Barack Obama, Our Endorsement:
But Kamala has more than a resume. She has the vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands. There is no doubt in our mind that Kamala Harris has exactly what it takes to win this election and deliver for the American people. At a time when the stakes have never been higher, she gives us all reason to hope.
Rebecca Traister, The Case for Being Unburdened by What Has Been:
I felt excited not in spite of my uncertainty, but because of it. I felt that our national political narrative was finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don’t know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, underpolled, creative measures to change, grow, and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us. No more clinging to the walls of the past for safety, no more adhering to models or traditions or assumptions that the autocratic opposition has shown itself willing to explode over the past two decades in its own efforts to win.
Within 36 hours of Biden’s announcement on July 21, Harris raised more than $100 million, according to her campaign, including $81 million in the first 24 hours. The $100 million cash infusion would more than double the $96 million the Biden-Harris campaign had in cash on hand at the end of June. Harris’ team said the massive haul, which includes money raised across the campaign, Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees, represents the largest 24-hour total in U.S. history.
Let’s fucking go.
M.G. Siegler at Spyglass (my favorite tech blog right now, bar none), writing about the newly released video of Steve Jobs speaking at the Aspen Design Conference in 1983:
Everyone knows the famous/infamous “reality distortion field”, but it really undersells Jobs’ ability to command a room by speaking in a way that’s intensely human.
Too many of our current crop of entrepreneurs and CEOs just cannot do this for whatever reason. So many over the years have tried to emulated such abilities for obvious reasons, but they may mimic the look and feel of such a talk, but can’t copy the underlying empathy that seems to exist within Jobs in these settings. You can say it’s an act, but it works. Over every talk. Over years and years. Time and time again. It’s both a command of what he’s talking about and an ability to convey true belief in what he’s talking about. Mixed with a way to make it all relatable to seemingly every person in the room.
Emphasis mine. The talk itself is absolutely worth watching, and it’s wild trying to imagine a time when most of the audience present didn’t yet own personal computer, Apple or otherwise. I love this bit (especially because I’m currently reading the early chapters of Chris Miller’s Chip War):
Third thing about computers: they’re really dumb. They’re exceptionally simple. But they’re really fast.
Linus Lee implores us to create things that come alive.
Within my little corner of the world, I think we’re often victim to an even more myopic pathology of this kind: we think that technology involves a computer, or spacecraft, or a microscope, or some other fragile thing cursed to be beholden to software. But writing is technology. Oral tradition is technology. Farming is technology. Roads are technology.
Technology exists woven into the physics and politics and romance of the world, and to disentangle it is to suck the life out of it, to sterilize it to the point of exterminating its reason for existence. to condemn it to another piece of junk.
If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag everything they touch into the realm of the living. And once in a while, if you are so lucky, may you create not just technology, but art — not only giving us life, but elevating us beyond.
Emphasis mine.
Poet Diana Garza Islas, in the Paris Review, Rorschach:
Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen.
Janna Levin talking with Natalie Priebe Frank in Quanta, What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?:
FRANK: [David Smith] was part of an online community of tiling enthusiasts that stretches across the world. And he was looking for interesting tiles in the following way that’s commonly practiced. So what you do, you can start with a hexagonal tiling of the plane. So it’s just all hexagons. And then put a dot in the center of the hexagon. And draw a line from that dot in the center to the middle of each edge. Not the vertices, but the middle of each edge. And so you end up making the hexagon look like six little kite-shaped things stuck together — they’re called polykites.
And so what you do is you take those little kite-shaped things and you just simply regroup them. And you just say, “OK, now that set of eight of them that are all stuck together, that’s my tile. Let me see if I can tile with it.” And so, people have categorically gone through the low levels of all the possible combinations of those things. Someone in the literature a few years prior had pointed out a tile with a very large corona or possibly a tile that didn’t tile. And so David started playing with this particular version.
LEVIN: Yes, and he called his “the hat” because it vaguely sort of looked like a big top hat.
FRANK: They decided it looked like a hat.
LEVIN: Some people called it a T-shirt.
FRANK: Yeah. But it got called the hat and that’s fine.
