Mandy Brown responds to Alan Jacobs, including a compelling peasant woodland metaphor borrowed from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (which I need to read). “A peasant woodland is one in which human participation and activity help the woods become more productive for humans and wildlife both—not through anything shaped like a plan but rather through a kind of call and response, an improvisation in which all the critters and creatures of the forest are players among us.” This way of thinking about the web seems healthy.
Helena Zhang’s Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font. Fun.
Nathaniel Roy on Knopf’s logo variations. Also fun. I wish more publishers did this. (Maybe they do.)
Naz Hamid on being content with an older iPhone. I used to upgrade my phone consistently every two years, but this is the first year where I don’t feel like I need to. Freeing.
Devin Kate Pope on fearing home cooks. “The U.S. food system disconnects people from their food and each other. […] We, the people, are really remarkably capable of cooking everything and anything. Why am I more comfortable buying frozen tamales made by a corporation flown into my town than from the lady up the street? Who is the suspicion serving? Who profits when people are scared to eat food made by their neighbors?” Good point, one I hadn’t thought of much before. (Even though my favorite food in other countries is typically street food sold by small vendors, which is close to the same thing.)
Gareth Edwards on the imminent disappearance of the .io domain because of the sovereignty transfer.
Mandy Brown on staying in the gap, referring to Ira Glass’s taste gap story about creative work. I think of the original quote quite often and like this expansion of the idea. “The gap between your abilities and your taste is not a gap to be crossed but one to be cultivated.”
Mandy Brown on personal sites. Particularly this part:
A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.
Alan Jacobs on POS instead of POSSE, for personal sites. This is largely where I’m at nowadays, though I do reluctantly post art to Instagram and Facebook (for now, anyway).
Tracy Durnell on the secret power of a blog. “If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write.” I need to remember this.
Katie Clapham’s lovely Receipt from the Bookshop newsletter. “I open the draft when I open the shop, detail the day’s customers and transactions, and then send it out to readers before I go home.” I love this idea, and the newsletter itself is good, too.
Richard Rutter on the problem with superscripts and subscripts. I didn’t know about font-variant-position, cool. Also see Richard’s TODS default OpenType stylesheet.
Dan B. on how to build anything extremely quickly via the power of outlining.
Steven Arcangeli’s oil.nvim, a Neovim plugin that lets you edit your filesystem like a buffer. Cool idea.
Robin on AI. “I want real things by real people.” Yes, exactly.
Anastasia Bizyayeva on how every online map of China is wrong, in the sense that the satellite images don’t line up with the street map vectors. Fascinating.
Marco Giancotti suggests you don’t have time to read books that won’t change your life. A high bar, but quality clearly matters far more than quantity, and perhaps there’s something to keeping the bar this high. I’m not quite this strict about my reading, but who knows, might be worth trying.
The Psmiths review Jonathan Sumption’s The Albigensian Crusade and Dennis C. Rasmussen’s Fears of a Setting Sun. Love these reviews, and the books they’re reviewing are super interesting, too.
Sean Voisen on Wendell Berry writing without a computer. This stood out to me, particularly the part about writing by hand for a more embodied process.
Greg Neville’s blog on Penguin book cover designs. Fun. I’ve enjoyed the posts on the Marber grid and the Penguin classics and the classics (again).
Alice Vincent on Coralie Bickford-Smith’s Clothbound Classics cover designs for Penguin. Loved this. The accompanying video is also good.
Ted Chiang on why AI isn’t going to make art, with his main argument being that art involves lots of choices. Agreed. (Truth be told, I haven’t been giving AI much thought lately. I know there are new developments — OpenAI’s o1-previews reasoning model, for example — but none of it is terribly interesting to me anymore.)
Christopher Bonanos interviews Robert Caro about The Power Broker. Also, the ebook will at long last be available (for real this time!). It goes on sale tomorrow on the Kindle store. Great book.
Jim Nielsen on sanding UI. I do this too, and clicking around a ton really is key.
Hamilton Nolan on taxing billionaires 100% over $1 billion. I’m not an economist and don’t know what ramifications this might have, but on the face of it I really like the idea.
Matthias Endler on moving slow and fixing things and the harmfulness of the Paul Graham VC mentality. “As it turns out, I’ve always been drawn to the exact opposite: sustainable growth, robust solutions, and a long-term mindset. That’s why I’ve been contributing to open source for 15 years, why I only run small, bootstrapped businesses or non-profits, and why I focus on writing and knowledge sharing.
Matt Webb on not privatizing essential parts of the economy. Yes, this. I wish this were already true.
Adam Mastroianni’s blog extravaganza winners, with several interesting linked blog posts.
Alex Tabarrok quotes Vaclav Smil on how many workers it might have taken to build the Great Pyramid of Giza. Fewer than I expected.
Adrian Roselli’s semiannual reminder to learn and hire for web standards, wherein he quotes Alex Russell: “Never, ever hire for JavaScript framework skills. Instead, interview and hire only for fundamentals like web standards, accessibility, modern CSS, semantic HTML, and Web Components. This is doubly important if your system uses a framework.”
Mark Simonson’s Type Design Like It’s 1987 demo. I’ve only watched little parts of this so far, but it’s fascinating.
New hymn day! “Amazing Grace,” “This Is the Christ,” “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need,” and “Come, Lord Jesus,” among others.
