this is sippey.com

Scrolling through this story with all of its beautiful images made me tear up for what we had with 44, and what we’ve lost with 45/47.

“It’s a new approach and shows his sensitivity to how a presidency can be reflected in the culture,” said the presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “This is a president who, from the time he began running through the length of his presidency, loved contemporary culture, spoke about it, was conversant in it and talked in a serious way with people who created it.”

Anil Dash:

The traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration. Wide swaths of the government’s websites have been erased, taken offline, or had their content modified to either delete or adulterate the content. Leaders who regularly post AI slop on their social media accounts, and who have begun posting lies and distortions on major websites like the White House’s, will of course not hesitate to modify or remove photos from public archives as well. By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.

Thank you, Ben & Don MacAskill:

We’re doing this so that in 100 years, we aren’t just sharing millions of cultural heritage photographs. With the work of the Flickr Foundation, we’re creating a visual commons—a collective reference of our history and our humanity, accessible by anyone, anywhere.

M.G. Siegler on Mythos and Glasswing:

Given the issues Mythos has already found – across every operating system and seemingly every piece of software they’ve looked into – it’s hard to feel anything other than overwhelmed here. And again, that to me is sort of the story of AI right now. It’s less about “superintelligence”, and more about intelligence scaled in a way that humanity cannot.

….

Creative endeavors feel more protected. And that’s because while AI technically could write the works of Shakespeare – again, time is not an issue, endless possibilities are literal – the system wouldn’t necessarily know when it had. It would only know which version to pick if compared against the existing works of Shakespeare. But what about future Shakespeares?

Dalia Taha:

Look how beautiful you look as you read.
Look how peaceful you look
as you let an entire continent colonize you;
as you lay the book down on the nightstand,
as if returning to the world
something that belongs to it—
as you stand, dazzled by the hills
as though the book, too,
has returned to the world
something that belongs to it.

Loved this.

Ben Thompson:

I’ve previously wondered if OpenAI might be like Twitter, another text-centric company that fell backwards into a huge market and never developed into a functional business because of it; if Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, OpenAI might be the short bus at the end of the rainbow. There’s supposed to be a pot of gold there, but it never quite seems to materialize, the colors are fading, and worst of all there just isn’t much evidence that anyone knows what they are doing or that there is any sort of overarching plan. Ads are bad, until they’re the plan; Meta execs are hired en masse, and the ads that launch are low-effort keyword-driven offerings; Apple is a partner until Jony Ive is hired, but he’s still doing projects for Ferrari; meanwhile, Anthropic is focused on the enterprise and shipping, Google is encroaching, and the answer to that is to buy a podcast? What is going on here?

I don’t love every song on his new album but I really like this one, and this performance is fantastic.

Karen Shepard:

Oh, yes, she was often aware of how difficult she was. I’m sure she would’ve said that I was difficult also. It was like a lighthouse: sometimes she could see herself with real clarity, and then the light would swing away, and she was unable to do so anymore. It was difficult, as her daughter, to have to learn how to not rely on that light.

Om Malik:

If you saw the movie Almost Famous, the main character based on Cameron Crowe didn’t get just one hour in a hotel room. He got days on a tour bus. Proximity produces honesty. The subject stops performing eventually. But of course, you could be Lex Fridman. You could talk, and talk, for hours and numb your subjects, not to mention atrophy the brains of your listeners who actually listen.

💀

Jamieson Webster, in the Paris Review, recounts the “forced choice” of the holdup at gunpoint, posited by Jacques Lacan.

The perpetrator says to his victim: “Your money or your life!” Of course, everyone hands over their money. Yet there is an important logical error, for while you assume you have made the choice to escape scot-free, in handing over your money you have not escaped a loss of life, you’ve paid a price to live. Even as the price is worth paying, you live at a cost. Lacan used this example to demonstrate what he called a “forced choice.” Seemingly presented with options, you lose either way. There is only one choice, and you are being forced into it.

Robin Rendle:

The Song of LinkedIn is one of domination and intimidation, a song of con artists and get rich quick schemes. It’s a song of anxiety and lame ideas sexed up into mild takes. But alas the world is not in desperate need of certainty, or any more short cuts, or, indeed, grifts masquerading as nuggets of truth.

Anne Applebaum on the lack of a U.S. strategy for Iran.

