massacre in prehistoric Britain James Urquhart at New Scientist
...It is the largest and most extreme episode of mass violence known from prehistoric Britain. The archaeologists behind the discovery think the perpetrators did it to dehumanise, or "other", the victims, possibly as revenge to send a political message.
From Tesla to Trump, Elon Musk had a very busy 2024 New Scientist
Are place-based policies targeting the wrong distressed areas? Geographic inequality hit a new high in 2023 Jed Kolko at SlowBoring
Arcimboldo
Giuseppi Arcimboldo Wikipedia
Seeing Double Patrick Hughes at LRB 1987 (review of Pontus Hulten The Arcimboldo Effect
The Artistically Grotesque Paintings of 16th-Century Italian Painter Geeks
Arcimboldo's Vertumnus: A Portrait of Rudolf II JAMA Psychiatry
The Lawyer, possibly Ulrich Zasius, 1461-1536
Musical Imagination Andy Ilachinski
Perception is never purely in the present,
it has to draw on experience of the past;
We all have detailed memories of how
things have previously looked and sounded,
and these memories are recalled are
admixed with every new perception....
Music can also evoke worlds
very different from the personal,
remembered worlds of events,
people, places we have known....
Every act of perception, is
to some degree an act of creation, and
every act of memory is to some
degree an act of imagination.Oliver Sacks (1933 - 2015)
Musicophilia
We Are Not a "School"—We Are a Hospital System with a Football Team McSweeney's Internet Tendency
Network of Supermarket Chains Flowing Data
The Artist Exposing the Data We Leave Online
Never Forgive Them Ed Zitron
The Coldest Day of the Year Maps Mania
Making Visible the Invisible Andy Ilachinski
- Fay Godwin (1931 - 2005)
Phytochromes: The 'eyes' that enable microalgae to find their way in the depths ScienceDaily
The genomics of ancient East Asia Victor Mair at Language Log
The Rot Economy Ed Zitron
Trumpism's healthcare fracture-lines Cory Doctorow
The Strange Thing That Is Lutefisk
The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years
"First Catch Your Hare": A Brief Meditation on Written Recipes part 1, part 2, and part 3 Cynthia D Bertelsen at gherkinstomatoes.com
Interdisciplinary insights into the cultural and chronological context of chili pepper (Capsicum annuum var. annuum L.) domestication in Mexico Katherine L Chiou et al. PNAS
Practical Thoughts upon the Revival of Landrace Grains and Heirloom Vegetables David S Shields at substack
Roaming rocks Marcia Bjornerud at Aeon
A rising danger in the Arctic: Microbes unleashed by climate change Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Flat Foot Floogie with a Floy, Floy
And "floy, floy" was slang for a sexually transmitted disease, probably syphilis. One effect of end-stage syphilis, which may not show up for many years after the infection, is called proprioception. It causes the sufferer to walk with a high-stepping gait, sort of slapping their feet flat on the floor.
Chart of life extended by nearly 1.5 billion years ScienceDaily
Imperefect Concepts Andy Ilachinski
Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)
Class Cleavages
Alex Browne
...Absent from Harris's donor base were the oil and gas industry, which gave $20.4 million to Trump, tobacco, which gave $8.6 million to Trump, and waste management, which gave $8.2 million to Trump. Absent from Trump's donor base were education and media. Strikingly, Harris received over twice as many contributions from the defense industry as Trump. The financial elite were divided but leaned red: Trump raised $234.9 million from the sector to Harris's $117 million. Finance nonetheless constituted Harris's main base of business support, giving more to the Harris campaign than any other sector.
...In the 2024 American election, of particular note was the vocal support of hedge fund, venture capital, and private equity executives for Trump. Unlike their counterparts in traditional sectors, hedge funds are not employers in any serious sense of the word: Ackman, whose net worth is over three times greater than that of Jamie Dimon, employs fewer than 100 people. As such, their executives—themselves significantly wealthier than their counterparts in traditional industries—have tremendous liberty to make political interventions.
