Kyle Chayka:
For journalists and commentators now, especially those of any public notoriety, there’s an identikit new career package. It goes something like this. Loudly quit or get pushed out of your job in traditional media institutions, whether newspapers, television, or even a website. Argue that your voice has been ignored, neglected, silenced, and held back from its true potential of reaching audiences who hunger for truth and connection — it may be true or it may be an exaggeration. Start a series of direct-broadcast channels for yourself — newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel — and then use your preexisting social-media accounts to promote them. Then, broadcast yourself incessantly, your face, your voice, your thoughts, as if you are a 24/7 cable news channel of one. Go on television, if you can, with your Substack publication in your chyron, otherwise, livestream on YouTube or Instagram or Substack. Importantly, collab with anyone who has more followers than you. Cross-post on their newsletter, appear on their video podcast, or get into a public fight that benefits both parties. Finally, you will have developed your digital clique, the bellicose band of paying subs who sustain your livelihood and pay attention to your sponsorships.
Stomach churning; empahsis mine. But! The upside: a very good use of the word “identikit.”
identikit, adjective
very similar in appearance, in a way that is boring and has no character
Jeff leads Wilco (duh, you probably already knew that), Spencer is Jeff’s son and Waxahatchee’s drummer.
Dara Weyna: Question for Spencer: Is it a full circle kind of moment to be drumming in a band that’s on tour with your Wilco family? It’s always so fun to see you and Sammy on stage with your Dad, but this must feel different somehow, I’d imagine. It’s a beautiful thing to witness the many collaborations, connections and relationships that Wilco makes and fosters and something’s tells me you’re a big part of that.
ST:It does feel great, and I feel like the luckiest human being in the world that we’re doing this.
JT: Awwww.
ST: And that I get to see Wilco every night, and …
JT: Oh, brother.
ST: Honestly, it’s true! The weirdest part about it is being in a group that’s even compatible with a Wilco support slot. That’s really exciting to me. I love playing with Katie, it’s such a great group of people that we’re getting to do this with. Anything more well-spoken that I have to say about it is leaving my mind because a Mountain Dew ad is on the TV. But it feels really great. The coolest part is that I feel proud. Sometimes friends from a different part of your life get to see your other friends or your family, or visit you at work or something. You see it through their eyes, and sometimes that doesn’t feel good. But I feel really relieved, though not surprised, that the whole Waxahatchee band seems to sincerely love Wilco as a band, and love them as a touring group.
JT: As an operation.
ST:As an operation that does this thing that we do. And that makes me feel really good. And even if they weren’t expressing any of their admiration, or anything like that, I know just from that feeling of seeing yourself through your friends’ eyes, or seeing your family through their eyes, I’d already be feeling proud and not embarrassed. And I’m very glad that that’s the case. And I know it sounds like I’m saying it because I’m sitting across from my dad, but I’m not.
Emphasis mine.
Great combination of New Consumer’s research (“Almost one in five US consumers — 17% — say they’ve used an Apple Watch in the past week,” and “Men and women report using an Apple Watch in nearly identical proportions. Trump and Harris voters, too”), Frommer’s personal observations of wearing ᴡᴀᴛᴄʜ for the last 10 years, and some analysis:
In its first decade, I’d say the Apple Watch has proven both that there is a mass market for these things and that they, so far, aren’t revolutionary devices. The Watch makes the iPhone better, and therefore strengthens Apple’s ecosystem (and platform lock-in). But its magic feels limited. … There are no Watch-native messaging platforms, network effects, nor unicorns. The iPhone (and cloud) is still where innovation is most potent. Most of the best Watch tools are built into the operating system (notifications, Apple Pay, “Live Activity” trackers, watch face widgets) or are simple extensions of iPhone apps (buttons, remote controls).
I recently took mine off, powered it down and put it away in a drawer. I had just one screen too many in my life, and the one that tapped my wrist had to go.
“The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it’s embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.”
