Teddy Macker on David W. Orr and a healing vision for America. This was so, so good. Highly recommended. This quote from Orr at the beginning sets the tone: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

Matt Glassman on how you should invite people over to your home regularly. This is good advice.

Han Lee on the AI Great Leap Forward. This really resonated. I really do not like AI mandates.

Becca Rothfeld on how you don’t have to use AI. “I am saying that the bar for using AI for anything, even something stupid and mindless, should be extraordinarily high.”

Henry Oliver’s post of someone else’s comment about teaching poetry to Latter-day Saint students raised on the KJV.

Christopher Drum on CAD-3D on the Atari ST. Particularly liked the parts about friction and UI density.

David Cain on enjoying things on purpose.

kqr on slide rules for kitchen measurements. After reading this, I ordered a slide rule. (Still need to learn how to use it, though.)

Photonist on documentary photography in the age of AI. This feels more human to me.

Elisa Gabbert on the essay as realm.

Ross Barkan on fiction and AI.

James O’Sullivan on writing with AI. “If you need a large language model to write, you are not a writer.”

Aubrey Hirsch’s comic on ChatGPT dads. Ha.

Alan Jacobs on redistributing your media portfolio (going analog, mainly).

Open Printer, “an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed for makers, artists, and anyone tired of throwaway hardware. Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair. You can print on standard sheets or paper rolls and choose between black or color cartridges, refillable at your convenience.” Cool.

W. Evan Sheehan on LLM-generated code in Neovim.

Niels Leenheer wrote a DOOM with CSS. Wow.

Analog cameras that can be 3D printed.

Alex Chan’s personalized garbage collection calendar via a Python script.

Frank Elavsky on why people should stop saying AI is just a tool. Yep. His post on prototyping is also good.

Lisette, a little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go.

Heerich.js, a tiny engine for 3D voxel scenes rendered to SVG.

Playbit Runtime, an interesting “runtime designed for highly dynamic graphical apps that are collaborative, with a really good set of developer tools.”

Den Odell on Pretext, that shiny new text layout JS library.

Tracy Durnell on personalized computing and agentic AI.

Audrey Watters on AI. “The future that the vast majority of people want – for themselves, for their children – is not one in which we can only afford to buy digital replicas of products and digital real estate (Facebook board member Marc Andreessen has been quite explicit about this goal) because everything that’s actually real is only accessible to the rich; where we’re all yanked around by algorithms; where there are no jobs; where there is no art, only slop; where there is no green space, no wilderness, no water because the planet is covered in the data centers that power this destruction.”

Sharif Shameem on how willingness to look stupid is a moat in creative work.

Matthias Ott on AI and the shape of friction.

Christopher Butler on making art by hand.

Brian Leli on how LLMs are antithetical to writing and humanity.

Pavel Laptev on shiny new CSS features.

ReadBeanIceCream’s plain text kanban reading board.

Cory Doctorow on AI psychoses.

Audrey Watters on AI again.

Marcin Wichary on AI autocomplete suggestions.

Jonas Hietala on one-bag travel for work.

Hyperwood, open source furniture.

Alexander Petros on how XML is a cheap DSL.

Lisa Charlotte Muth on moving all her content back onto her site.

Scott Smitelli on generative AI.

Sean Boots on generative AI vegetarianism.

zkbro on slowing down.

Marcin Wichary on web haptics on iOS.

Ada Palmer on why all science fiction and fantasy writers are historians.

Lev Grossman from 2014 on getting to the halfway point in NaNoWriMo.

Michael Uloth on switching configs for Neovim.

Rusty Foster on how AI isn’t people.

Robin Rendle on how the world is still so full of dinosaurs.

Marcin Wichary on Lotus 1-2-3 and two-line menubars.

Lyra on how you no longer need JavaScript for a lot of things.

Matthias Ott on LLM bots scraping the web incessantly. I’ve run into this as well. Ugh.

Dave Gauer on the love of programming (in the face of AI). This resonated.

A post on holding on to your hardware since the AI data centers could very well make it hard to get in the future.

