Mahzad Hojjat, a social-psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, once told me that people may say that friendship betrayals aren’t as bad as romantic betrayals if they’re presented with hypothetical scenarios on a questionnaire. But that’s not how they experience friendship betrayals in real life. This doesn’t surprise me. I still have sense-memories of how sickened I was when this friend told me I’d been relegated to a lower league—my heart quickening, the blood thumping in my ears.

Were friendships always so fragile? I suspect not. But we now live in an era of radical individual freedoms. All of us may begin at the same starting line as young adults, but as soon as the gun goes off, we’re all running in different directions; there’s little synchrony to our lives. We have kids at different rates (or not at all); we pair off at different rates (or not at all); we move for love, for work, for opportunity and adventure and more affordable real estate and healthier lifestyles and better weather.From the November 2019 issue: Why you never see your friends anymoreYet it’s precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much. We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians.It’s not wholly natural, this business of making our own tribes. And it hardly seems conducive to human thriving.

In 2009, the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst published an attention-grabber of a study that basically showed we replace half of our social network over the course of seven years, a reality we both do and don’t intuit.

And yet the kind of relationships also matters. After all, “we remember the deceased because he was a father” is hardly heroic praise, amounting to little more than congratulating someone for the fact they managed to reproduce. It’s not the fact of our relational existence that matters to us so much as its quality: a loving mum, a supportive dad, a caring husband, a kind sister. We want to be remembered for the charity and sympathy with which we lived in communion. As the poet Philip Larkin put it, “What will survive of us is love.”

Death mercilessly cuts through the moral fog of living. Few people want to be memorialized for the stuff they had or the leisure they enjoyed, in spite of the fact that we spend so much of our time on earth pursuing these things and then talking about then. We want our funeral eulogy to be positive—obviously—but positive about the right things.

“Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”  I have spoken these words myself many times.  They are echoed in the old words of the Mass, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you.”  They might have meant something different in their time and place, but today they can often sound like a posture of self-flagellation, of refusal to believe in our essential goodness. What follows in the story are the words of Jesus: “Do not be afraid.”  Jesus sees Simon’s fear and shame and tells him not to be afraid. Some of us queer Catholics can get stuck in “Depart from me, Lord.”  It’s hard to make it to “Do not be afraid.” It was hard for me to hear the words of Jesus and really believe them.

I was overwhelmed by his mercy, which I had learned was one of God’s names.

Cringan evolved into its current form, cringe, in 16th-century Middle English, when it came to mean “to bend or crouch in embarrassment, servility or fear” (see: Robert Greene’s 1591 pamphlet describing a “fellow courteously making a low cringe”). By the 19th century it had been generalized into the current meaning: “to recoil in embarrassment, shame or fear.”

rhizomyx]] https://twitter.com/rhizomyx/status/1490789320822767626 /

The Self 000 Knowledge Management 100 Personal Management 200 Philosophy & Psychology; Spirituality & Religion Others 300 Social Sciences 400 Communications & Rhetoric; Language & Linguistics Others + Self 500 Natural Sciences 600 Applied Sciences 700 Art & Recreation 800 Literature History of Others & Self 900 History & Biography & Geography

My favorite classification system is Universal Decimal partially because it can do cool shit like the sequence of digits is interrupted by a precise type of punctuation sign which indicates that the expression is a combination of classes rather than a simple class e.g. the colon in 34:32 indicates that there are two distinct notational elements: 34 Law. Jurisprudence and 32 Politics; the closing and opening parentheses and double quotes in the following code 913(574.22)“19”(084.3) indicate four separate notational elements: 913 Regional geography, (574.22) North Kazakhstan (Soltüstik Qazaqstan); “19” 20th century and (084.3) Maps (document form) things can also be coordinated with +, marked as an extension of the first term with /, subgrouped with [], specified that it is inclusive with A/Z, and have other systems introduced via * So searching for “novels about lesbian firefighters in norway from 1960-80 by bisexual authors” is a legit query

Step 1: Divide everything in to ten things Take everything you need to organise and sort it in to, at most, ten large buckets. Make sure the buckets are unambiguously different. Put a label on each bucket. This forces you to group things quite broadly, but that’s the point.

Tagging is very useful but the lack of control and meaning breaks things down fast. “a (controlled term) is worth a thousand tags” as one article put it. Part of my pitch here is to say that i8n organizing your PKB you should favor controlled vocabularies and favor classification systems when you can.

women who have four or more children will never pay income tax again

I know whose side I have to be on.