Finally, Noah Kalina on fireworks:
I used to be obsessed with fireworks. Fountains specifically. You know, the kind that only go about ten feet high. Was it because I was born on the fourth of July? Probably not. I liked fireworks for the same reason most people like them. I enjoyed fireworks for their hypnotic visual displays and their captivating booms and crackles. They have an undeniably mesmerizing effect. Also, fireworks are often associated with celebrations and communal gatherings, evoking feelings of nostalgia, joy, and togetherness. I think those are the normal and healthy reasons to like fireworks.
I’m a couple of weeks behind on this one, but this letter from Donald Sutherland to Hunger Games director Gary Ross about the character of President Coriolanus Snow is pitch perfect.
Power. That’s what this is about? Yes? Power and the forces that are manipulated by the powerful men and bureaucracies trying to maintain control and possession of that power? Power perpetrates war and oppression to maintain itself until it finally topples over with the bureaucratic weight of itself and sinks into the pages of history (except in Texas), leaving lessons that need to be learned unlearned.
Heather Cox Richardson, July 1, 2024:
Today the United States Supreme Court overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law. It decided that the president of the United States, possibly the most powerful person on earth, has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.
Mara Quint, Supreme Court-Approved Ways to Celebrate the Fourth of July:
Representational democracy had a good run, but the Supreme Court has finally rediscovered the founders’ original intent. Sure, they were against kings, but it turns out, after 248 years, we had completely misunderstood that they actually liked when someone has the powers of a king; they just didn’t like the word “king.” It rhymes with too many other words and leaves the nation open to getting absolutely destroyed in a rap battle. With “president,” you just have “resident,” “hesitant,” and maybe “negligent,” but that’s sort of a stretch.
Anne Helen Petersen interviews Soraya Chemaly, author of The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, about the importance of nurturing relationships in getting through hard times:
I think my idea of resilience was a pretty common one in that I thought of resilience in almost entirely personal terms, as an individual characteristic or trait. Over years I had really absorbed the idea that resilience was 9/10th the ability to persevere, be gritty, try to stay optimistic, etc. and 1/10th having a supportive social circle. When my family was thrown into the deep end of a crisis, it became clear that nothing I could do as an individual could compare to what we all needed, which was a combination of love, friendship, compassionate listeners, and actual material resources, such as access to good health care and medicine.
What I concluded, after that experience and through writing this book, is that that our individual/collective resilience ratios should really be reversed or, a better formulation, that the more accurate and helpful way to think of “supportive social circles” is broadly: as the connections, material resources, and political entitlements that serve as the foundation for our individual strengths and capacities.
Cody Delistraty in The Paris Review, on Agnes Martin and Grief:
Combining linear rigidity and spatial abstraction, in Martin’s works I saw an idea of the world that is guided by plans and sure outcomes—a world made whole again. Martin’s own life was imperfect and traumatic (though she’d likely bristle at the word): she said she was raped as a girl on four occasions, dissociating each time; she lived a seemingly lonely existence, chafing against middle-class sensibilities. I figured she desired, like me, exactness and rightness, apparent salves for the broken. I supposed this aspiration was a core reason for her grids and lines. In fact, she suggested something of the opposite: to view the world as though it were perfect but to understand that it is not – and to see that perfection need not be pursued. “Perfection is not necessary. Perfection you cannot have,” she once said. “If you do what you want to do and what you can do and if you can then recognize it you will be contented.”
handicapped
Golf Distillery’s guide to handicaps:
The handicap index is a one-decimal number used to compare golfers regardless of where they play golf or which sets of tees they use. A golfer with a low handicap index will be better than a golfer with a high one. Very good golfers whose handicap index is better than 0 are assigned a + sign in front of their index number. For example, a golfer with a handicap of +2.0 should score better than one with a handicap index of 2.0, and much better than one with 10.0.
Richard Haass, Handicap:
It is tragic that things were allowed to reach this point. Biden should not be the Democratic candidate. He should have announced sometime in early 2023 that he would not stand for a second term. Yes, that would have made him a lame duck, but it also would have given him the ability to do the right thing about the border and the Middle East without having to worry about how activists in the Democratic Party would have reacted. … The critical difference between Biden and both Bush 41 and Carter is that Biden would be losing to someone who constitutes a grave threat to an American democracy that has served this country well for close to 250 years and a world order that has served this country well for 75 years. If Biden loses to Trump in November, it would overshadow all of his achievements over the past four years and define his legacy. To allow it to happen would be irresponsible and unforgivable. If democracy is truly on the ballot, as Biden and his campaign often argue, then he owes it to the country to step aside.
