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Elisa Gonzalez at The Paris Review on Marilyn Monroe’s poetry. “Marilyn often spent long periods in front of the mirror, just looking at herself. This wasn’t only the rapture of narcissism. She studied and honed her movements and faces, learning to feel how she looked in the eyes of others. Especially given that Marilyn never sought publication, reading her work makes me think less of overhearing a conversation than of watching someone else’s shifting reflection. These dashed-off, insular poems embody an oft-submerged but ever-present feature of lyric poetry: a dialogue within the self, overheard by the self.”

Olivia Snow, in Wired: Are You Ready to Be Surveilled Like a Sex Worker? “Some precautions I’ve taken for my own safety as a sex worker include withholding my birthday, age, ethnic background, hometown, current city, former cities, commute, alma maters, graduation years, time zone, weather, current employers, past employers, even my favorite color. When I post photos, I photoshop out my face and tattoos, and I never reveal my natural hair. If I post a screenshot, I crop out any time stamps.”

John Gruber: How to Temporarily Disable Face ID or Touch ID, and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone or iPad. “Just press and hold the buttons on both sides. Remember that. Try it now. Don’t just memorize it, internalize it, so that you’ll be able to do it without much thought while under duress, like if you’re confronted by a police officer. Remember to do this every time you’re separated from your phone, like when going through the magnetometer at any security checkpoint, especially airports. As soon as you see a metal detector ahead of you, you should think, ‘Hard-lock my iPhone’.”

Jia Tolentino: We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse. “Pregnancy is more than thirty times more dangerous than abortion. One study estimates that a nationwide ban would lead to a twenty-one-per-cent rise in pregnancy-related deaths. Some of the women who will die from abortion bans are pregnant right now. Their deaths will come not from back-alley procedures but from a silent denial of care: interventions delayed, desires disregarded. They will die of infections, of preëclampsia, of hemorrhage, as they are forced to submit their bodies to pregnancies that they never wanted to carry, and it will not be hard for the anti-abortion movement to accept these deaths as a tragic, even noble, consequence of womanhood itself.”

Steven Johnson: Natural Magic. “When Charles Babbage encountered an automaton of a ballerina as a child in the early 1800s, the ‘irresistible eyes’ of the mechanism convinced him that there was something lifelike in the machine. Those robotic facial expressions would seem laughable to a modern viewer, but animatronics has made a great deal of progress since then. There may well be a comparable threshold in simulated emotion—via robotics or digital animation, or even the text chat of an AI like LaMDA—that makes it near impossible for humans not to form emotional bonds with a simulated being.”

Vulture’s interview with Bill Hader about the end of Barry, season three. “The very first shot of the entire series is not funny. It’s a dead body and that was very much on purpose. You’re just trying to do what’s honest for the characters and the story. When we got to those last two episodes, it felt like we were forcing things to be funny. It undercut what you wanted the characters to go through. When you’re doing a show about a murderer and dealing with domestic violence and trauma and PTSD and conversion therapy of a gay man, you can’t really be that funny at times. If you’re going to portray it honestly, the comedy comes from other moments, like in life.”

ArtNet: Surrounded by Visitors, the FBI Seized 25 Works Purportedly by Basquiat From a Florida Museum in a Mid-Day Raid. “The exhibition, titled ‘Heroes and Monsters’, was due to close June 30 before traveling to Italy. ‘A show like this, with supposedly unknown, unseen works by Basquiat would be a tremendous financial gain for any museum,’ Levin said. ‘The fact that there wasn’t one U.S. institution that had inquired and arranged to travel this show prior to the F.B.I. investigation speaks silent volumes.’”

Fred Wilson: Staying Positive. “Yes, it is our collective fault for getting out over our skis during the good times and not seeing tougher times ahead. Yes, we could have and should have been more conservative with our growth plans and hiring. Yes, it is our fault for putting our companies in the position where they have to let go of so many people. But it is also the case that the number one thing in times like this is staying in the game so you can play another round.” Reminder that we’re playing an infinite game.

