Links #134

Lincoln Michel on TV prose, his name for writing overly affected by visual media. Yes, 100%. This is something I’ve thought about frequently in recent years, and I’m slowly trying (with varying levels of success) to get into older novels to offset this.

Alan Jacobs on breaking bread with the dead (reading old books, etc.). “A vast cultural inheritance is ours for the taking, and to access it almost all we need is a computer with a web browser.”

Jonathan Edward Durham. “If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.” Ha. I like that.

David Epstein on taking a vacation from news consumption. Agreed. Doing this soon after the election made a huge difference for me.

James Goldberg’s essay on Latter-day Saint holidays from the Holiday Lit Blitz. “I will admit that, living less than two centuries into Latter-day Saint history, our holidays can feel a little underwhelming to me. But I suspect they’re still in their early stages, waiting to see what we might make of them.” I really liked this and agree.

Samuel Arbesman on creating a humanist monospace font for his terminal. “I wanted to construct a monospaced typeface—where the width of all glyphs are the same—that is ideal for writing code, but that would also have certain features of handwritten manuscripts that make it feel a bit like working with an old and mysterious text. I wanted programming to mingle with dusty tomes or spellwork. If programmers have been talking about the similarities between coding and magic for years, maybe we need a font that tries to make this more manifest.”

The Tilings Encyclopedia, a list of aperiodic tilings (like Penrose tiling). Cool.