The question is whether Biden has the self-awareness to realize how devastating his debate performance was and to step aside. My guess is that he’s not even close to it. My heart sank yet again when I saw a clip of him thanking supporters immediately after the debate, and he was gracious and optimistic — exactly as if he hadn’t just spent the previous hour-and-a-half struggling to get to the end of his sentences in full view of 100 million Americans. The only hope is for the people who have any possible influence over him — let’s say Barack and Michelle Obama, Jill Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, maybe the Clintons — to sit down with him in the Oval Office and break the hard news to him. They can wait for the next round of polling to come out — if there’s a swing of five or even ten points against Biden, as there may well be, there’s a chance that that can get through to Biden. For the sake of the country, I hope it’s ten points — whatever it takes to get the message across. And it does have to happen very, very soon. The point is that the Democrats have a losing hand right now. There is no other shoe that will drop between now and November — Trump is not going to go prison or drop dead, Biden will not magically rejuvenate. The only thing to do is to reshuffle the deck, but it will take Biden to do that and Biden won’t do it unless he is very firmly pushed.
Counterpoint from Heather Cox Richardson:
Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.
What a fucking mess.
Conor Niland, who used to be the number one tennis player in Ireland, on being “at the bottom of the top” of professional tennis. I loved this bit about seeing Andre Agassi at an ATP event in San Jose…
“Can we get you anything, Andre?” the gaggle circling him asked earnestly. “Uh, sure, I’ll have some water,” he replied half-heartedly, even though he was standing a few paces from a fridge full of bottled water. He wanted to give them something to do. One of them was dispatched and quickly came back with a plastic glass full of chilled water. Andre took a small sip and put it down on the table beside him, the one I was sitting at. He didn’t pick it back up. After a few moments, Andre and his entourage moved on.
If you like Niland’s piece, and you’re even mildly into tennis, then you should absolutely read Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. The opening chapter (“The End”), has this brilliant bit:
It’s no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it’s all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It’s our choice.
Consider this your friendly reminder that Wimbledon kicks off on Monday; any point can become the turning point.
three book recommendations
It’s officially hot book summer; here are three things I’ve read recently and absolutely loved, because it turns out that every book is a beach book.
Moonbound, by Robin Sloan. Robin was kind enough to gift me an advance reader copy of his new novel, so I finished it a bit ahead of some friends of mine (#humblebrag). Set 10,000 years in the future, after the decline of human civilization (“the Anth”), it’s a delightfully weird take on the Arthurian legend, a hero’s journey through a strangely evolved planet that features talking beavers, multi-dimensional math, and a battle with AI “dragons” with a very unlikely narrator.
X and Y and Z, along with time, are sufficient for billiard balls and booster rockets-simple things. But real life, the complexity of it, demands more. This was our discovery: the world, like a sponge, will soak up as many dimensions as you provide.
Eastbound, by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore. This brief novel (137 small pages – you might miss it on the bookshelf, or lose it in your beach bag!) follows two AWOL travelers on the Trans-Siberian Express: Aliocha, a deserting Russian soldier, and Hélène, a Frenchwoman who has left her Russian lover. They can’t speak, and yet there are sentences like this one…
In the end, whether it was this young man or a bear stretched out there, it would amount to the same thing, the same enormity, as though the real was suddenly crumbling, subverted by powerful dreams or completely other substances capable of catalyzing metamorphoses, as though the real was tearing apart under the pressure of faint but immutalbe deviations, something far bigger, far stronger than it – but no, there are no dreams in Hélène’s head, no drugs in her blood, the young man is well and truly there – indeed, he is the real, the tangible present moment of life, here, breathing with his mouth open a little, body rising and falling imperceptibly with each breath, and if she were to place a hand on him, on his pale and downy cheek, on his shoulder, she knows she would feel him alive, he would stir, open and eye and wake up.
The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen. What does it mean to be a friend? And what does it mean to be a friend with someone suffering from schizophrenia? And what happens when that friend stabs his girlfriend to death with a kitchen knife?
You would have to be very ignorant about schizophrenia, as I certainly was, and deluded about writing, as I continued to be, to think that telling the story of your struggle with psychosis could turn it into a past-tense affliction, like sorrow transmuted into words.
no i don't have a substack...
