What is urgency? Why are some people driven while others sit back? Because I am a happy cliche, Hamilton has been on repeat recently. In Burr’s words: “he has something to prove, he has nothing to lose.” Why wouldn’t you try to do everything you can? Time is limited, and you can’t wait for life to happen to you. Clearly not everyone feels this way. Or even if they do, they don’t all feel able […]
•“The poetics of history from below” • Undark on how nudge theory—which was very exciting to the political classes over the last decade—fared during the pandemic • The Office of Collecting and Design • I love Michael Hobbes. Here’s his recent video on cancel culture (re: the last post) • Why the Center on Privacy & Technology is no longer using the term “artificial intelligence”
Information wants to be free. People want to be free too. But freedom from? Or freedom to? Hello Isiah Berlin. What freedoms count on either side of this moral ledger? Who gets to speak? And who gets to criticize? We’re dragged there again and again by the faithless, often in the tawdriest pages of the New York Times. A couple of years ago, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny became my go-to book on the threat to […]
• March 19 in San Francisco, Letterform Archive presents “Making Mistakes on Purpose” (passim) • Keith Stuart on the return of video game magazines: “If we’re going to cut down a tree, I want to do something as special as I can with it.” • “Tree planting is booming. Here’s how that could help, or harm, the planet.” (cf) • I wonder what’s happened to Barbara Beskind.
Surveillance in the wake of George Floyd, Tara Westover, Nico, and cancer.
The heart of a new kind of information ambience is a lop-sided shift in power.
Ukraine, viral philanthropy, asexuality, Facebook and two women on a quest to meet Evan Dando.
There are so many ways we can make mistakes, but also to make things that merely have the appearance of a mistake.
What to think about Ukraine? What to do about Ukraine? Timothy Snyder is building a list of ways to help. Lots of great, often worrying, information in this story on IKEA’s insatiable appetites. It’s the world’s largest consumer of wood; it’s the largest private landholder in Romania. I also learned the word “edacity”. (trees, passim) The NYT’s David Leonhardt, who has consistently argued for a kind of liberal’s relaxation of covid restrictions, has been a […]
What are animals to us? They are our friends, our families: they are threats, they are resources.
Start here 