For decades, American presidents from both parties have oscillated between coercion and engagement with Iran, sometimes offering diplomacy, sometimes sanctions. Doves and hawks both sought to manage the tactics of the Islamic Republic – its nuclear ambitions, its ballistic missiles, its network of proxy militias throughout the Middle East – without ever coming up with a meaningful strategy to combat the root problem: the ideology of the regime itself.

The Islamic Republic is a theocracy founded explicitly to oppose the deepest principles of liberal democracy and the rule of law. During its 47-year reign, this theocratic state underwent no meaningful political reform, made no improvement to its human-rights record, and never stopped trying to export its radicalism abroad. To maintain control, the regime has used mass violence, intimidation, and surveillance. In recent years, the regime has also sought, successfully, to use online smear campaigns to divide and denigrate the Iranian opposition. Nevertheless, as the scholar and activist Ladan Boroumand has written, Western liberal democracies have long preferred to engage the Islamic Republic “almost solely through the paradigm of Realpolitik,” to engage in negotiations that never seemed to work.

Scott Rogowsky was the host of HQ Trivia, and is now the co-founder of Savvy.

Does it ever feel like you’re competing with a ghost?

Although I shall always remain Quiz Daddy Emeritus (and continue slinging vintage tees and sports cards on quizdaddys.com), you are correct to call “HQ Scott” a ghost. Not only because that show is dead, that moment in time is dead, and that era of internet culture is dead, but because that Scott who hosted HQ is dead.

…

HQ Scott may have seemed to project a fairly positive outward appearance, but inwardly he was possessed of a deeply unhealthy mindset. Only now can I look back with a gimlet eye at that version of myself and see that I was drowning in a whirlpool of negative self-love (a gentler name for ‘self-hate’), spun by near constant thoughts of self-doubt, self-criticism, self-recrimination, self-consciousness, scarcity, inadequacy, insecurity, unworthiness; plagued by anxiety; shrouded in negativity; chronically complaining; only conditionally content.

Click through, read the whole thing, watch the videos. They’re good.

Neil Gorsuch reminds us we have a third branch of government.

Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.

Amen.

Friend of the pod blog Paul Ford, in the New York Times, nailing the vibes.

When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.

That last price is full 2021 retail — it implies a product manager, a designer, two engineers (one senior) and four to six months of design, coding and testing. Plus maintenance. Bespoke software is joltingly expensive. Today, though, when the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month plan.

I love Maria Popova’s The Marginalian (née Brain Pickings); a friend of mine and I send links of hers back and forth all the time. Her new book Traversal is out this week, and the Longreads folks launched their version of the Proust Questionnaire (titled The Longreads Questionnaire, natch) by asking Popova 25 questions about reading, writing and creativity. I loved this one:

What are you really good at?

Pouring liquid from a large-mouthed vessel into a smaller-mouthed vessel without spilling. Including with my non-dominant hand. Including in motion. In the apocalypse, when everyone is rationing water, you want me around.

A great story in The Economist, aptly filed under “Bleak House.”

In the past, lawmakers might get onto an interesting committee, where members on both sides haggled over new laws. But since the mid-1990s power has been hoarded in the offices of the speaker of the House and the Senate leader. To get around partisan gridlock, congressional leaders try to cram all their priorities into a single “omnibus” budget bill, which is negotiated in secret and passed, largely unread, by their rank and file. “[Committee] power has been pulled away,” complains a recently retired Democratic congressman. “And you say to yourself, what am I doing here if I can’t make my own decisions?”

Hearings have become marbled sets for brand-building. For the ambitious, “it’s all about getting that viral moment,” says the ex-congressman. “Members want to land their attack, and then package it up into a 30-second viral [clip] for social media.”

“There are a lot of ways to spend your 20s, and going out to see live local music all the time is about as good as it gets.”

That’s Marc Weidenbaum at Disquiet in a rememberance of Greg Brown, guitarist of Cake, recently dead at the way-too-soon way-too-sad (and way-too-close) age of 55. I was lucky enough to see Cake multiple times in the 90s at The Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco…Brown’s death weirdly bookends the announcement that the club will close at the end of 2026 after 35 years.

Dhruv Khullar, at The New Yorker, touches on one of the most interesting potential impacts of GLP-1s: resetting how society views addiction from a moral failure to a neurobiological difference.