…but I finally wired up an email newsletter, powered by Buttondown, to automatically deliver new sippey.com posts to your inbox if that’s how you roll. Learn more at sippey.com/subscribe.
two by two
Long time readers know I love a good 2x2. After all, two of my most read blog posts feature them; one here on sippey.com, and one that’s been unceremoniously deleted from blog.twitter.com. LOL.
Which is why I absolutely LOVED Noah Brier’s deep dive into the history of the 2x2 at Why is this Interesting. From Igor Ansoff at RAND, to Boston Consulting Group to Clayton Christensen’s passionate defense of the form in 1997, Brier lays it all out.
While it may seem silly to spend this amount of time diving into the concept of the 2x2 rather than the content of some of the most famous matrices, in this case, I think the medium is the message. Strategy is far too often disconnected from execution and simple tools like 2x2 matrix attempt to make it more accessible and therefore more easily acted upon by individuals within an organization.
Emphasis mine.
Cal Newport compares ultra-processed food to ultra-processed content:
This analogy between food and media is useful because it helps us better understand responses to the latter. In the context of nutrition, we’re comfortable deciding to largely avoid ultra-processed food for health reasons.
…
This is how we should think about the ultra-processed content delivered so relentlessly through our screens. To bypass these media for less processed alternatives should no longer be seen as bold, or radical, or somehow reactionary. It’s just a move toward a self-evidently more healthy relationship with information.
National treasure Matt Levine on Safe Superintelligence:
OpenAI was founded to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of outside commercial pressures. And now every once in a while it shoots out a new AI firm whose mission is to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of the commercial pressures at OpenAI.
Via Simon Willison, Nikhil Suresh, I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again:
Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.
Neven Mrgn, How it feels to get an AI email from a friend:
It felt like the episode of Mrs. Maisel where Midge discovers that her husband’s comedy act features stolen Bob Newhart jokes.
Dynomight delivers 43 pieces of Obvious Travel Advice:
Time seems to speed up as you get older. And you wonder—is it biological, or is it because life had more novelty when you were a child? Travel partly answers this question—with more novelty, time slows way down again.
Finally, Phil Hazleden reviews The Iliad:
So I got basically no sense of what it was like to be on the battlefield. How large was it? How closely packed are people during fighting? How long does it take to strip someone of their armor and why isn’t it a virtual guarantee that someone else will stab you while you do? The logistics of the war are a mystery to me too: how many Greeks are there and where do they get all their food? We’re told how many ships each of the commanders brought, but how many soldiers and how many servants to a ship?
Steven Johnson on the capabilities of NotebookLM, and some of the interesting skills requried to get the most out of LLMs:
The core skills are not just about straight prompt engineering; they’re not just about figuring out the most efficient wording to get the model to do what you want. They also draw on deeper, more nuanced questions. What is the most responsible behavior to cultivate in the model, and how do we best deploy this technology in the real world to maximize its positive impact? What new forms of intelligence or creativity can we detect in these strange entities? How do we endow them with a moral compass, or steer them away from bias and inaccurate stereotypes? Can language alone generate a robust theory of how the world works, or do you need more explicit rules or additional sensory information?
Related, Maggie Appleton’s (gorgeous) presentation at the Local-first Conference in Berlin, Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers:
We first need language model agents that are designed to act as central orchestrators for home-cooked software projects. These agents can guide barefoot developers through the process of writing technical specifications and help them work out what kinds of tools they might need for a piece of software.
Sam Kahn makes an argument Against Stories:
When I read most work that’s out now — let alone most movies — what I see, basically, is fear. A fear of boring an audience. A fear of alienating an audience. And so there’s an obsession with a clever style. There’s an obsession above all with economy — with making sure that there is nothing extraneous in a work of art, nothing that detracts from the optimized story structure.
Craig Mod on his latest walk, this time through Bali. I love Craig’s writing, because so much of it is drum-tight; this one is loose and free, deliberately so. All of it is worth reading, but here’s my favorite sentence:
Us, a bunch of overachievers laid flat by jungle encroachment, sharing chocolate snacks and fruit and crackers and smokes against panoramic backdrops on an IMAX scale.
Greg Allen, Moby Dick is My Moby Dick:
I want a first edition of Moby Dick, but I think the psychic price of actually ever buying one will be too high.