Props to the (well-named) band Surprise Privilege:
A rally Tuesday at San Francisco State University drew hundreds of supporters and protesters of [Turning Point Director] Charlie Kirk, who was speaking on campus. But across the street, a punk show in a grassy roundabout drew a similar-size crowd, including many who came over after heckling the right-wing personality.
“This song goes out to them,” singer Joey S. said, pointing to the Kirk supporters. “It’s called ‘Fuck You.’”
Especially Isamu Noguchi‘s magestic frieze “News” at the entrance to the Associated Prests building.
A telephone, a typewriter, a camera. But the subject of the sculpture isn’t any of these individual products or technologies. It’s the employment of these technologies by humans to create new things, to report and distribute stories about the world. The story is a story about technology, but here, technology is fundamentally a human endeavor. It is humans who give technology meaning and direction, and humans’ directed use of technology which Radio City celebrates. This humanist perspective on technology is simultaneously irreverent, principled, and agency-asserting.
Emphasis mine.
Rosencrans Baldwin attends the US launch of World.
I do see one more famous person, and it’s the mystery guest: musician Anderson Paak, who is presumably being paid handsomely to perform at the event as his alter ego, DJ Pee Wee. Which means he’s wearing his alter ego’s costume of a black bob wig, sequined jacket and sunglasses, so I kind of see him and kind of don’t. The people dance. The people sing. I don’t see a single Covid mask. I am encouraged to get my iris scanned, but I do not get my iris scanned. I am offered and refuse a free Orb Mini, their new product, smartphone-shaped, which World hopes people will use to scan their friends and neighbors and welcome them, secure in their humanity, to this Brave New Reality. And on low couches, I notice a quartet of attractive men and women sitting with their legs and arms draped over one another, one of them a semi-famous start-up CEO (wearing stretchy pants with cargo pockets), and I’m left wondering if they’re maybe a polyamorous quartet, sequestered in this warehouse amid doomsday clocks, protected by their wealth, free to fuck away the final days before an autonomous car picks them up and drives them to some bunker while the rest of us are out here dating robots.
I hate this timeline.
Levine remains a national treasure:
One theory of crypto, popular among venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs, is something like “crypto will be the way that people verify identity online and distinguish themselves from AI.” Another theory of crypto is “you get some tokens and the number goes up.” Now the two theories can work together.
Robin Sloan has a new zine available for purchase.
This is a three-color Risograph print on 11″ × 17″ paper. The poster side bears a design & exhortation that are, as of this writing, indecipherable to the frontier AI models from Google, Anthropic, & OpenAI.
…
This zine is playful & also serious. Playful, because I had so much fun thinking through the cat & mouse of these strategies. Serious, because AI’s compounding capability really does pose a profound, unsettling new challenge to artists of every kind — commercial or academic, aspiring or professional, digital or analog.
This is epochally weird stuff, & anything could happen in the decade ahead. The value & values of art are never static; reconsideration sweeps in like rain. The Secret Playbook isn’t about defense (though there is some defense in here) but rather about where to go next. It’s a map towards higher ground.
Dave Itzkoff covers a different kind of Imperial ship, complete with gorgeous photos by Max Miechowski of Kyle Soller and Denise Gough.
But behind the scenes, Gough said, she was wary of any story line in which Karn’s rescue of Meero led them to a conventional romance, and she expressed this to Gilroy: “I was like: ‘So, what, she just gets saved by a bloke? Is that what we’re going to do?’” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Seriously, you think that’s the story I’m going to tell?’”
Evan Goldfine listened to all of Bach, and blogged the experience. “The more I listen and play, the deeper I feel, and my writing becomes stronger — a beautiful feedback loop. Music writing and art criticism should try to convey the depth and richness of what’s at hand, pointing to what can be uncovered by anyone who is open to exploring.” (Via The Browser.)
The art of the deal, indeed.
This U.S.-backed plan echoes almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort in exchange for helping Trump win the White House. Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight.