On some level, I’d already understood addiction to be a treatable disease, not a personal failing. Still, these scans helped me appreciate how deeply addiction is rooted in neurobiology. A mere photograph of alcohol—to say nothing of a sip—was enough to send a person’s reward centers into a frenzy. Our decisions still matter; the red circles are known to grow brighter when they’re conditioned by repeated use of a drug. But it was counterproductive, even biologically incoherent, to shame a person for having overwhelming cravings. If GLP-1 drugs prove successful, they might reset not only people’s addictions but also society’s perceptions.

Writer Eliot Peper builds and ships Dialed to the App Store, an app that delivers hyperlocal surf forecasts for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Dialed is extremely simple. All it does is bring data from different public sources into one place to help you decide when and where to surf along this beautiful stretch of coastline.

With its global scale, it would never make sense for Surfline to do something this niche, nor would the teeny, tiny addressable market for Dialed justify the time or investment required to build it without AI tools. But with those tools, I was able to create a piece of software to solve my own weirdly specific problem, and offer it to others who might find it useful.

I love this so much, for obvious reasons.

Adam Dietz at Points in Case:

Cherished by all who experienced it, the 90-minute movie entertained audiences with a well-told tale that did not require one clear an entire day to watch it. While it may have never become ubiquitous, the 90-minute movie saw its popularity repeatedly rise and fall throughout its lifetime. Though, regardless of the filmmaking trends of the time, from the long shots and lens flares to the split screens and star wipes, the 90-minute movie remained 90 minutes.

While the 90-minute movie was notoriously versatile throughout its career, it is perhaps most associated with the comedy and horror genres, with beloved classics like Frankenstein and Airplane serving as evidence of a life well-lived. However, recent years saw both genres eschew tightly-constructed narratives for more “elevated” and indulgent stylings, leading to a cinematic bloat. Nevertheless, whenever a 90-minute film debuted, it brought unbridled joy, with audiences often noting how great it was to be able to drink an entire soda without the risk of missing key plot details while using the restroom.

You know what absolutely should have been a 90 minute movie? Licorice Pizza. God bless Paul Thomas Anderson, but by law all coming of age movies should be 90 minutes.

The No. 16 seed, who won the opener 6-3, 3-6, 6-4 in an impressive turnaround from a break of serve down in the final set, made a statement on the court. But by far the biggest was the one she made walking onto it, leaving fans on Rod Laver Arena gasping and cheering as she floated out in a Robert Wun design which, according to Vogue, took inspiration from the “beauty and elegance” of jellyfish and Osaka’s daughter, Shai’s, love of them.

Wun is a London-based couturier from Hong Kong, known for working with Ariana Grande, Beyonce and Lady Gaga. For Wun, Osaka, and their collaborators, the two-time Australian Open champion and former world No. 1, the collaboration is a moment of art imitating life.

“We were just kind of in there in the studio like kids, just trying to figure it out. It was like a dance,” Osaka said in her news conference.

Wun was inspired by an Osaka moment from her victorious campaign at the Australian Open in 2021, when a butterfly landed on Osaka’s face during a third-round match against Ons Jabeur.

Love her.

“We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic.” Om Malik dropping wisdom.

Wang is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. (Via The Browser.)

One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.

…

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee. People who are dead serious tend not to embody sparkling irony. Yet the Communist Party and Silicon Valley are two of the most powerful forces shaping our world today. Their initiatives increase their own centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation states. Perhaps they are successful because they are remorseless.

Earlier this year, I moved from Yale to Stanford. The sun and the dynamism of the west coast have drawn me back. I found a Bay Area that has grown a lot weirder since I lived there a decade ago. In 2015, people were mostly working on consumer apps, cryptocurrencies, and some business software. Though it felt exciting, it looks in retrospect like a more innocent, even a more sedate, time. Today, AI dictates everything in San Francisco while the tech scene plays a much larger political role in the United States. I can’t get over how strange it all feels. In the midst of California’s natural beauty, nerds are trying to build God in a Box; meanwhile, Peter Thiel hovers in the background presenting lectures on the nature of the Antichrist. This eldritch setting feels more appropriate for a Gothic horror novel than for real life.

While doing some housekeeping, this afternoon I swapped out Algolia for Pagefind to provide archive search on sippey.com.