One of the key facts of what I call “soft totalitarianism” in my recent book is that this ideology is taking power within the structures of liberal democracy. Take Amazon’s decision earlier this year to stop selling books that present transgenderism as a pathology. Amazon has the right to sell, or to not sell, whatever it wants. But Amazon controls so much of the US retail book market that if it decides not to sell books that take a particular moral or political position, then Amazon will have effectively exiled that debate from the public square. No publisher can afford to take the risk of coming out with a book that Amazon won’t sell. All of this is happening within liberal democracy, which is one reason why this totalitarianism is treading softly into dominance.

However

If Orban fails to ground Hungarian democracy in Christian thought and practice, then something quite ugly and racist may well arise. I think often about Ross Douthat’s great line: if you don’t like the Religious Right, wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.

there’s no doubt that the Orban government is anti-Muslim, and doesn’t want Muslim migrants. I think this is a wise position for a European country to take, given the evidence in other European countries. In the US, we have been able to assimilate Muslim immigrants, but for whatever reasons, that has not been true in Europe.

because he dissents from the woke race ideology

Kids of my generation, even in the Deep South, where I grew up, were taught that what Martin Luther King stood for was true and correct, and in fact profoundly Christian. This is true! I still believe it’s true. But now we are told by the American left that that’s not true, that in fact what the old segregationists believed – in race essentialism – is actually the case. I find this profoundly illiberal, and profoundly anti-Christian.

The idea of giving the invisible “others” so much influence over one’s work and creativity is baffling.

We are now programmed to evaluate our creative work using metrics,

We have all experienced those interactions where friends, colleagues, family members, and lovers got upset because we didn’t like their Facebook entries or Instagram photos fast enough.

Tempted to make a [[YunoHost]] package for [[Agora]].

Consumers can now buy improved heat pumps and induction stoves, which can boil water in nearly half the time as a gas stove.

“The average American likes choice and doesn’t want to be told what kind of fuel to use in their homes,” said Karen Harbert, chief executive of the American Gas Association. “Municipalities cannot take away that choice.”

In November 2019, the California Restaurant Association sued the town of Berkeley to strike down the change in building code. The association in its lawsuit said that “many of these restaurants rely on gas for cooking particular types of food, whether it be flame-seared meats, charred vegetables, or the use of intense heat from a flame under a wok.”

In the Pacific Northwest, a group of gas and pipeline companies put up $1 million to establish another front group called Partnership for Energy Progress.

The concept of everyday cake is upheld by cultures around the world. Cake features prominently in the ritual of English afternoon tea as well as in the Swedish coffee break known as fika. Italians eat cake for breakfast.

A staff of local women prepared and provided not only breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but also two coffee breaks, midmorning and midafternoon. The indisputable star of the latter, café da tarde, was cake, cut into neat squares: bolo de fubá, made with cornmeal, coconut, condensed milk, on one day; dense chocolate frosted in buttercream another; vanilla sponge layered with strawberry jam and vanilla cream the next.

"good maps are better than naked-senses sensing the territory"

To me, getting terse edits in Google Docs is preferable to the time an old-fashioned editor sat me down, looked at my draft, looked at me, and said soberly, “Words matter.”

Do you really care how that person’s weekend was?

(It’s also much more obvious when you are stifling your anger in person than when you are typing and deleting draft Slack messages. I typically do this in an offline text file to avoid the ominous “Olga is typing.”)

When the audience is large and unregulated, women can feel shut down, harassed, or ignored, says Susan Herring, an Indiana University professor who researches gender and digital communication. But in situations where a teacher or a boss is reading what people say—like a classroom discussion group or a workplace Slack channel—people are more likely to be civil.

Women are often punished for not behaving gently and communally. But on the internet, nobody knows you’re a bitch.

Of course, I still want my colleagues to like me, so I still bend a knee to gender norms. I simply say what needs to be said in Slack, throw in an exclamation point and a nice emoji, and call it a day. It’s much easier to perform your gender with a dancing penguin than by “power posing” or whatever.

Some educators sneered that the parents who complained just wanted free babysitting. But I’m not ashamed to say that child care is at the heart of the work I do. I teach children reading and writing, yes, but I also watch over them, remind them to be kind and stay safe, plan games and activities to help them grow. Children deserve attentive care. That’s the core of our commitment to them.