…
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country will not recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea. In this determination, he speaks for the global rules-based order the U.S. helped to create after World War II. Recognition of the right of a country to invade another and seize its territory undermines a key article of the United Nations, which says that members won’t threaten or attack any country’s “territorial integrity or political independence.” French president Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders are standing behind those principles, saying today in a statement from Macron’s office that they reject Russian territorial gains under the U.S. plan. “Ukraine’s territorial integrity and European aspirations are very strong requirements for Europeans,” the statement said.
But Trump himself seems eager to rewrite the world order. In addition to his own threats against Greenland, Canada, and Panama, in a post today on his social media site he echoed Putin’s 2024 statement blaming Ukraine for Russia’s bloody war because it would not agree to Putin’s terms. Today, Trump said Zelensky’s refusal to recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea was “inflammatory,” and he pressured Zelensky to accept the deal.
Curiously, he felt obliged to write that “I have nothing to do with Russia…”.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Joseph Goldstein over the past year or so; his Insight Hour podcast is an ongoing series of dharma talks. This discussion with Dan Harris and Sam Harris on the Eightfold Path is one of the better introductions to Buddhism I’ve listened to. Sam can grate on me (I churned from the Waking Up app), but Joseph is a treasure and this is a lovely, lovely conversation.
“I believe in academic freedom. I think it’s crucial for all of our institutions to handle our own business the way they want to and they should not be shaken down and told what to teach, what to say by our government. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But it’s kind of par for the course right now, so yes this is me supporting Harvard. Way to go, way to stand up to the bully.”
Harvard president Alan Garber’s letter is addressed to “Members of the Harvard Community,” and tonight it feels like that community is much bigger than the list of people who went to Harvard, teach at Harvard or work at Harvard.
Our motto—Veritas, or truth—guides us as we navigate the challenging path ahead. Seeking truth is a journey without end. It requires us to be open to new information and different perspectives, to subject our beliefs to ongoing scrutiny, and to be ready to change our minds. It compels us to take up the difficult work of acknowledging our flaws so that we might realize the full promise of the University, especially when that promise is threatened.
Love this. “I would venture to remind you that tomorrow’s schedule includes Sir’s dental appointment at Brightsmile Dental Clinic from 2:15 pm to 3:00 pm. Madam’s research presentation is scheduled for Thursday afternoon at the University Biology Department, and both young Master Lucas and Miss Emma will require packed luncheons for their school field trip on Friday.” (Via Simon Willison.)
Huzzah! And of course his post about it is brilliant. “What an experience to experience my body as pure system, this kind of metabolic system which is just astounding and fascinating, and has so many nuances and edges; I’m learning a new landscape, a geography, this surface of a metabolic manifold of surprisingly few parameters really.”
I don’t really care about this movie, but it’s wild to pair this oral history with the NYT’s Interview with Bill Murray.
Frank Oz, who directed What About Bob, on the challenges on set:
Look, every set has a culture and a dynamic of its own, and there I have had difficulties. Those bad situations are cracking me up because they show our frailty as human beings and our imperfections … the egos and the fears, the insecurities when you get in a crucible that’s so pressurized. Making a movie like this, we’re talking about millions and millions and millions of dollars. We’re talking about stars believing that it better work, because the next paycheck won’t be good if it doesn’t. Richard Dreyfuss was not trying to be bad. Everybody believes they’re doing the best thing for the movie and they’re trying their very best. That doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is the best for the movie, but they honestly believe it.
Murray, in the Times:
You describe wanting to bring lightness, but there are a handful of rough stories about you on set. Winging a glass ashtray at Richard Dreyfuss’s head — You can tell that story as much as you like, but it’s never going to be true. I did fire a glass, but I threw it at the ceiling. We were in a townhouse on the set of “What About Bob?” and I did not fire it at anyone. I threw it up in a far corner of the townhouse, assuming it might break upon contact with the ceiling and the walls, but I didn’t throw it at anyone. If I’d thrown it at Dreyfuss, I’d have hit him.
Emphasis mine.