Mandy Brown on specialists.

Scott on Gopher. Ah, nostalgia.

Halvor William Sanden on anti-intellectual tech.

Marcus Hutchins on the reasons he hates AI.

Bret Victor on AI. “If we take ‘AI’ to mean the current trend of deep-learning models trained on large datasets, there are a number of ways in which these techniques are incompatible with our values.”

Eliot on Henyapente and binary biology in the Gameboy OS.

An HTML quine. Also see Markdown CSS.

Rich Hickey on AI.

Matt Sephton’s WebGL CRT shader.

Matthew Walther on reading one hundred pages a day.

Oliver Burkeman on the power of immediacy.

Jim Nielsen on the anchor element’s href attribute.

Virginia Postrel on libraries of matter.

Fontquant, a tool to quantify what fonts can do.

Whew!

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There never was such a man, or behaviour so atrocious as his—a mixture of narrow-mindedness, selfishness, truckling, blustering, and duplicity, with no object but self, his own ease, and the gratification of his own fancies and prejudices, without regard to the advice and opinion of the wisest and best informed men or to the interests and tranquillity of the country.

Also:

Objects which I used to contemplate at an immeasurable distance, and to attain which I thought would be the summit of felicity, I have found worth very little in comparison to the value my imagination used to set upon them.

And:

Three days ago Lord Liverpool was seized with an apoplectic or paralytic attack. The moment it was known every sort of speculation was afloat as to the probable changes this event would make in the Ministry. It was remarked how little anybody appeared to care about the man; whether this indifference reflects most upon the world or upon him, I do not pretend to say.

Very much looking forward to reading the remaining volumes.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, published 1963, fiction, 259 pages. Oof. I picked this up because I liked Plath’s poetry and maybe also as a small attempt to try to better understand my father’s suicide. The writing was indeed great, but whew, the second half was kind of brutal for me.

Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, by Dava Sobel, published 1999, biography, 405 pages. I quite liked this, which is no huge surprise given how much I love reading about the history of science. It’s a biography of Galileo’s adult life, with lots of letters from his oldest daughter (a nun at a nearby convent) interleaved with the narrative, which covers Galileo’s research in astronomy and physics and of course the infamous trial. Reading this book made me realize I don’t spend nearly enough time actively thinking, or at least I don’t feel I do, which likely means instead that I’m not thinking about the things I wish I were. This passage is good:

“I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation,” Galileo continued his letter to Castelli, “such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.”

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen, published 1811, fiction, 456 pages. Delightful and witty. Loved it. I’d seen some of the film adaptations before but had never read the book till now, and that was entirely my loss. Of Austen’s novels, I have left only Emma and Mansfield Park, and I look forward to completing the set in the not too distant future.

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It started when I came across Karin Hendrikse’s article on building a static RSS reader (oh how I love static files), and then Terry Godier’s post on RSS and phantom obligations nudged me away from the idea that a feed reader has to be something like Feedly or Google Reader. At some point Feedly started adding more AI features (ugh) and I decided it was time to part ways and do my own thing.

Digest is a little command-line tool I built in Go that reads a list of feed URLs from a text file, fetches all of them in parallel, caches the responses, parses the feeds, and then compiles a list of all the posts from the day before into a static HTML file. That’s basically it. I run it manually on my laptop and rsync the HTML up to my server so I can get to it on my phone.

It’s been great so far. A few other thoughts and observations:

• Boundaries and edges feel good. It’s like a personal daily newspaper, where it’s very clear when I’ve finished for the day. Infinite rivers carry more stress, I think. Or maybe I just like checking things off lists.
• The slight time distancing also feels good — quiet and calm. Because it’s a daily digest from the day before, it feels like less of a dopamine slot machine. No more checking Feedly dozens of times a day.
• I originally had Digest run on my server via a cron job, but I moved back to running it manually on my laptop and I’ve found that I much prefer it this way. Fewer moving parts. (If I’m unable to generate the digest on any given day, by the way, I can pass the date as a command-line argument to the tool and it’ll compile posts for that date instead of yesterday’s.) A bit more resilient, too — I can just open the HTML file locally on my laptop if I want, no server needed.
• At first I included the contents of each post in the file, but I’ve since trimmed it down so each entry just has the post title and link plus the blog title and the author, and I open each link in a new tab. After decades of reading RSS feeds in homogenized typographic settings (all posts in the same font, etc.), I thought I wouldn’t care to read posts on their original sites, but I was wrong. I love it. Especially since most of what I read is on the small web.