A magistrate could instead be an augur, a different sort of religious functionary whose job was specifically the reading of Omens. In Roman society, practically every major public event was preceded by an augur doing some kind of thing to make sure the gods approved of whatever the event was. The two main ways of doing this were by examining the flight of birds and by slaughtering an animal or bird and examining its entrails. Doing this was important enough that we are aware of manuals and diagrams to show people how to do it correctly. As your quotation points out, an augur could in theory put a hard stop on substantially anything the Roman State attempted to do simply by claiming that the Omens were bad. Caesar's co-consul Bibulus used this technique (as a magistrate, per your source) on several occasions to try to block Caesar's agenda, but was generally unsuccessful.

The flamen dialis, a priest specially dedicated to Jupiter, could never leave Rome for more than one night and could never touch iron or ride a horse, and he could never attain the high office of consul.

Christopher Dyer reckons that people in late medieval England usually worked about 240 days a year after allowing for holidays, festivals, illness, and times when they showed up at the shop and the master was not hiring journeymen that day, so an income in pounds a year is more or less pence (1/240 of a pound) a day (240 workdays in a year). So the shirts of humble servants at Henry VIII’s court cost between 3 and 10 days’ income. That would be similar to someone who earns 10 dollars or Euros an hour spending 240 to 800 dollars or Euros on an item today. (Of course, in the 15th and 16th century, people spent much more of their incomes on food, fuel, and clothing than they do in Europe or European settler societies today, and much less on rent, transportation, and medical care … but it seems that most people could make or obtain one or two new shirts every year or so).

So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic. That is not so different from the price at the court of Henry VIII of England, considering that the ancients did not have spinning wheels. The linen tunics in 301 CE were probably woven as one rectangular or cross-shaped piece and sewed up the sides and under the arms, whereas the English shirts were cut and sewed from long pieces of cloth, but that is another story.

t's the belief that something will happen, that the world will work in a certain way, without any real evidence or rational arguments as to why it will do that. So we want less of that, and we want more truth—which what I really mean is a greater reason to believe that our expectations will be met.

Unfortunately, despite common goals, some on today's old Internet are hostile to blockchain technology. I am not sure why.

And if we had the time, I would tell you that the same thing has always happened—with the troubadours of 11th century or Sappho and the lyric singers of ancient Greece or the artisan performers of the Middle Kingdom in ancient Egypt. Musical revolutions come from the bottom up, not the top down.

The radio stations will only play songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven’t changed much in decades. That’s even more true for the algorithms curating so much of our new music—the algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That’s actually how the current system has been designed to work.

For example, the fear of copyright lawsuits has made many in the music industry deathly afraid of listening to unsolicited demo recordings. If you hear a demo today, you might get sued for stealing its melody—or maybe just its rhythmic groove—five years from now. Try mailing a demo to a label or producer, and watch it return unopened.

I listen to 2-3 hours of new music every day, and I know that there are plenty of outstanding young musicians out there. The problem isn’t that they don’t exist, but that the music industry has lost its ability to discover and nurture their talents.

I like these random prompts for thinking about stuff. [[Tarot for thought]].

Doesn't sound good.

[chesterton's fence](#chesterton's fence)

Sequential Wiki Not a formal term, but I use it often. A sequential wiki is like a wiki page, but people contribute blocks of [[content]] instead of arbitrary fragments; and they maintain clear ownership and control over their blocks.

codexeditor]] https://twitter.com/codexeditor/status/1482906226292039681

[[Is]] it [[in an [[endearing]] way]]?

It feels more like an invisible weight that can be felt through every idea and keystroke. Through every executed action, like something you can lose, something you need, something missing from the stream of data you’re writing.

I read a book once which argued that the problem with modern political discourse is it pits the "I don't want things taken from me" (liberty!) people against the "XYZ is a human right" (entitlement!) people. And that a better way to frame the cultural argument is "XYZ is my responsibility to society." As a simple example, "Internet access is a human right," is just a sneaky way of saying "someone should give people free Internet." Who is someone? It's left unspecified, which is skipping over the entire mechanism by which we deliver the Internet. It's much more revealing to write, "To live in a healthy society, it's our responsibility to make sure every person has Internet access." Suddenly, oh, crap. The someone is me! Healthy society is created through constant effort, by all of us, as a gift to our fellow members. It's not extracted from us as a mandatory payment to our overlords who will do all the work. If there's one thing we know for sure about overlords, it's that they never do all the work.

This set of tools for easily creating graphs is conveniently disguised as a set of fonts. OpenType features are used to interpret and visualize the data. The data remains as editable text, allowing for painless updates.