“Sometimes it feels like the pandemic. But that was better, in a lot of ways. Because we were all together in it, at least at first. Singing for health staff and staying home and whispering sweet nothings to our collective sourdough starter. But then we stopped singing and we politicized staying safe and we stopped feeding our sourdough starters and now the ghosts of those sourdough starters are really fucking pissed at us.” (Via Kottke.)
“Right out of the gate, it’s been barrel, barrel, barrel, all day, every day. Some barrels even dip themselves in oil, combust, and then mosey around looking for trouble. Same with President Donkey Kong’s press conferences. Reporter asks a gotcha question? Barrel. Someone wants to know what he’s doing about the price of eggs? Barrel. Softball from a friendly reporter? Barrel, barrel, barrel.” (Yep, there’s a horse in the hospital.)
Just finished. A difficult read; highly recommended.
The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood – only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque – what we do to one another so grotesque – that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.
From Jillian Hess’s excellent Noted, a post on the path Picasso took to “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
One need only look at Picasso’s notebooks to recognize the staggering amount of work that went into “Les Demoiselles.” He carried out 809 preliminary studies and filled 16 different sketchbooks with his attempts to represent the women. It was with this painting that he introduced the world to what would become known as cubism.
“Because the $20 gap between my manufacturing cost and my sale price flows to Americans, American companies and other American entities: to the Amazon warehouse workers and delivery people I help fund through my Amazon seller fees; to Peter, my U.S. Postal Service parcel carrier; to software platforms, like Google, Intuit and ShipStation, which I use to run my business; to the freelance designer working with me on a new product; to the lawyers who protect my patents and trademarks; to my advertising and marketing partners; to the coffers of the U.S. Treasury, New York State and New York City; and, hopefully in the end, also to me and my family. It seems an awful waste to torch $20 of domestic economic activity to get at $5 more.”
“Kids books and cookbooks and other full-color titles will likely be rendered either unavailable (if they’re printed outside the US, say in China or Mexico) or unaffordable (if publishers decide to print them here instead). International mail order, even across the border to Canada, will be financially ruinous for sellers and buyers. Even domestically printed paperbacks will likely see a price hike as imported paper is slammed by import surcharges. Publishers will take fewer risks on new authors, and print fewer copies. The industry already operates on impossibly thin margins. What’s more impossible than impossible? And that’s assuming there’s anyone actually able to buy new releases. For many people, books are considered a luxury, which means they buy fewer of them in a recession.”
Vara wrote the wonderful novel The Immortal King Rao, and her new book of essays, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, comes out next week.
I love talking to people. I love knowing people’s stories. There’s so much richness in the way all of us tell stories, not just those of us who are employed as writers. In my work as a journalist, I’ve always found that compelling. I did this project several years ago where I collected oral histories from workers who have jobs that didn’t exist a generation ago. I felt like I was making an implicit argument. Anytime we publish oral histories, we’re making an implicit argument for the artistry of language, all our language. It’s not just those of us who are employed as writers who can tell stories, and I love that.
The way LLMs function is sort of the opposite. There’s this flattening effect of the technology. Because it’s built to try to sound like this idea of the average human it then doesn’t sound like any actual real human. The specificity of our experience is what makes it interesting to hear about one another’s experiences. People are nuts. I could not dream up, and an LLM could not dream up, all the interesting ways that people answered those questions.
“This was not an easy battle. It came at a price—a price you’ll all be paying, based on a random assortment of numbers we pulled from thin air. We accomplished this great feat the way we always have: by just making it all up.” (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.)
Paul Krugman: “When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this? Next thing you’ll be telling me that Trump’s people are planning military actions over insecure channels and accidentally sharing those plans with journalists. Oh, wait.”
Julian Lehr: “The inconvenience and inferior data transfer speeds of conversational interfaces make them an unlikely replacement for existing computing paradigms – but what if they complement them?”
Noah Smith: “Over the past two decades, Americans collectively convinced themselves that their economy — by many measures one of the top performers in the world, and indeed in all of human history — was fundamentally broken and needed major changes. This line of thinking, popular on both the right and the left, did succeed in identifying some problems with the existing American system. But it massively blew those problems out of proportion, and brought way too much ideology into the debate. Now we’re going to experience the consequences.”
