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.
• I was rapt by the way this Katie Baker piece on Eric Schneiderman’s attempt at a #MeToo redemption tiptoed through such difficult territory. • Hype as a scale. • Scratching that Murakami-esque, middle aged vinyl dad itch: Listening Room on Instagram • When she was worried about the state of the world in the 1960s, Pauline Oliveros started singing and playing long, extended drones on her accordion. She spent nearly a year on a […]
Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans said if you inspire enough people to support your work just enough, you can earn a living from almost anything. A thousand people, a hundred dollars each, that’s enough to build on. A simple theory. Li Jin recently put forward a modest proposal: what if you get 100 people who give much, much more? More money from fewer people. Why stop there? Why not a single patron giving one thousand […]