As of now I have no plans to release Digest as open source, but maybe this description will inspire someone to build their own tool that meets their personal needs.

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The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410, by Iris Origo, published 1957, biography, 526 pages. Enjoyed this deep dive into the life of a medieval Tuscan merchant. Very detailed, thanks to Datini’s voluminous correspondence. Recommended if you’re into 1300s Tuscany, as I am. The preface includes this gem about the author:

The illegibility of her handwriting was also notorious. Her publisher and friend Jock Murray tells of tackling a passage at the bottom of a letter, which had defeated everyone else, and eventually deciphering the words: “Dearest Jock, I can’t read what I have written. Please type it out and send a copy to me.”

And this, from Petrarch, on doctors back then (glad things have changed!):

No one heeded their prescriptions, for I have always besought my friends and bidden my servants that nothing should ever be carried out on my person of what physicians had ordered, but that, if indeed something must be done, it should be just the opposite.

Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy, by Joyce Vance, published 2025, nonfiction, 168 pages. I’ve occasionally dipped into Vance’s newsletter for legal analysis on the criminal embarrassment that is Trump and his incompetent administration and all their unconstitutional mayhem, and her newsletter is solid. This book is likewise good, though it doesn’t have much legal analysis; it does, however, review Trump’s current attempts to destroy our democracy and turn himself into a vainglorious dictator, and it has recommendations for how to preserve our freedom. It’s about how rule of law and democracy are our best defense against the capricious, arbitrary whims of a tyrant, things we in America once again have firsthand knowledge of (re: Iran, tariffs, etc.). The book also points out (or maybe it’s just something I thought while reading it; I can’t remember) that anyone who is actively trying to make it harder for Americans to vote (cough SAVE Act cough) is fundamentally anti-American and an enemy of democracy.

The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, published 1353 (translation by John Payne published 1886), fiction, 1,075 pages. What a bawdy, bawdy book. I found it repugnant, though near the end there were a couple very refreshing stories where someone chooses not to be immoral. (Shocking!) While I was in the middle of this, we came to Genesis 39 in our family scripture study and that too was a glorious breath of fresh air. I did enjoy the conclusion, where Boccaccio tries to defend his work against the objections he was sure were coming. All in all, I’m glad I read this for the sake of becoming better versed in medieval lit, but whew, never going to read it again. Also, incessant vice is boring.

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You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

I’ve long interpreted that last sentence as a command to stop sinning, but today (and acknowledging that this is probably news to nobody else), seeing it as part of a paragraph and in the context of the immediately preceding verses, I believe I now actually understand it. (I was about to say that I finally understand it, but how final my interpretation is remains to be seen. And who knows — my reading may turn out to be balderdash.)

The epiphany: in these verses, Christ commands us to love our enemies, those who are hard to love, and by extension it’s a command to love everyone, inclusive, just as Heavenly Father loves everyone — a love encompassing, a love complete, and (in the sense of not missing anything or anyone) a love that is perfect. So “be perfect” here maybe doesn’t mean “don’t mess up in any way” (impossible in this life, and that impossibility is precisely why we need a Savior) but rather is a reiteration or summation of the preceding verses: a much more doable “love everyone.”