Robin Sloan on Dean Ball’s essay, Where Are We Headed:
If Dean is a believer — one who will state plainly, “Most of the thinking and doing in America will soon be done by machines, not people”—then at least he is a very interesting believer, writing with a density and quality that’s provocative and truly useful.
For my part, (1) I’m not sure any of this is really going to function outside of the magic circle of SAAS companies building software for SAAS companies, and (2) the prospect of working in this kind of firm, one of the outnumbered humans toiling alongside the CEO’s servile AI swarm, sounds pretty awful.
Paul Krugman: “There can’t be any secret agenda behind the Trump tariffs, because there’s nobody around Trump with the knowledge or independence to devise such an agenda.”
Heather Cox Richardson on Cory Booker’s epic speech on the floor of the Senate:
Standing for the next 25 hours and 5 minutes, without a break to use the restroom and pausing only when colleagues asked questions to enable him to rest his voice, Booker called out the Trump administration’s violations of the Constitution and detailed the ways in which the administration is hurting Americans. Farmers have lost government contracts, putting them in a financial crisis. Cuts to environmental protections that protect clean air and water are affecting Americans’ health. Housing is unaffordable, and the administration is making things worse. Cuts to education and medical research and national security breaches have made Americans less safe. The regime accidentally deported a legal resident because of ‘administrative error’ and now says it cannot get him back.
The Times quotes Booker’s speech, where he calls out that motherfucker Strom Thurmond:
“To hate him is wrong, and maybe my ego got too caught up that if I stood here, maybe, maybe, just maybe, I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand,” Mr. Booker said. “I’m not here though because of his speech. I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”
Great post from Hillel Wayne, not only with a list of great gamer games for non-gamers, but also the rationale for each one on the list. Includes mini-explainers of good Sokoban-style games, cozy games, deduction games, and roguelike games.
The video game industry is the biggest entertainment industry in the world. In 2024, it produced almost half a trillion dollars in revenue, compared to the film industry’s “mere” 90 billion. For all the money in it, it feels like gaming is a very niche pastime. It would surprise me if a friend has never watched a movie or listened to music, but it’s pretty normal for a friend to have never played a video game. The problem is that games are highly inaccessible.
“The cruel irony is, the thing I perceived as the sellout move is in free-fall.”
I won’t save you the click to see who wins, but I’m with Nicholas Glastonbury on this one. “I had a feeling, when I first saw the shortlist, that these would be the Tournament’s finalists, and boy, they did not disappoint. What beauty and what terror. Two ambitious books, two protagonists writing themselves into life. Metatexts, double consciousness, oneiric encounters, the deceptions of names, the trouble of kin, the evil rot at the heart of the American enterprise. But if I must choose (and they tell me I must), then for its propulsive acerbity, its acrobatics of language, its sheer humanity, I choose Martyr! In this time of martyrs, I revere the grace and glory of this book.”
“To build this project, we used the dataset of hundreds of thousands of songs on Genius.com accessible through their API, over 200,000 of which were “connected” in some way by sample, interpolation, cover, or remix. We used this dataset to identify promising examples and then confirmed or revised the relationships in those examples based on cross-checking with other sources, including WhoSampled.com, Spotify, and news media and academic scholarship.” (Everything is a remix.)
Greg Allen on the Jenny Holzer show at Glenstone, a private contemporary art museum in Potomac, MD. “The terrible history and present that Holzer has aestheticized for urgent attention has been edited, collected, curated, realized, and exhibited in this singular context: a billionaire’s museum in an ongoing coup.”
“I’ve been asking people how they define love,” Dacus said. “Everybody’s answers are so interesting. My therapist had my favorite definition so far—that love is the connective tissue between all of us that’s easy to forget. I like that. Because it means it’s just there.” (Go listen to the new album. It’s fantastic.)
Tim O’Reilly brings the long view. “When there’s a breakthrough that puts advanced computing power into the hands of a far larger group of people, yes, ordinary people can do things that were once the domain of highly trained specialists. But that same breakthrough also enables new kinds of services and demand for those services. It creates new sources of deep magic that only a few understand.”