Noah Kalina’s series of photographs Protect the Network.
We’ve all seen this. It happens everywhere. The trees trimmed to protect the wires. … I was curious about what goes into the pruning and maintenance of these trees, so I reached out to the person whose title is “Manager, Vegetation Management” at my local utility company.
He and designer Pablo Declan have published that correspondence and the photographs in a limited edition zine. Instant order.
Rebind recipe: combine one part Project Gutenberg, one part Chat GPT, two parts Masterclass, add a healthy dash of pretense, mix well. I don’t buy the “director’s commentary” metaphor (the Rebind experts, like John Banville, aren’t the “directors” in this movie), but I am really into using LLMs to help people dig deeper into difficult material.
Related: I hadn’t really been paying attention to Authors Equity, but in his newsletter a few days ago James Clear (author of Atomic Habits and an investor in Authors Equity) announced that Seth Godin is publishing his next book there, and Joseph Nguyen signed with them to distribute his best selling Don’t Believe Everything You Think. The biggest difference between AE and traditional publishers? Profit sharing. From their FAQ: “We work with a joint venture/profit share model, paying no advance but offering a much higher per-unit payout to the authors we work with.”
Robin Sloan, in his latest newsletter, on the “phase change” of AI training.
When capability increases so substantially, the activity under discussion is not “the same thing, only faster”. It is a different activity altogether. Phase change.
Basically, I want to immunize you against this analogy, and this objection. There’s plenty to reasonably debate in this nascent field, but any comparison between AI training and human education is just laughably wrong.
This is what digitization does, again and again: by removing friction, by collapsing time and space, it undermines our intuitions about production and exchange.
No human ever metabolized information as completely as these language models. “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” You’re gonna need fresh intuitions.
Robin’s new novel, Moonbound, comes out in June. Spoiler alert: it’s fucking great.
ten recent good things
Deb Chachra’s book, How Infrastructure Works.
I think of these two systems, time and mapping, as the infrastructure for infrastructure. Their growth in extent and precision has paralleled and enabled the infrastructural networks that rely on them.
Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Flights.
The world is ready to be overturned – it’s only a convention that the floor is beneath our feet, while the ceiling is overhead, the body no longer belongs just to itself, but is instead a part of a live chain, a section of a living circle.
Episode 9 of Shōgun.
Accepting death isn’t surrender. Flowers are only flowers because they fall.
Jaqueline Novak’s Netflix special, Get On Your Knees.
I do have a sort of poetic sensibility I like to warn people about at the top of the show because I know it can be trying at times. I can’t help myself. Yeah, I used to write poetry in college. Like many, I gave it up. I grew tired. I grew tired of being in a constant state of enchantment. You know, just so many hours spent curled in windowsills, just the muscles cramping, the eyes drying out from all that wonderment, just… Every night seeing the moon as if for the first goddamn time. I just wanted to grow accustomed to the moon, you know? I wanted to take moonlight for granted, like other girls.
Ted Gioia on the MacGuffin, What Is Really Inside the Briefcase in ‘Pulp Fiction’?
The fun is in the pursuit, not its final object. But consider the unsettling implication: Hollywood heroes are really chasing nothing.
Robin Rendle, Longboarding.
Onboarding is the interface. All of it. Not just a check list or a flow or big dumb modals with fancy illustrations in them. Onboarding is every moment in the application. So every moment should be cared for.
Heather Cox Richardson, April 12, 2024.
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort built on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor. … Over the next four years, the Civil War would take more than 620,000 lives and cost the United States more than $5 billion. By 1865, two-thirds of the assessed value of southern wealth had evaporated; two-fifths of the livestock— horses and draft animals for tilling fields as well as pigs and sheep for food— were dead. Over half the region’s farm machinery had been destroyed, most factories were burned, and railroads were gone, either destroyed or worn out. But by the end of the conflagration, the institution of human enslavement as the central labor system for the American South was destroyed.
Amanda Petrusich, Maggie Rogers’s Journey from Viral Fame to Religious Studies.
Headlines are overblown by design, but her audience’s devotion—something akin to worship—was real. The tumult of the Trump Administration and the pandemic meant that Rogers’s fans, like everyone, were increasingly desperate for moral guidance. But Rogers was, too. “I was looking for answers, just the same as everybody else,” she said. “It was really jarring—people asking me for advice on suicide, or to perform marriages. I started to realize that there was this functional misalignment with the work that I had trained to do and the work that I was being asked to perform.”
