It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance—and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility—doing a much more effective job than Trump.

It’s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”—resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as “diversity” simply reveals the safe space they enjoy. Because of their identity.

the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison; Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic-primary vote in the state

David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the country in 1990 by almost winning one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate

I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community

In the early 17th century, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity

Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president

Also his name is Fisher and apparently he likes fishing with his son Son Fisher (I'm not googling Jeff Fisher's son's name) because nominative determinism is real

The art direction for modern websites often requires displaying the same image in different places, shapes, and sizes. For example, a site’s home page might show square image thumbnails that link to selected articles. Each of those images might be shown as a large landscape picture on the top of the relevant article page, while a zoomed-in excerpt from the same picture might be shown lower down in the article. Other sizes might be used next to search results or in a collage.

neutered minimalism

rococo days of the web

as much as I know that transmitting writing via cables and air is a hell of a lot easier and cheaper than transmitting video, I’m not sure I can really stand here and say that the writing is—or should be—primary.

I worry that the push to keep the web defined to words, while pragmatic and reasonable in many ways, may also be used to decide what stories get told, and what stories are heard.

You can describe what happens in each of those videos in words, but those words will never equal watching them.

There’s more than a hint of disparagement and elitism in that saying: everyone should have taken up writing, which is obviously superior to reading or watching or (gasp!) consuming. And I worry that that same sentiment creeps in when we argue the supremacy of text over image on the web.

I think that history is telling: in that, given a canvas on which to play, many people opted to express themselves with color and image, often spending much more effort there then on the words, and often in surprising ways.

And yet:

So, okay, as a design constraint, the web sure does look like it’s text all the way down, and all this other stuff is extra. And I’m distinctly sympathetic to that notion: I happen to like text over other mediums, not only as a reader, but as someone who doesn’t particularly like to spend all day waiting for pages to load. I also like text because it’s more accessible than other mediums, and more easily archived. If the web is primarily text, then accessibility and preservation are both easy (if not trivial) problems to solve.

is hypertext constrained to text?

She can’t wait for virtual reality systems that will allow her to interact using her hands and body. The first systems with individual hand controllers should be coming out next year, those will be the real game changers.

Perhaps the world won't end in water wars after all.