Pagefind is a fully static search library that aims to perform well on large sites, while using as little of your users’ bandwidth as possible, and without hosting any infrastructure. … The goal of Pagefind is that websites with tens of thousands of pages should be searchable by someone in their browser, while consuming as little bandwidth as possible.

This site used to run on a combination of Github, Netlify and Algolia; now it only uses two of those. The swap didn’t take long; most of the work was configuring look and feel (which still needs some work, tbh, but it was good enough to ship).

There are more than 2,100 posts and 400,000 words here, and Pagefind just works.

Via Watch and Discover’s list of the best video essays of 2025 (via Kottke), this absolutely grabbed me. A foundational argument that what LLMs do is not writing, complete with Kermit the Frog, Gertrude Stein, Stephen King, One Slay More and the guy drinking Ocean Spray to Fleetwood Mac.

As part of his answer to the question “I don’t experience anything when I go to concerts anymore, but I still really enjoy music. Do you like going to concerts?”

At the Radiohead concert at the O2, I was sitting among twenty thousand people. Bizarrely, it was the first time I had ever been in the audience at such a large show, and I was stunned by the depth of love in the room – people dancing, screaming, crying, hugging each other, throwing themselves around. I was struck by the realisation of just how powerful live music is – that a group of individuals can come together and concoct a sound unique to them, and that people can connect with that distinctive vision as if it were their own experience. I could feel its moral quality – how this singular force has the capacity to repair the world with its goodness.

I engage in various spiritual activities – I swim in a lake, go to church, walk in nature, meditate – but none offer the transcendent opportunity of a live concert. It is a form of human activity that radiates goodness, working its way through the crowd and into the world as a reparative, cosmic force, improving matters, keeping the devil at bay. I believe Radiohead’s audience was responding not only to the music, which was astonishing, but also to the courage of the performers – the sheer nerve to stand before a crowd and offer up their souls. Like everyone else there, I was deeply moved and humbled.

Emphasis mine.

Hanif Abdurraqib on one of my favorite albums from my senior year of high school. (Jesus, I am old.)

I believe, very deeply, in the urgency of the opening. When the song closes, when the poem closes, when the day closes, you are not obligated to be who you were at the start, but who you were at the start does matter. It can be the first, most immediate thought. It can be the thing that has weighed on your heart for what feels like as long as you’ve been alive. It can be the most vulnerable place you’ve ever been willing to go, and you can shout it into an empty landscape and then build a small world around it. The voice of Sade Adu, also one of our greatest poets, arrives slowly on “Is It A Crime,” the opening track of Sade’s 1985 album, Promise. It waits about 25 seconds, for Stuart Matthewman’s saxophone to blare itself to a sense of calm, a steady moan. And then, she enters: This may come, this may come as a surprise, but I miss you.

This is one of my favorite lyrics to open any album in the history of albums and in the history of lyrics, in part because it isn’t only the language itself, but how the language is presented. Adu’s voice beginning light and airy in the first two fragments, before dipping, suddenly, when we arrive at but I miss you, the final sound in you stretched out for a few seconds, creating a brief tunnel of oooohhhh that isn’t mournful or even revelatory, but more a sigh. It is what it is. Against all of my better instincts I have surrendered to my own heart, and this is where it has dragged me. It matters a great deal what comes next, but it also doesn’t. Sade Adu has presented a dilemma which is uniquely hers, but it could be yours. Might have been yours, at some point before this one. Yes, the man is a liar; yes, the man lays with someone else. You know the type, or you’ve been the type. You have been the criminal, or you’ve loved the criminal and, through your loving, you become them.

Joanne McNeil:

I have found myself thinking about power differently lately as I realize there are no kings, if there ever were—just people who represent ideas with purchase over the minds of others, with hands on various levers to reach these minds. Levers that have grown rusty.

Some of the fake kings have money. Many are burning to the ground their own industries—the sources of what had been their clout and prestige to weed out what they call “wokeness,” even though, ultimately, they couldn’t care less if sitcoms are diverse or not, not even about pronouns. What they fear is what every rich person fears: justice and accountability. They have been so coddled, so isolated from the world, that sarcastic tweets from random people felt to them like the blade edge of a guillotine. Wrath toward the greater public—a public they must court if not serve, has come back to them in the end, as voided cultural capital and waning influence.

Ana Marie Cox edits Olivia Nuzzi. This is a masterclass in deep reading and compassionate feedback.