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Anyway, here we are, twenty years after. (Which, to digress yet again, I read as a kid and quite liked. Maybe it’s time to reread that series.) If you, dear reader, were reading this blog or one of its sundry predecessors (mostly Blank Slate and Top of the Mountains) twenty years ago and are somehow still here, I salute your fortitude and perseverance, and I think you should poke your hand out of the fog of darkness (commentless blogs being one-way glass) and tap out a short email saying hi. [The author would like to note that — mildly disturbing metaphors aside — this friendly suggestion also applies to anyone who started reading the blog later on, anyone starting now (hi!), and anyone who can’t take it any longer and stops reading after this paragraph mercifully concludes.]

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I generally read between four and ten books at a time, though at times it’s gone as low as two and as high as, uh, thirty. (Those were wild days.) For me it’s a balance between finishing books — where fewer at a time helps — and reading across more of my areas of interest in parallel.

Each day I try to read at least 100 pages. My loose goal is at least ten pages per book per day, though I’m not strict about that. I also try to read at least fifty pages per day from the main books I’m reading (usually either book club books or the ones I’m closest to finishing). Even long books like War & Peace melt away fairly quickly at fifty pages per day.

When I get near the end of a book (fewer than 150 pages left), I tend to switch to burndown mode where I focus only on that book and largely ignore the others (reading only a page or two from them per day, if that).

As of today, this is my list of reading tracks, which is how I divvy up my reading across genres. I usually try to read one book per track, but that’s not a hard and fast rule.

• Nonfiction, authors I’ve already read. Working through the bibliographies of authors I like, basically.
• Nonfiction, authors new to me. Which in practice means any nonfiction that isn’t already covered by one of the other nonfiction tracks.
• Old nonfiction. “Old” is defined loosely here but mostly means books one can find on Project Gutenberg.
• Biography/memoir. On these I try to alternate between modern and old (same meaning of “old” as above).
• Diaries and letters. I’ve split these up into their own tracks before and may do so again, but for now I flip between them.
• Classics. I try to switch between more serious classics (the Brontës, Tolstoy, Gaskell, Hardy, that kind of thing) and more “fun” classics — a designation I’m not totally happy with — like Anne of Green Gables, Dracula, The Secret Garden, and Phantom of the Opera.
• Modern lit. I tend to rotate through sf&f, lit fic, and historical fiction, though the genre lines are messy and I don’t worry much about which track a book ends up in since it’s the reading that matters. Sometimes I split sf&f out into its own track, but lately I’ve been less interested in it so I’ve consolidated.

The list is alive and changes frequently. It will no doubt change tomorrow, or even later today. I don’t know what that says about me.

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Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard, published 2011, history, 368 pages. Loved it! The history — the assassination, the undiagnosed mental illness, the medical malpractice — is tragic and awful, of course, but the book itself is so good. Highly recommended. I also enjoyed the parts about Alexander Graham Bell and now want to read Reluctant Genius. And Garfield’s diary.

Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis, published 1952, nonfiction, 239 pages. A reread after twenty years away. Overall, it held up. Lots of good stuff.

Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery, published 1908, fiction, 377 pages. I grew up on the Canadian miniseries but had never read the original book till now, which I’m glad I finally did because it’s delightful and wholesome and human and I loved it. And the ending! Poignant. (From what I can remember, by the way, the miniseries — which is on my list of “things to show to my kids as I irrationally try to recreate my childhood for them” — seems to be a fairly faithful adaptation.)

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Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, by Adam Cohen, published 2020, history, 498 pages. Good book, though frustrating throughout because of the court’s frequent decisions in favor of the rich and powerful instead of normal people, and also because of slimy, underhanded tactics by Nixon and McConnell and others. I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this, but still it stung. More and more, conservativism seems these days to me to be a blight that rots whate’er it touches and in many ways is fundamentally incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ. (Saying this as someone who grew up fairly conservative.)

The White Album, by Joan Didion, published 1979, essays, 223 pages. Still loving Didion’s writing, about any topic. Liked this: a “place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”

The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, published 1597, play, 96 pages. Rather liked it — lots of great lines. Fun (if “fun” is the right word for a tragedy) (it’s not) to read it after reading Ovid on Pyramus and Thisbe. Also, it hits quite a bit differently now that I have teenagers around the age of Romeo and Juliet.

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