In response to a detailed list of questions about my purchases and about online sales in general, the EPA said that it understood its Risk Mitigation Decision “would not completely remove second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides from use by general consumers, as it intended to allow use by persons such as farmers and custodians.” It also said that it was “aware that retail has changed dramatically since 2008,” but it did not say whether it has ever taken any enforcement action against manufacturers or digital retailers. The agency added that it is currently reviewing the registration of these products but gave no timeline for the review process. Eisemann tells me there is a familiar pattern to regulating pesticides. The development of new technologies always outpaces the scientific understanding of their risks and benefits. As a result, regulators are continually playing catch-up. Even still, he was struck when I told him I had been buying the stuff from Amazon and walmart.com. “It’s probably time for the EPA to certainly take a look at doing enforcement actions,” Eisemann says, “and it’s probably time for them to reevaluate e-commerce.” 

The first step was to build up a deep layer of indigo blue (usually 8-10 dips in the vat) followed by a mordant, and finally red and yellow dyes. That red could be madder or cochineal but I chose to use only madder, since that is what I am growing in the garden.  My preferred yellow is weld.  Each different combination results in a subtle variation. Some “blacks” are more purple, while others are a bit more green, or brown. I began using black walnut  and cutch as a substitute for the madder and weld and sometimes added madder or weld to those.  Each is a distinct hue, and definitely in the “black” family. I am confident of the lightfastness of these hues because of the primary dyes that have been used. 

Alum and green vitriol (iron sulfate) both have sweetish and astringent taste, and they had overlapping uses. Therefore, through the Middle Ages, alchemists and other writers do not seem to have discriminated the two salts accurately from each other. In the writings of the alchemists we find the words misy, sory, and chalcanthum applied to either compound; and the name atramentum sutorium, which one might expect to belong exclusively to green vitriol, applied indifferently to both.

“The in­ter­ro­b­ang was eas­ily made with a back-space and over-type”, as Ned told me via email, which is re­mark­able in it­self. But this quirk of type­writer op­er­a­tion also al­lowed the con­struc­tion of the fabled quasiquote, where a hy­phen and quo­ta­tion mark were over­struck to pro­duce something like "this", or 'this', and which en­cap­su­lated an ab­bre­vi­ated or para­phrased quo­ta­tion rather a ver­batim re­port of the speak­er’s words.

In the second century before Christ, king Ptolemy the Fifth promptly ordered craftsman to stop exporting one of their national products. The reason was as simple and mundane as jealousy. A rivaling library in Pergamon, then in Mysia an now in western Turkey, had gained enough traction to greatly annoy the king, who wanted to protect the fame and power of his Great Library of Alexandria at all costs. The sudden papyrus shortages did not stop Hellenic king Eumenes the Second from expanding the library in Pergamon. His hunger for literature was much, much bigger. The papyrus plant does not grow well in Mysia, and resorting to clay tablets greatly decreases the capacity of a single book. Instead of accepting defeat, Eumenes' experts perfected the eastern art of writing on animal skin, a method that until then was only used locally and not highly regarded. Ptolemy’s masterstroke turned out to be a painful mistake. It was called parchment—pergameno in Latin—as a memory to the city where this technique was perfected, and it was parchment that made sure Ptolemy’s already crumbling Alexandria lost even more political power.

Many stories out of the past have only become “escapist” in their appeal through surviving from a time when men were as a rule delighted with the work of their hands into our time, when many men feel disgust with man-made things.

These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station. But from them it is as a rule very hard to gather what men in such a world-town will do. They may abandon the “full Victorian panoply” for loose garments (with zip-fasteners), but will use this freedom mainly, it would appear, in order to play with mechanical toys in the soon-cloying game of moving at high speed.

Art of the same sort, if more skilled and effortless, the elves can also use, or so the reports seem to show; but the more potent and specially elvish craft I will, for lack of a less debatable word, call Enchantment. Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World. It does not matter by whom it is said to be practised, fay or mortal, it remains distinct from the other two; it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills.

Let us take what looks like a clear case of Olympian nature-myth: the Norse god Thórr. His name is Thunder, of which Thórr is the Norse form; and it is not difficult to interpret his hammer, Miöllnir, as lightning. Yet Thórr has (as far as our late records go) a very marked character, or personality, which cannot be found in thunder or in lightning, even though some details can, as it were, be related to these natural phenomena: for instance, his red beard, his loud voice and violent temper, his blundering and smashing strength. None the less it is asking a question without much meaning, if we inquire: Which came first, nature-allegories about personalized thunder in the mountains, splitting rocks and trees; or stories about an irascible, not very clever, redbeard farmer, of a strength beyond common measure, a person (in all but mere stature) very like the Northern farmers, the boendr by whom Thórr was chiefly beloved? To a picture of such a man Thórr may be held to have “dwindled,” or from it the god may be held to have been enlarged. But I doubt whether either view is right—not by itself, not if you insist that one of these things must precede the other. It is more reasonable to suppose that the farmer popped up in the very moment when Thunder got a voice and face; that there was a distant growl of thunder in the hills every time a story-teller heard a farmer in a rage.

Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.

I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.

At first I tried to distinguish between symbols and symbols, between what I called inherent[Pg 65] symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the distinction has come to mean little or nothing. Whether their power has arisen out of themselves, or whether it has an arbitrary origin, matters little, for they act, as I believe, because the great memory associates them with certain events and moods and persons. Whatever the passions of man have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the great memory, and in the hands of him who has the secret, it is a worker of wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils. The symbols are of all kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its association, momentous or trivial, in the great memory, and one never knows what forgotten events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and the ragweed, into the great passions. Knowledgeable men and women in Ireland sometimes distinguish between the simples that work cures by some medical property in the herb, and those that do their work by magic. Such magical simples as the husk of the flax, water out of the fork of[Pg 66] an elm-tree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in the depths of the mind where it mingles with the great mind, and is enlarged by the great memory, some curative energy, some hypnotic command.

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are— (1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols. [Pg 30]I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.

Religious mysteries are things that you can understand, but not explain in words. Sex is a common example: you can read all the information about sex you want, but you won’t know how *you* respond until you do it yourself.

Basically, it’s what happens if you take a path intended for small groups of people with a high commitment level and formal structure, and mesh it with American ideals about free access, along with some of the feminist movement rhetoric around issues of power and control. Again with the handwaving over complexities, but you get the idea.

The Roman Catholic Church could not very easily call the Great Goddess of Ireland a demon, so they canonized her instead. Henceforth, she would be ‘Saint’ Brigit, patron saint of smithcraft, poetry, and healing. They ‘explained’ this by telling the Irish peasants that Brigit was ‘really’ an early Christian missionary sent to the Emerald Isle, and that the miracles she performed there ‘misled’ the common people into believing that she was a Goddess. For some reason, the Irish swallowed this. (There is no limit to what the Irish imagination can convince itself of. For example, they also came to believe that Brigit was the ‘foster mother’ of Jesus, giving no thought to the implausibility of Jesus having spent his boyhood in Ireland!)

The attempt to make a distinction between the spiritual, devotional, or celebrational side of our religion, and the more utilitarian use of ritual and ceremony to effect desired changes in our world, would never have occurred to us. One of the principle tenets of Witchcraft is that the spiritual and material sides of life interpenetrate one another and cannot be meaningfully separated. To attempt to do so is to encourage the sort of Neo-Platonic dualism that has bedeviled our Western society for centuries and led to, among other things, the demonizing of sex and the body, and disdain for our environment. In fact, any attempt to separate Wicca from Witchcraft, the religious practice from the magical practice, is not only historically misguided, but politically dangerous. It plays us directly into the hands of our detractors. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Another example is something I do for ongoing workings. I create a design with symbols that make sense for me and that working. I do a sketch or five in pencil to figure out specific elements and layout, then do a full size one. I trace it in pen, add colour with watercolour pencils (I have a set of the Inktense ones, which are very vibrantThen when I’m ready, I activate the whole thing by going over it with a brush and clean water. That extra step makes it much easier to focus on the intention without worrying about the art.

Animism – which is a worldview, not a religion – teaches that all things are not things but persons. If we are virtuous and ethical, we do not use and exploit other persons – we form respectful relationships with them. Other-than-human persons are not human, so we don’t relate to them the same way we relate to other humans. Our relationships with tree-persons and wind-persons and cat-persons aren’t the same as our relationships with human-persons, but they are relationships nonetheless.

Communities are helpful and rewarding, but they require work by all their members.  Avoiding the unpleasant parts of community marks you as a religious consumer instead of someone who is committed to the goals of the community. Without the active, caring, and sometimes frustrating religious communities in which I live, work and worship, my practice and my life would be far less than they are.

Ancestors and family spirits are generally thought to be more accessible than Goddesses and Gods – a Heathen saying goes “if you feel a tap on your shoulder, it’s probably your grandfather, not the Allfather.”