Life is never cleanly sorted into victims and villains. You can be both. People and events wounded you, and you’ve written around that pain in metaphor, circling it rather than naming it or taking us through it. Give us the scenes. Give us the exact words. Show us what happened rather than relying on the feeling-memory alone. Don’t aim for readers to sympathize with you; tell them in detail (Quotes! Actions! Sensations!) what you went through, and trust that it was bad enough (it was) that you don’t need to persuade them. Maybe they’ll sympathize. Maybe they won’t. They will respect you for the clarity.

There’s one moment in the excerpt where the lyricism falls away—when you move from the symbolic to the literal and describe your numbness in the body (“my chest, my spine, behind my belly button”), and then reveal the presence of the gun. It is the most unadorned, direct piece of writing in the whole chapter: no myth, no monster-language, no fire, no national allegory. No metaphor. Just the fact of the gun, and the fact of your blankness. That’s the level of clarity the rest of the book needs. Not more pain, not more confession—just the courage to stay literal when the stakes are highest. That’s where the truth is.

Best analysis I’ve read yet:

“When you’re not profitable, at some point, you run out of cash,” said Nicolas Graf, a professor at New York University’s Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality. “And that’s what happened in the past few weeks.”

Anil Dash on the “effusive, exuberant, contagious joy” of Zohran Mamdani.

So much of what people hear in politics is negative and threatening. Zohran’s opponents spoke almost exclusively about how people should be scared and angry. But the undeniable energy of the Mamdani campaign has been joy — an effusive, exuberant, contagious joy. Even when times are hard, maybe especially when times are hard, people are drawn to that joy. And they’ve been missing leaders who offer them a positive vision. They don’t want to hear horrifying visions of “American carnage”, especially when they know those are lies designed to manipulate. A better world is possible.

…

Perhaps one of the most joyful parts of Zohran’s instantly-legendary victory speech on election night was its eloquence. His speech was at well above a 10th-grade level. It was complex, erudite, punctuated by deep and fluent references. He proved that politicians don’t have to condescend to voters with baby talk! And a big part of re-establishing our democratic norms is going to be speaking to the electorate as if we are all adults, assuming a level of literacy in culture and history, as well as as basic civics. I keep saying that I’m hoping we get an “easter egg breakdown” version of this speech, similar to the ones that people on YouTube do for a Marvel movie or a Star Wars trailer. There’s such a dense level of references and context that people will be able to extract meaning from it for years to come — a welcome contrast to a political environment that has usually had deeply hateful dog whistles as the only thing buried within its content.

My friend and former colleague Raffi Krikorian, who recently became the CTO of Mozilla, in The Atlantic.

When validation is purchased rather than earned, we lose something vital. And when that validation comes from a system we don’t control, trained on choices we didn’t make, we should pause. Because these systems aren’t neutral; they encode values and incentives.

Values shape the worldview baked into their responses: what’s framed as respectful or rude, harmful or harmless, legitimate or fringe. Every model is a memory—trained not just on data but also on desire, omission, and belief. And layered onto those judgments are the incentives: to maximize engagement, minimize computing costs, promote internal products, sidestep controversy. Every answer carries both the choices of the people who built it and the pressures of the system that sustains it. Together, they determine what gets shown, what gets smoothed out, and what gets silenced. We already know this familiar bargain from the age of algorithmic social media. But AI chatbots take this dynamic further still by adding on an intimacy that fawns, echoing back whatever we bring to it, no matter what that person says.

Emphasis mine. I love that sentence.

Greil Marcus on Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere:

When in the midst of White’s bedroom recordings there’s a cut to a record studio where “Born in the U.S.A.” is happening, it’s absolutely there, with the line “Hiring man says, Son, if it was up to me” coming across as a whole novel in those ten words, for the way they’re written, for the way, now, they’re sung.

This piece is lovely, and full of practical advice on how to make friends. But I’m going to quote from this at length because I am absolutely in love with this general theory of friendship.

Start with a simple admission: every friend you’ve ever had has wronged you. Not in the grand opera ways - no poisoned goblets, no monologues under the thunder. It’s smaller, meaner, bureaucratic. They drift. They acquire a dog with a complicated gut. They move to a suburb called Something-Heath where the last bus leaves at 9:12. They reply “haha amazing” to your most elegant despair. They go off gluten and then become gluten. Even the ones who stay close eventually betray you by dying. And if they don’t, you’ll betray them first. This is the contract hidden in the handshake. That’s the horror of it. That’s the miracle of it.