Rosencrans Baldwin, Stillness.
Phones ping. Pots clatter. Every day has its heartbeats and hydraulics, and so do I. But to sit with them, feel them in my chest and know them better—a feeling of freedom grips me.
Brooks Reitz, A sauce for anything/everything.
Tonnato is a sauce made from canned tuna, lemon, olive oil, anchovies, and mayonnaise. It doesn’t jump off the page when you read “tuna sauce,” but it way overdelivers on the plate. It comes together in the food processor in minutes and should be deployed liberally on anything: raw veggies, hard boiled eggs, and grilled chicken being a few of my favorite vehicles.
r.i.p. richard serra
Richard Serra died this week. Coverage: Artsy, Artnet, NYT (Kimmelman), NYT (Smith).
Here’s Kimmelman on experiencing Serra’s “elliptical mazes of twisted Cor-Ten steel.”
I always found them to be serious fun. They concentrate the mind, stirring fear and anticipation, changing inch by inch, step by step. Serra magically transforms folded, tilting walls of rolled steel into what can almost resemble planes of melted wax. Passages, like caves or canyons, narrow and looming, suddenly open onto clearings.
Google Photos is getting pretty good – here’s a screenshot of the first bit of search results from all the Serras I’ve snapped over the years…
The experience of disappearing into his mazes turned Serra’s sculptures into something remarkably human, almost in spite of their materials, their scale. This short piece from SFMOMA about the installation of his piece Sequence is a great reminder of how Serra’s sculptures bumped up against notions of time, decay, civic infrastructure, personal boundaries and visual perception.
Three things of sporting note: death, machinery, words.
Iditarod musher Dallas Seavey kills moose to protect his dogs during race.
According to Iditarod Rule 34, if an edible big game animal — like a moose, caribou or buffalo — is killed in defense of life or property, the musher is required to gut the animal and report it to race officials at the next checkpoint. Mushers who follow must help gut the animal when possible and no teams may pass until the animal is gutted and the musher gutting the animal has proceeded.
Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain. Linked everywhere, because it was unceremoniously unpublished from Road & Track’s website, but obviously worth reading. (Version linked here is my highlighted read on Readwise.)
When we got into the garage, Lewis’s car was naked, its insides visible for all to see. I think this was the moment where my respect for the sport as it exists really made itself clear. It is hard to describe what I felt looking at that car. The closest phrase I have at my disposal is the technological sublime. I pictured a living, breathing animal of extraterrestrial origin, hooked up to a thousand arcane sensors that delivered messages in little pulses. All the tubes and sculpted carbon-fiber parts and the endless net of wires all working in service to the godhead engine, formed something totally incomprehensible to me, a feat of engineering so vast it breached the realm of magic.
The Tournament of Books Play-in Match. The Auburn Conference v. The Bee Sting v. The Librarianist.
As is well known, the Tournament of Books is an elaborate prank played on those who think they are capable of making aesthetic judgements.
Didn’t have this on my 2024 bingo card: Taylor Swift Beau Travis Kelce Will Help Finance a Basquiat Documentary.
WITI: The Saddle Stitch Edition. I loved the Hermès episode of Acquired; Why is this Interesting digs into the saddle stitch. “The craft and process is antithetical to mass-produced goods and is a good representation of what actual luxury is: based on effort, rare, and made to last.”
Via The Browser, this 13 year old, 3200 word piece on the Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball Extra Fine.
We care about what our words look like because we somewhere believe that this says something about who we are beyond font or scrawl. We think we can detect gender and personality, childhood traumas, future ambitions deep-seated hang-ups, sophistication and intelligence from the way a person’s hand puts ink to paper.
Greg.org on Richard Prince’s photographs of Milton Berle’s file cabinets of jokes:
When I first saw these images, I figured that their elongated, portrait-style dimensions reflected a decade of Prince using an iPhone as a studio. But they also simultaneously read as landscapes, with joke mesas extending to a cropped out horizon, a western desert begging for a cowboy. Then I saw the file cabinets, and realized these images also map to their subject, and the experience of living with these physical objects made over decades from words, ideas and language.
