Katherine Rundell’s five audio essays on the power and politics of children’s fiction. So far I’ve listened to the first two and have loved them. Worth your time.
Erin Kissane says the big platforms like Facebook are dead on their feet. “The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs.” Agreed.
Ash Huang on tidying up her consumerism. “I can’t vote away billionaires who have no connection to common people and are obsessed with going to space instead of paying workers. But I can alter how much of my day-to-day cash goes to their war chest. I can reduce how much money I’m giving to dangerous people, and punish companies focused on algorithmic blood sucking and extractive practices. Even if they’re not billionaires yet.” Yes. I feel the need to do better at this.
Maxwell Neely-Cohen on how to store something for a hundred years. Published by the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, and the page design by Shelby Wilson and Alex Miller is really quite lovely. The topic, too, is something I think about often.
David Moldawer on technique, particularly this quote from Stravinsky: “I’ve … learned to distrust the future. If I have an idea, it’s crucial to work it out now, while it still makes sense in my head, rather than jot a half-baked notion down to be resolved later. With this stuff, there is no later. Get it right, right now.” Part of my mind insists that this can’t be true, but at the same time I do find that ideas fresh at inception can and often do go stale. That might be a good thing, though? (Some ideas seem good initially, but later on, not so much.)
Celine Nguyen on research as a leisure activity. I really liked this. Recommended!
Wesley Osam on worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy. In particular this bit: “Most of us live in the long tail of historical significance. The books that speak most deeply to most people deal with problems of our magnitude and help us come to terms with our mundanity. Much of SFF assumes without thinking about it—and, in assuming, inadvertently argues—that the only people of significance or interest are the ones whose lives take place on the cosmological/world-historical scale of exhaustive worldbuilding. Part of becoming an adult is accepting that you’re really Toiletry Application Guy, and that being this kind of person is okay.” I wish there were more speculative fiction in this vein.
Henry Oliver on reading great literature and his upcoming book, The Reader’s Quest. “We should read these great works because they offer us pleasures and perspectives that are unavailable anywhere else. Because they can fundamentally change how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us. Because they are pinnacles of human accomplishment.” This post sparked my interest in trying classic lit again. (With some success this time!)
Steven Johnson on how to read a novel, more specifically about Patrick Collison’s book list tweet and Middlemarch and Bleak House. Neither of which I’ve read. I hope to rectify this by the end of the year.
Nathaniel Roy on how he uses notebooks. A nice nerdy deep dive. Enjoyed this. I’m using my paper notebooks more now, after a hiatus of several years, and it’s tremendously satisfying.
Julian Gough on stanets and ploons. I have no idea if he’s right about any of this, but the ideas here — that most of the life in the universe may be inside the icy moons of planets that don’t orbit stars — are riveting. (As is his idea about the evolution of universes, which I’ve linked to before.) (And…apparently I’ve linked to his newsletter not once but four times already. I did not realize this.)
Simon Willison on running a link blog, to get a little meta for a moment. Several of these accord with my own unwritten rules for these link posts, particularly the one about always including the names of the people who created whatever it is I’m linking to. That one matters a lot to me.
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.
Alex Chan on using static websites for tiny archives. Ooh, I really like this idea. I’m now planning to do this with my personal apps (to do list, journals, notes, etc.), having them regularly export static site archives. (I already archive the database files, but an HTML export is a lot more usable and would work without the app needing to run and without the user needing to know how the database is structured, which is nice.)
Rachel Andrew on Chrome’s new support for adding content to page margins (like page numbers, as part of the CSS Paged Media spec). Exciting to see this start happening! I’ve been waiting a while for browsers to start implementing this, making Paged.js less necessary. Hoping the other browsers follow suit soon.
Sean Voisen on reading at whim. I have lists of books I want to read — several lists, in fact — and update them daily, but even then, what I read next almost always comes down to whim. I feel like it’s working out okay.
Keith Cirkel on not having time to learn React. I like and echo his advice on studying web platform fundamentals, learning a strongly typed systems language, and reading specs.
MIT is offering free tuition to students whose families make under $200k/year. Wow.
Michael Walther on ETH Zürich’s new method for printing buildings with earth-based materials. Also see this article by Rupendra Brahambhatt about it, with more details. Very cool.
HTML for People, by Blake Watson. If you want to learn HTML and start making websites, this seems like a good first step.
Helga Stentzel’s clothesline animals are lovely. I also enjoyed her Food for Thought and Edible Creatures series and her Hope piece.
Jesper on Andy Matuschak’s post about learning from textbooks. Particularly the last bit: “I’ve been doing way too much silent reading, and though I rarely stop thinking about things, I’ve been doing way too little writing and processing.” I feel the same.
Swissmiss on having a “no excuse hour” at the beginning of the day. I like this idea, though an hour may be unrealistic for some (see the next link).
Eleanor Konik on what it means to not have time. A good counterpoint and reminder. “But it’s okay if you just pick one thing you really care about, and it’s okay if that thing is ‘being a good friend’ instead of ‘maximizing your potential’ or ‘journaling daily’ or whatever.”
The First Presidency has authorized garment changes for women in hot and humid climates.
Matt Sarnoff’s subpixel text encoding. Ha. Not new (it’s from 2008) but still quite cool.
Heikki Lotvonen on a font with built-in syntax highlighting using OpenType features. Interesting idea. I’m not sure how realistically usable it is, but either way, fun to see the experimentation.
Michael Lopp on writing. Seems about right, particularly the last line.
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.
Victoria Gill on the reservoir of liquid water found on Mars. Exciting!
Benj Edwards on researchers crafting lifelike robotic skin from living human skin cells. This is weird and kind of disturbing in a few different ways. (I’m over here imagining a fleshy Roomba whose skin starts decomposing after a software update fails. Zombie robots, anyone?)
Victor Tangermann on scientists creating a robot controlled by a blob of human brain cells. And hey, another disturbing step forward. Ha. Part of me wonders, by the way, how far advances like these will get before global climate change regressions become a blocker to progress.
Ted Gioia on doctors raising a patient from a deathlike state with ultrasound electronic music. Fascinating.
Sara Hendren on sending kids to college. “This is the first of many parenting presuppositions that make up the cultural water we’re swimming in and therefore can’t see. We imagine our children as maybe-slightly-immature but essentially fully-formed selves. Our job is framed as clearing the obstacles only; we’re tasked with whatever passive supports will help our children optimize themselves on their own terms.” Which is how I’ve seen it. Her point here, though, is that this isn’t enough, and that these kids still need to be formed. “But formation is in short supply everywhere! I don’t get very far, even among fellow professors, when I bring this up. The autonomy-led, buffet-style, platform-burnishing model for higher education is thoroughly internalized in most places. You have to look pretty far and wide to find a strong sense of mission for forming young people into their free future selves.” Interesting throughout.
Teenage Engineering’s medieval EP-1320. Ha. Love this.
Tanner Greer on Patrick Collison’s canonical Silicon Valley reading list. While I’ve admittedly soured a fair bit on SV technologists in general and I have zero interest in becoming more like them, the books on this list that I’ve already read (The Power Broker, Dealers of Lightning, The Dream Machine) were good, and I suspect there are a few others here worth reading. (I’ve long wanted to read A Pattern Language, for example, and Seeing Like a State and Titan and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt are on my list as well.)
C. D. Cunningham on the CES Letter not actually being the sincere questions of an honest truth-seeker. Not a huge surprise.
Eleanor Konik on themed logs being more useful than daily ones. Agreed.
Steven Luu on using enums instead of booleans. A good point.