Friendship was never supposed to be a bilateral treaty anyway. It’s a cultic rite conducted in the ruins of the self where, briefly, the candles catch. If you insist on keeping score - “I texted last,” “I bought rounds,” “I provided crucial banter in Q4” -the bookkeepers of Hell will love you; they worship exactitude. But the rest of us are trying, in grubby, hopeless ways, to kneel before something larger that sometimes borrows a human shape.

So here is the stupid heresy: each particular friend is an emissary. A courier for the Infinite Friend. You’ve met them. You keep meeting them. They arrive disguised as a barista who treats you like a Victorian convalescent. As the flatmate who wordlessly slides a plate of eggs under your door when your brain has become a wasp factory. As the stranger in the smoking area who tells you, in a voice like a kettle unplugging itself, the one sentence you needed to remain alive for another week. That’s not them. That’s the Infinite Friend poking a paw through the membrane of history.

Marc Weidenbaum on the closing of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors at SFMOMA. In its latest run here I went about half a dozen times; it was a wonderfully meditative experience for me and I’m going to miss it.

I notice different things in the sound and the images every time — at this point countless — that I take in The Visitors, and two things stood out this visit:

One was that the roadie seen at the very end of the hour is also there at the opening. I love the closing bits of the experience, as he walks around the house, thus making it possible for the audience to, finally, connect the various screens’ relative proximity based on his path.

The other was that the audience at SFMOMA came, at the end, to collectively focus on that outside-view screen, and in turn came to resemble the audience within the work. By watching together, we had, in effect, turned the gallery into a porch. When I noticed this, I stepped back into the furthest corner, took a photo of what I was witnessing, and recognized that Kjartansson has engineered a scenario in which is audience became a tableau just like the one he had filmed.

Maria Popova’s introduction to her meditation on John Burroughs’ collection Birds and Poets is a remarkable distillation of what makes a life.

A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for. Like evolution, like Leaves of Grass, it is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity, which is at bottom the adaptation of the self to the soul and the soul to the world.

Emphasis mine.

Nick Cave, in his newsletter, answers a question from a fan / reader: “I’ve had several disagreements with friends about where you stand on things. Where do you…stand?” I absolutely love this response.

As the ground shifts and slides beneath us, and the world hardens around its particular views, I become increasingly uncertain and less self-assured. I am neither on the left nor on the right, finding both sides, as they mainly present themselves, indefensible and unrecognisable. I am essentially a liberal-leaning, spiritual conservative with a small ‘c’, which, to me, isn’t a political stance, rather it is a matter of temperament. I have a devotional nature, and I see the world as broken but beautiful, believing that it is our urgent and moral duty to repair it where we can and not to cause further harm, or worse, wilfully usher in its destruction. I think we consist of more than mere atoms crashing into each other, and that we are, instead, beings of vast potential, placed on this earth for a reason – to magnify, as best we can, that which is beautiful and true.  I believe we have an obligation to assist those who are genuinely marginalised, oppressed, or sorrowful in a way that is helpful and constructive and not to exploit their suffering for our own professional advancement or personal survival. I have an acute and well-earned understanding of the nature of loss and know in my bones how easy it is for something to break, and how difficult it is to put it back together. Therefore, I am cautious with the world and try to treat all its inhabitants with care.

I am comfortable with doubt and am constitutionally resistant to moral certainty, herd mentality and dogma. I am disturbed on a fundamental level by the self-serving, toddler politics of some of my counterparts – I do not believe that silence is violence, complicity, or a lack of courage, but rather that silence is often the preferred option when one does not know what they are talking about, or is doubtful, or conflicted – which, for me, is most of the time. I am mainly at ease with not knowing and find this a spiritually and creatively dynamic position. I believe that there are times when it is almost a sacred duty to shut the fuck up.

Emphasis mine.

Justin Chang’s review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie; I loved this paragraph…

The film’s opening half hour is loud, tense, and extraordinarily propulsive: we follow the French 75 through raids, robberies, blown-up buildings, and smashed-up cars. Compounding the cacophony is a Jonny Greenwood score that veers between manic percolation—imagine a xylophone humping a coffeepot—and grandly operatic surges of synth. The music sweeps us up in the queasy thrill of revolt, but also in the heat and momentum of an impetuous romance. Perfidia and Pat are like an Antifa-pilled Bonnie and Clyde, minus the impotence.

