“The Afrofuturist cannot tell you about the trajectory of an epidemic, predict the future of policing, or an election’s outcome. But it can say that, whatever our plights, a better world is possible. And more specifically, that an interaction with technology offers us a route to resistance.”—How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend, C Brandon Ogbunu, Wired
“Jill Abramson’s reason for not signing? “I thought it was part of an anti-wokeness campaign, backlash clothed as free speech,” the former New York Times executive editor said bluntly.” —The Harper’s ‘Letter,’ cancel culture and the summer that drove a lot of smart people mad, Sarah Ellison and Elahe Izadi, Washington Post
“Sicha has managed to widen the scope of Style without making it the junk drawer of the Times. Style is a place where experiments can be run and boundaries pushed. This is likely possible because Style is still seen as a less fraught area of the newsroom than, say, the Politics desk (not to mention Op-ed).”—How Choire Sicha Is Steering Style in a Crisis, Jessica Wakeman, Study Hall
“Digital computers are synonymous in the popular mind with precision processing of information. However, when it comes to the basic information processing task of keeping time, they often perform worse than expected. To see how bad computers can be, consider some things that are better at keeping time. The gold standard in timekeeping is the sundial, which is a perfect analog timekeeper. However, sundials are not very practical and are not used to keep time on […]
Anne Helen Petersen’s latest words resonated with me: I am not a parent. I am, however, a person who hears and sympathizes with so many of the struggles of managing to work and parent right now, and as Chloe Cooney put it all the way back in April, “the parents are not okay.” Not the parents who are essential workers. Not the parents who are taking care of infants, or toddlers, or elementary school age […]
JUST BOOKS THIS WEEK, otherwise I was offline more or less, no work. Two more Maigrets—The Carter of La Providence and The Hanged Man of St Pholien—along with A Burning by Megha Majumdar and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Chatter, his 2006 book on the NSA and Echelon. A lot’s changed in the years since that one came out, I can tell you.
They talk about living your values, of walking the walk. John Lewis did it, figuratively and literally. This morning I heard a Republican on the radio lauding Lewis for a life spent in service. The speaker noted, of course, Lewis’s leadership in civil rights, and specifically pointed out his dedication to non-violent protest and civil discourse. Given the moment, it was almost too easy to read between the lines, to catch a whiff of the […]
BLESSED RELIEF came as I prepared to take a week offline to get my head back But coming on the back of two short weeks, it was a headache to get everything done that I could—so that week is this week, if you follow. Still, I managed to finish a short novel: based on John Lanchester’s recent praise of the entirety of Georges Simenon’s Maigret series, I started at the beginning to see what he […]
I harbor a mild but ongoing fascination with the wild, out of the way places that British people have decided they should inhabit; the far-flung islands, the unnavigable boggy moors, the places where there’s one house every few miles and people choose lonely, hard existence for whatever reason. St Helena, Dartmoor, the Hebrides, Pitcairn and so on. Larissa MacFarquhar—one of the New Yorker writers I most enjoy—crystallizes what draws people to one of these places, […]
A REMARKABLE WEEK! I finished a book, as in properly-finished-closely-reading-for-fun, for the first time in three months. And then I finished another one! Things are pretty wild up in here. (Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson and A Man by Keiichiro Hirano, if you’re interested. Only books with “man” in the title, apparently.) The odd thing is that I’ve been totally blocked writing BRB, even though I don’t need to read new books in order to write […]
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