James Carse: Finite and Infinite Games. “Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.” (Ahhh, I love Readwise.)

ArtNet on the new James Turrell Skyspace in Colorado. “Titled after the Colorado town where it resides, Green Mountain Falls Skyspace, joins more than 85 other ‘Skyspace’ installations built around the world, but it’s the first one situated on the side of a mountain, as well as the first in Colorado. … Nestled amid the pine trees, at a scenic viewpoint overlooking the town and Gazebo lake, the installation merges seamlessly with the surrounding landscape and fresh mountain air. The piece serves as a naked-eye observatory, augmenting the natural beauty by framing the ever-changing sky within its borders.”

The Pudding: A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon. Another home run from The Pudding. “The Gods illustrated below are imaginary. These made-up illustrations show how symbols and attributes in real Aztec iconography were composed to depict a God’s domain, abilities and needs.”

John Pistelli on Ulysses. “The opening chapters of the novel, the ones that deploy the famous stream-of-consciousness technique immersing us first in Stephen’s and then in Bloom’s inner lives (in chapters chapters one through three and four through six, respectively), brings us to the side of these protagonists as we are made viscerally to feel their intelligence and their loneliness, their sympathies and their sorrow, especially in contrast to their coarser fellows. … Every intellectual with a typewriter was producing hard-to-read novels in the 1920s, and we’re still reading this one and not most of the others, because, no matter how bitter a pill it may be for avantists to swallow, we care about Stephen and the Blooms the same way we care about Lizzy and Pip.”

When Elon Met Twitter. “(Also at one point Musk mentioned that he has seen no evidence of alien life, and no one really knew what to make of that.)”

Ben Thompson on MLS and AppleTV. “What is notable about this approach is that it is a bet against bundling; individual subscriptions are very hard to square with a bundle — how do you apportion the revenue? … Just because a bundle is better in theory doesn’t mean it will happen in practice: while I think any particular ecosystem, particularly the sports ecosystem, which is chock full of casual fans, would be worse off in an atomized world of individual subscriptions (instead of a bundle), we might end up there anyways, and Apple now has a head start in defining what that could look like.”

The Athletic has a deep dive on everything MLS and Apple, including this illuminating quote from MLS’ Gary Stevenson about the opportunity for Apple to dramatically improve the storytelling around MLS. “Imagine if we sign a star player from Colombia. Immediately, immediately, we have the ability to serve content to those fans in Colombia of that particular player in the Apple global distribution system, whether it’s Apple News, Apple Health and Fitness, Apple Watches, Apple Music, all of those different areas we expect to be integrated in and go forward with with Apple. So, to me, when you think about what are the intangibles here and why does this really make the most sense, it makes the most sense because we have that ability to distribute content.”

Nate Rogers at The Ringer on Kate Bush burning up the charts. “In previous eras, it was much harder to account for a population’s broad listening habits outside of the physical, new music they purchased in record stores; these days, streaming charts offer a more nuanced window into the day-to-day reality of what people play in their homes, cars, offices, etc.”

Robin Sloan: Specifying Spring ‘83. “Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a ‘board’, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. …  I recommend this kind of project, this flavor of puzzle, to anyone who feels tangled up by the present state of the internet. Protocol design is a form of investigation and critique.” Need to dig in to this.

Marcus Thompson: Draymond Green’s fingerprints are all over Warriors’ Game 5 win, especially this bit about that incredible moment when Draymond followed Tatum to the bench after the Celtics called timeout. “This was a version of a player taking a shot during a dead ball and an opponent swatting it out of the air. Can’t let shooters see the ball go in. Can’t let scorers steal confidence between whistles. … Play had stopped. The Celtics were headed to the bench for their timeout. But the Warriors’ ball pressure didn’t let up. A defiant Tatum, unwilling to show signs of surrender, responded by keeping the rock and taking it to the bench with him. So Draymond followed Tatum all the way to the Boston bench, backpedaling into a hedge of green like the Homer Simpson GIF. The Warriors star didn’t care that he was surrounded by the entire Celtics roster. He was following the ball. He was being a nuisance. He was sending a message. He was doing what Draymond does.”

