Humans do. It’s how we operate; a fundamental part of what makes us. We shape the world around us. We observe. We try to be interesting. We act. Every action is a protest against what was there before. Every creation is a moment of optimism. Doing is how we are built. Sometimes we do with our bodies. Remember covid lockdowns? Remember when a new and potentially deadly disease stalked the planet, when nobody was even […]
Currently reading Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America and happened across a statistic which made me sit up: the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US peaked in 2007 and has been slowly declining ever since. Here are the numbers according to Pew, from 2019—remember that when the politicians get their blood up.
• Jonathan Katz has the best piece I’ve seen about the current attempts to rewrite the history of the New York Times op-ed controversy in 2020. (You remember, the one that engulfed the paper when it published Tom Cotton’s call for federal troops to end Black Lives Matter protests? The one currently undergoing a revisionist reconstruction project which is being laundered by Semafor as a way to get attention?) • Some people dredged up a […]
•“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 […]
You can lose a lot of things. Your door keys. Your temper. The plot. If you’re particularly careless, you might even lose entire countries. Ukraine is on the edge right now. It’s not the first. Doggerland was a piece of prehistory, a stretch of marshy coastline from when Britain was just an archipelago dangling from one corner of Europe. It was misplaced during the Original Brexit 9,000 years ago when the sea carved East Anglia […]
• Beautiful images of polar bears who have moved into an abandoned Arctic weather station (drone footage on YouTube) • Coober Pedy is a town in Australia where half of people live underground because it’s so bloody hot. • The alien’s binary: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on motherhood. • Pew’s morphology of Republicans identifies five distinct groups. • Mind expanding (to me) piece on the possibilities of Arabic typography.
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