“Without expert intervention, the best these tools can do today is produce a somewhat functional mockup, where every future change beyond that risks destroying existing functionality.”
filtered for avoiding inauguration week
It’s been a hell of a week. I can’t stand looking at the news, and so I’m deliberately pointing my attention elsewhere. Here’s a Friday dump, a way to get things out of my head (and maybe into yours).
reading
Making my way through Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which I can’t believe I haven’t read before. // Also, Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch: “all the rhythms and repetitions and seashell whorls of meaning to be extracted from the dull casings of everyday life” (NYT). And because lately truth is more depressing than fiction, Rabbit Hutch is mirrored in the sex abuse scandal at Miss Hall’s. // Rosencrans Baldwin, Cinematic. “In the dark, for ninety minutes, we let go of our inhibitions, and that’s a powerful experience—though within that give and take, if someone cries, if people run from instinct, don’t they deserve respect?” // Alex Nevala-Lee, Chimes at Midnight, about visiting the Clock of the Long Now. “Arriving at the primary chamber, you see the brass and quartz enclosure that protects the calculation system, the escapement, and a pendulum that completes one swing every seven seconds. The clock face itself is eight feet across. At the center is the black globe of a star field, encircled by movable rings that indicate sunrise, sunset, and the phases of the moon.” Mindblowing. // Zach Vasquez on the Startling Empathy of David Lynch. “The films of David Lynch are strange creatures, not unlike the strange creatures that often appear within them, and to focus only on the most ungainly of their appendages is to willfully ignore their equally beautiful qualities. Even in the darkest and most terrifying of Lynch’s films, there are moments of profound beauty and warmth.” // Matt Webb dowsing the collective unconscious.
watching / seeing
Twin Peaks. Binged Season 1 last week, am now slowly making my way through Season 2. It’s as weird and awkward and shocking as you remember. Maybe more so, with time. Also, David Lynch: The Art Life, available for free right now on Criterion. Lynch’s tobacco-stained voice is soothing, and there should be volumes written about his hair. // Amy Sherald: American Sublime at SFMOMA. The “smaller” pieces are hung so their subjects are basically at eye level with you; the intimacy is entrancing. // Also spent a full hour watching Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-screen video installation The Visitors, which has been extended through September of this year. If you’re in the Bay Area, go. Even if you’ve seen it before. Even if you saw it last week. Go again. // Every bucket in Kobe Bryant’s 81 point performance from 2006. Literally a supercut. // Every Frame a Painting, Where Do You Put the Camera? Greta Gerwig on Little Women: “I almost wanted the camera to start young, and get older – like the girls did.” (Via Kottke) // Nobody does OK Go like OK Go does OK Go.
listening
New Lucy Dacus. // Old Sugar. // Anything from Claire Rousay, it seems. // Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes talking attention. // Four Tet: Three. // Sydney Ross Mitchell: Pure Bliss Forever, esp Fast Cars and Faster Horses. (“Heaven has cigarettes and Coca-Cola, hotel beds and love to borrow, mmm hallelujah.”) // Bill Ryder-Jones: lechyd Da. // Kendrick, Reincarnated, like everyone.
In Scope of Work, Spencer Wright rides along with New York Times photographer Christopher Payne, on his visits to the MTA’s repair shops.
The factories he visits are complicated, complex, kludgy. Factories take knowledge away from craftspeople and turn it into bureaucracy and institutional anxiety. Factories pollute our waterways. Factories take razor-sharp lathe swarf and try to convince us it’s jewelry; factories enlist workers to help someone else fulfill their dreams. But then Christopher Payne comes in, and he crawls around for a few months, and he finds parts of the factory that we can be purely and unabashedly proud of. I don’t think that Payne’s work is asking questions at all; he’s just taking something messy, and pointing a spotlight on the honorable parts.
Virginia Heffernan interviews congressman Hakeem Jeffries about January 6th, 2021.