Maurice Sendak's Rarest Art: His Vintage Illustrations for William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" The Marginalian
A Whole of Parts: Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox of Personality The Marginalian
The 10 Best Literary Adaptations of 2024 Literary Hub
Mapping Marine Traffic Maps Mania
These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words Other Sides of a Nobody
Is AI a Steam Engine or a Calculator? George Dillard at Medium
Lok Virsa Heritage Museum Tahastories at Medium
The Murmur of Engines: A Historian's Historians Christopher Clark · LRB
Principles of Human Geography (Vidal de La Blache) Hathi Trust
The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women Edward Carpenter 1908 UPenn
Encyclopedia Britannica Is Now an AI Company Gizmodo
Bali: Rangda and Barong Jane Belo via Hathi Trust
Synthography Mike Johnston
Ann Berthoff
What Works? How Do We Know? pdf
Ann Berthoff from the Margins: An Infusion of All-at-once-ness for Contemporary Writing Pedagogy
Paige Davis Arrington
Audit of a Profession: The Virtues of (Very Belatedly) Meeting Ann E. Berthoff's Challenge to Composition Paige Davis Arrington and Keith Rhodes
Bridging Composition and Women's Studies: The Work of Ann E Berthoff and Susanne K Langer Phyllis Lassner
OpenAI Announces 'o3' Reasoning Model Andrew Hoblitzell at InfoQ
Velveteen Rabbit Wikipedia
"Current difficulties in achieving intersubjective agreement" Mark Liberman at Langiage Log
Montaigne at HyperEssays: The Essays translated
NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st c.
libricide at Sesquiotica
Entanglement Andy Ilachinski
2024 Word of the Year: Genocide Juan Cole
The War on Gaza Crystalizes Israel's Image Yakov M. Rabkin at Informed Comment
OpenAI Claims Its New Model Reached Human Level on a Test for 'General Intelligence. What Does That Mean? Michael Timothy Bennett and Elija Perrier at Gizmodo
Scientists Built Tiny VR Goggles for Mice at Gizmodo
The Year ahead in the Middle East: A weakened Iran has big Implications for China at Informed Comment
A Geopolitical Checkup Chas Freeman at Radio Open Source
A Complete Unknown: A Listening Companion from Smithsonian Folkways at The Hobbledehoy (Elijah Wald's Dylan influence Playlist at Spotify)
Birds, Loves, and Obscure Sorrows: The Best of The Marginalian 2024
The Kraken Won Doc Searls
The Legacy of Narnia Matthew at Medium
...And just like The Hobbit, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe also introduces the themes that would become integral to the development of the mythology or the whole series, and the features that would make it enduring. Narnia is not just a storybook medieval England, besides the iconic portal theme and the memorable characters — it is a land of Naiads, Fauns, Satyrs, talking animals, and deep magic. Out from between the cracks in the allegory comes a greater work of symbolism and metaphor, something that reflects the obsession of C.S Lewis' life: longing.
Some Winter Festivals Codex Inversus at Medium
In a rural setting with a big extended family the"hearth of the house" could be just the oldest couple, even if they are not really the ones in charge, while the ones actually holding the reins of the house are probably too busy running the farm. In very big farms it also becomes a way for the hired workers to show gratitude to their employers and receive a tip.
This is also the occasion to "break in " potential new family members: it could be the occasion for someone to present their boyfriend/girlfriend to get the family's approval. Or it may be a way for parents to push a good "candidate" to their son/daughter, a matchmaking exercise that can be binding as an "arranged engagement" (the boy and girl involved will have the last word, but if your mother invites the neighbor son at the winter celebration you kind of have to go out with him for some time before declaring he’s not the right one for you).
...A noble house that is high status enough can enter this arena of social warfare to meddle in other houses' marriage alliances, even if they don’t have any heir in the fight. The Winter Balls of the Prince-electors are highly political matters where commercial treaties, land disputes, debt forgiving, and infrastructure projects are decided by a meaningful brooch, a foot stomped during a sarabande, or a coquettish laugh to a bad joke.
The Social Dynamics of Online Communities Giles Crouch at Medium
...When online communities miss or fail to see their community is shifting from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity, is when communities tend to fracture. Some in that community may evolve a different vision and thus split and form a new community. This happens quite a lot.
...Online communities are now part of the sociocultural fabric of our global societies. They are active participants in our world. The way they work changes by culture, but common values can be found similar to the real-world. The importance of online communities in the future of our physical and digital societies cannot be understated.
A Manifesto: Saving Philosophy of Mind from Conceptual Chaos Wolfgang Stegemann at Medium
Emily Wilson's Odyssey Victor Mair at Language Log
Predictions 2025: Tech Takes the Power Position John Battelle
...Tied to identity, prompt data provides one of the richest signals of what people want, need, and plan to purchase, and that is simply too valuable to not be leveraged by marketers (and Big Tech).