Emphasis mine.

JA Westernberg on why status is our last religion:

But when I watch the petty indignities of the boarding process - the elbowing forward, the resentment, the humiliation of the stragglers - I wonder if we’ve confused ambition with vanity. There is, there has to be a difference between striving to create something valuable and striving to sit in a slightly more comfortable chair. Much of what we call “achievement” is just status laundering. A promotion might mean more responsibility, but often it mostly means a new title to flash at cocktail parties - or more likely, as a humblebrag on LinkedIn. An Ivy League acceptance letter might open opportunities, but it functions more as a lifelong badge that tells everyone you were chosen.

From Mike Davidson, inspired by Matt Webb (two of my favorite people!). “Elevator music for your Claude Code tasks! Automatically plays background music while Claude is working, because coding is better with a soundtrack.”

Via Long Reads, Ash Sanders at The Believer on the Bombay Beach Biennale.

In a very real way, Bombay Beach sits at the end of the world, figuratively and physically. It sits at the bottom of a river, at the edge of a sea. It lives at the terminus of all our logic, caught inside everything we’ve ever done and all that has ever happened. There is also a truth to this place; in other words, a clarity to the tragedy. And maybe that means we’re not just stuck here. Maybe it means we’re also free to do something new.

Wanda’s talk reminded me of a sculpture I saw my first day on the playa, a staunch metal affair made of copper and die-cut lettering. THE ONLY OTHER THING IS NOTHING, it said. I thought about that sign for the rest of Convivium. I thought about it when I got news alerts on my phone from the outside world: men shaved, shackled, and pressed together in a Salvadoran prison. A student protester abducted off the street. Forests opened for logging; the planet sold for parts. I thought about how wide the gap can be between the end of one world and the beginning of a new one, and how, in some places, that gap becomes narrower by virtue of idealism or necessity. And so we sit in that strange lacuna between what we have done and what we must do next. The situation is impossible; there are endless possibilities. The world ends; the world begins again. The feeling is grief. And the feeling is also joy.

I was lucky enough to attend the Biennale in 2024; here’s a pic of the sign in question. I think about this sign almost every day.

It’s publication day for Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, so here’s a recently highlighted bit from her memoir Priestdaddy.

All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.

Ian Penman goes deep on Brian Eno.

Eno is a conundrum: impish disruptor and happy polymath, he can also be a bit of a tech prig lecturing us from on high, dropping serene apothegms that turn out on closer inspection to be vanishingly banal. It’s as if there are two of him: Brian has a great sense of humour, Eno can be suffocatingly precious; Brian picks a brilliant selection of Desert Island Discs, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.

Spencer Tweedy on touring with Willie Nelson and the flag that hangs behind his stage…

The first-most exciting thing I’ve seen all year, maybe all decade and up there in all life, is the American flag unfurling behind Willie Nelson when his band kicks in on “Whiskey River,” the first moment of his set, barnstorming.

…

It’s a flag that means death. And it’s a flag that symbolizes your rights. Until our distant descendants draw a new one without so much blood on it, we have to tug it toward the latter meaning. Associations are powerful: we stand for justice for all, and that flag is on my stage. My woven guitar strap. Our definition, our choice.

Mind-blowing. (Both the city itself, obviously, and the Minecraft model.)

Kowloon Walled City, considered the densest settlement on the planet, was demolished in the mid-1990s. At its height in the ’80s, it was home to around 33,000 people—a government survey provided some idea of the local population—but estimates are often closer to 50,000. And that’s all within an overall footprint of 2.6 hectares, or just shy of about 6.5 acres. It’s an area smaller than five American football fields or about 2.5 New York City blocks.

…

For an architect who goes by Sluda Builds on YouTube, the astounding, densely packed metropolis spurred an elaborate Minecraft project. From the ground up, including a surprising landscape grade that often doesn’t read clearly in photographs, he meticulously reconstructs the city’s skyscrapers, mezzanines, interior passageways, rooftops, and alleys.

“The reason that so many of us have become increasingly susceptible to foreign propaganda, “fake news” and just plain bad arguments can be easily explained by the fact that much American curriculum simply fails to teach students how to think critically and deprives them of the important historical and geographic information that would allow them to spot when they are being deceived.”