Heffernan: So what moments stick out to you from that day?
Jeffries: The moment that probably crystallized that we were entering into a very different space was when a Nancy Pelosi, who was on the rostrum as the speaker, was suddenly and expeditiously removed and the sergeant at arms or someone from the sergeant at arms, the staff interrupted the debate and then says that the mob has breached the Capitol. They’re on the second floor. There are a few steps away from the House chamber. Be prepared to hit the ground and secure the gas masks that are underneath your seats. I’ll never forget those words because I never thought that I would hear them. And I didn’t even know that there were gas masks underneath each seat in the House of Representatives.
Emphasis mine.
Four years on, the framing of January 6th that resonates with me is from Jason Kottke: “this was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt.
Nick Cave, in today’s Red Hand Files, answers the question “Where is the hope? What is hope?”
So, what is hope, and what is hope for? Hope is an emotional temper that emboldens the heart to be active, it is a condition, a mood, an aura of being. It is a feat of the imagination, both courageous and ingenious, a vitality that inspires us to take innovative action to defend the world. Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperiled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be. We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope – the necessary driver of change – to inspire us to action.
Bartosz Ciechanowski’s latest epic Moon explainer / simulator / playground makes it abundantly clear to me that I never could have done physics.
Elizabeth Spiers on the rage at the U.S. healthcare system, and the understandable desire to hold someone – anyone – accountable.
When you’re stuck in the pediatric oncology ward watching your child die because insurance thinks the doctor’s recommended treatment plan is too experimental, or when you’re watching someone you love experience unremitting pain that no one will treat or pay for, or you simply find yourself buried in mountains of paperwork and bills when you’re too sick to navigate it, who do you blame? Who can be held accountable? Everyone intuitively understands that there are individual people responsible for this state of affairs and no real mechanisms to prevent them from causing harm.
Om Malik’s post on the passing of tabla master Zakir Hussain is some wonderful blogging.
No matter how much you know, you can never stop learning and evolving. What a great lesson for everyone, including those who deem themselves experts. You are almost always the student, always part of the process, and part of the collective that leads to a better place…
If you’re looking for a way in to Hussain’s work, start with this Tiny Desk performance with Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer from 2010. Mindblowing joy.
Ev Williams on the launch of Mozi:
A lot has changed for me in the last couple years. I made a lot of new friendships and rebuilt old ones. I did a lot of growth and healing work. I now have a robust network of friends from coast to coast. Not because of an app, but because I prioritized relationships and invested the time.
I don’t think technology is the answer to our most human needs. But it would be silly not to use the tools at our fingertips to serve those needs. I love seeing when I will be in the same place as people I care about via Mozi.
If we’re in each others’ address books, I’ll see you on Mozi. ;)
Ben Thompson’s long piece on Intel is a fantasic read, starting with the history of CISC v. RISC computing, moving on to the rise of mobile and why Intel lost that battle, through the company’s current management and board struggles and ends with a call for the US government to save Intel in a Manhattan project to develop AGI.
If the U.S. is serious about AGI, then the true Manhattan Project — doing something that will be very expensive and not necessarily economically rational — is filling in the middle of the sandwich. Saving Intel, in other words.
Start with the fact that we know that leading AI model companies are interested in dedicated chips; OpenAI is reportedly working on its own chip with Broadcom, after flirting with the idea of building its own fabs. The latter isn’t viable for a software company in a world where TSMC exists, but it is for the U.S. government if it’s serious about domestic capabilities continuing to exist. The same story applies to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
To that end, the U.S. government could fund an independent Intel foundry — spin out the product group along with the clueless board to Broadcom or Qualcomm or private equity — and provide price support for model builders to design and buy their chips there.
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This is all pretty fuzzy, to be clear. What does exist, however, is a need — domestically sourced and controlled AI, which must include chips — and a company, in Intel, that is best placed to meet that need, even as it needs a rescue. Intel lost its reason to exist, even as the U.S. needs it to exist more than ever; AI is the potential integration point to solve both problems at the same time.
Emphasis mine.