...I alluded to this in the introduction, but let's formalize it here as a prediction: By year's end, Musk and Trump will have tired of each other, preferring to do business with each other through proxies. Sure, at least one of the DOGE boys will have his head on a spike, courtesy an unfettered Donald Trump. It takes a certain kind of quisling energy to stay in Trump's good graces for more than one year. I don't think any of the All-In crowd have it in them. However, both Musk and Trump are smart enough to realize they need each other — so they'll avoid an all out press battle.
Benedict Cumberbatch reads Kurt Vonnegut's ultra-timely letter to people living in 2088 Heather Wake at upworthy.com
=====
The transcendent, cosmic language of the Book of Changes Victor Mair at Language Log
Etymology of ramen and katsu Mark Liberman at Language Log
The Best Albums of 2024 Amanda Petrusich at New Yorker...The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I'm stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they've gradually degraded their products.
"The world is filled with these
invisible islands of energy,
where certain things can happen
and certain emotions and
dreams can be transported.
And as a photographer,
my task is to find those places.
...
Photography for me is not looking,
it's feeling. If you can't feel what
you're looking at, then
you're never going to get
others to feel anything when
they look at your pictures.
...
The camera is a tool for
making visible the invisible.By geological classification, these rocks are 'metamorphic', meaning that they have been transformed under punishing heat and pressure beneath the surface — and then, astonishingly, come back up. Unlike an igneous basalt crystallised from lava, or a sedimentary sandstone laid down by water, metamorphic rocks form in one environment, then go on journeys deep in the crust. This makes them the itinerant 'travel writers' of the rock world, returning to tell us about the restless, animate, hidden nature of the solid Earth. At each stage of their pilgrimages, they preserve a record of their experiences, and through them we can gain a glimpse of inaccessible subsurface worlds...
The floogie part originally was "floozie" or maybe "floosie," American slang for a prostitute. It was changed to floogie to make it fit for the delicate sensibilities of radio audiences.
To Taoism that which is absolutely still
or absolutely perfect is absolutely dead,
for without the possibility of growth
and change there can be no Tao.
In reality there is nothing in the universe which
is completely perfect or completely still;
it is only in the minds of men
that such concepts exist.Within the American business lobby, it seems there is no consensus about the direction of the country’s future. The large blocs of organized money that found Trump a threat to democratic institutions in 2021 evidently no longer do—similarly, proposals once thought bad for American capitalism, such as a twenty-percent universal tariff and mass deportations, are no longer outside the realm of possibility. As a result, today, the American business class’s record of partisanship could best be described as incoherent. What accounts for business's inability to challenge the Republican Party? And are there any patterns in the chaos?
all at once we are
ephemeral and eternal
new and yet ancient
both everything and nothing
center and periphery
Wikipedia
...The flywheels of surveillance capitalism were already too big. Apple and Google were about to turn the dashboard into a phone display with CarPlay and Android Auto. Broadcast radio is now a distressed asset, a walking anachronism. It is being eaten alive on the music side by streaming and on the talk side by podcasting.
... I was reminded that some of these themes in books I read many times as a child have come to shape me as an adult.
...the "fire that keeps the family warm".
In a nuclear family, this would be the father and the mother, and the idea is that the children (and the eventual single relative hanging around, like the bachelor brother, the old granny, etc. ) pay homage to their parents, and the parents in return award their children for their good behavior during the year. Something like "this candy is for who helped the most, and this is for the sweetest and most kind, and this is for the most diligent…".
...The challenge for purely online communities is the limits of artificial solidarity. Trying to build an online community and just expecting a genuine community to emerge without social bonds and shared cultural practices is pretty much impossible.
...our careless, even negligent use of language. With the insouciance of children playing with building blocks, we throw around terms as if their meaning were written in the letters themselves. A particularly frightening example is the concept of "information".
2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises, particularly for those of us who watch tech closely. We're not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure. For decades, we watched leaders from Goldman rotate through every administration's cabinet and economic team, and we got used to it. But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence. And while the finance bros have a reliable and predictable ideology — capital is king — the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as "techno optimism." The sophomoric claptrap underpinning Andreessen and Musk's approach to politics may not be representative of the tech industry overall, but for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.
...Compiling a year-end list is still the only activity that makes me truly feel like a Professional Critic, rising from my gilded chamber to drop some sort of objective and imperious decree. It's always hard for me to present a list without caveats—pop music, after all, is a vast and varied landscape, and art works on each of us in such different ways—but this year I felt more inclined than ever to simply embrace the silly grandiosity of the job.