Even if it’s fake it’s real, the architect seal of approval edition. “An architect lent his license to a New York City developer to approve buildings he didn’t design.”

Jamelle Bouie: The Gerontocracy of the Democratic Party Doesn’t Understand That We’re at the Brink. “What’s missing from party leaders, an absence that is endlessly frustrating to younger liberals, is any sense of urgency and crisis — any sense that our system is on the brink. Despite mounting threats to the right to vote, the right to an abortion and the ability of the federal government to act proactively in the public interest, senior Democrats continue to act as if American politics is back to business as usual.”

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index. Interested in digging into the details of inflation? All the data’s here. (Via Data is Plural.)

Matthew McConaughey: To Make the Loss of These Lives Matter. “Counselors are needed in all these places where these mass shooters have been for a long time. I was told by many that it takes a good year before people even understand what to do next. And even then, when they become secure enough to take the first step forward, a lifetime is not going to heal those wounds.”

Dan Pfeffer: How the GOP Plans to Wash Away the Truth about Jan 6th. “Democrats continue to view political communications as a combination of press management and public relations. Republicans correctly understand that messaging in high-intensity information warfare is waged in a digital environment. Most Congressional Democrats continue to operate in a long-extinct media world where facts matter and traditional media sources are the best way to deliver those facts.”

Blackbird Spyplane on credits in movies, music and fashion. “Just appreciating the visual representation, as name after name goes by, of the fact that MAD PEOPLE besides the director, writer & actors worked to make the thing I just watched — a collectivist counterbalance to romantic yet pernicious myths of INDIVIDUALIST GENIUS that can make us focus disproportionately on “numero uno” at the expense of fellowship & communitarian obligations!”

Tim Kawakami has a long read on Steve Kerr’s signature season. In this quote Kerr says psychological safety without saying psychological safety. “What really helped was I came in here with a blank slate as a coach and a five-year contract. I wasn’t afraid of getting fired. And I was gifted this incredibly talented team that allowed me to do that stuff and we could still win. Between the job security I had, starting out with my contract and then my relationship with Bob and his trust in me and the talent we had, which allowed us to maneuver and mess around with some lineups, maybe even losing some games as a result, but with the big picture in mind. It was way easier for me than for say, some coach who took over a lottery team and was going to get fired in a year if he didn’t win some games.”

R.E. Hawley, BeReal and the Fantasy of an Authentic Online Life. “The fantasy of an authentic social-media experience is as compelling as it is categorically impossible. It would, after all, be nice to discover that the secret to peering into the fully realized, complex personhood of another was as simple as finding the right design. But for all the documentation of our lives now available to us – posed or “real” – we do not appear to know one another more profoundly or intimately for it.”

Web3/Crypto: Why Bother? From Albert Wenger, back in December. “As a first approximation all the big powerful internet companies are really database providers. … Only they get to decide who has permission to read and write to this database and which parts of it they get access to.”

WeatherKit from Apple may not be the biggest announcement from yesterday’s WWDC, but it’s one of the most interesting. “In keeping with Apple’s commitment to privacy, WeatherKit is designed to give hyperlocal forecasts without compromising user data. Location information is used only to provide weather forecasts, is not associated with any personally identifiable information, and is never tracked between requests.”

The EU mandates USB-C on phones. Consumer protection theater. I’m sure standardizing power outlets across Europe is next on the EU’s agenda.

The Pragmatic Engineer: Shipping to Production. From YOLOing it to multi-tenancy rollouts, an excellent guide with tons of links to how companies like Uber, Facebook and Doordash manage shipping code to production.

Simon Willison on playing with GPT-3. “Everything about working with GPT-3 is prompt engineering—trying different prompts, and iterating on specific prompts to see what kind of results you can get. It’s a programming activity that actually feels a lot more like spellcasting. It’s almost impossible to reason about: I imagine even the creators of GPT-3 could not explain to you why certain prompts produce great results while others do not. It’s also absurdly good fun.”