It is connecting someone to the living human community of that tradition – a little bit like marrying into a family, or becoming a part of another tightly-knit group of people. Relationships like that are a two-way street. You can say “I wanna join you” all you like, but the community (at least in part) has to say “Yes, and we want to have you join us in this kind of connection.” But to get that far, you need to want to have a connection to that group of people – and they have to want it with you. No one can force that (or should), but at the same time, when it happens, it’s worth celebrating.

I have a theory about why so few older people are hikikomoris or otaku. I think that they have succumbed to learned helplessness: they’ve suffered throughout their entire life the fear21 & stress of walking down a crowded street and having no idea who all these people are, what threat they are22⁠, or how they relate to you, and their minds have been warped to the point that it no longer bothers them, they’ve simply adapted to the mental burden23⁠. (As one would expect, young people are more exhausted by groups24⁠.) The remaining mental dislocation is handled by exactly those small-scale social organizations whose passing Putnam bemoans in Bowling Alone. (This solution is as viable as it ever was. But the young have other options, and are no longer forced into this ancient conformity.)

Some people like to relativistically argue that all natural languages are equally complex and such comparisons are meaningless or ignorant (or racist). This is false. Children learn different natural languages at different rates (eg. Danish vs Croatian); this has real effects on their education (why are Estonia & Finland—with highly similar languages & regular spelling—ranked so high on PISA⁠, when the wealthier & healthier Swedish-speaking Finnish minority has lower scores?). To demonstrate with grammatical gender⁠; English has very little gender and when an Anglophone learns French, the male/​​female genders and associated differences in spelling & endings may strike him as superfluous complexity. He’s right. The gender rules, and specifically memorizing what gender each and every word is, are arbitrary and convey no meaning. They are random—a compression algorithm would choke on them. And we can run a thought experiment (no need to appeal explicitly to algorithmic information theory); imagine a French Prime which is like French but where there is a second gender system with, say, 20 different genders (and accompanying spelling & endings), and for each of the 50,000 words in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, a random number generator decides what gender it is. By definition, the output of the RNG is unpredictable & uncompressible. All a Francophone can do is memorize 50,000 gender indications if they are to speak proper French Prime. Surely French Prime is more complex than French—all a French Prime speaker has to do is blissfully forget how many thousands of vigesimal genders he memorized. (If this is not intuitively convincing, then let the number of genders go to the 140 of Tuyuca⁠, or 50,000, or however many words there are in a language; the gender rules would be monstrously complex, with no simplification anywhere in the language.)

The very concept of working for socially responsible computing implies several things. It implies, first of all, that a special kind of work is actually necessary. Computer people bring an ordinary degree of responsibility to the daily practice of their profession, of course, and outside social mechanisms such as laws and markets promote and regulate the use of computing in their own ways. Yet these factors together have not produced all the potential social benefits of applied computing, and they have not prevented certain institutional pathologies. Another implication is that computer professionals can, by departing from usual ways of doing things, actually ameliorate these problems. Doing so, whether as part of one's paid employment or on one's own time, amounts to a type of social activism whose relation to existing practices may not be simple.

The thing that all museums have gotten caught up in — and European museums as well in the last 50 years — is the building boom. The architecture bonanza has been great for architects, where a museum has to claim architectural singularity to get press, to get attendance, to get donors. So much of the attention and the money has gone into the making of the buildings, some of them good, some not so good — many of them not so good. But many of them, I think, to a fairly surprising degree, are not necessarily hospitable places to look at art. They might be incredible examples of urban intervention or the building arts, but they’re not necessarily places that are particularly congenial to, certainly, looking at paintings. Maybe looking at other kinds of art — they’re ones that could well be suited for that. I sometimes wish that less attention and less money went into the creation of these vast buildings and more to, as you say, just showing off the collection.

For want of a better word, the academic style of painting is something which is hard to do alone. It’s part of a whole culture, a whole academy of looking, a whole way of looking and setting up the studio and having a certain kind of assistants, a certain kind of pigments, a certain kind of tests of drawing, and things that contributed to the look and feel of those paintings. One could do it. It would just take a tremendous effort of will, and then, what exactly would be the point?

I think people might underestimate the decorative function of painting. Painting has various functions. A good painting satisfies most of them or all of them, pretty much at a high level. One of the functions, historically, is to make the room look better, to make people’s emotional temperature quicken slightly when the painting is in the room as opposed to when it’s not in the room. That’s a decorative function. It’s an important one. I remember the first time I met Jasper Johns. He actually said to a friend of mine, who was standing with us, “The first obligation of a painting is to make the wall look better that it’s hanging on.” It is one of those statements that is so simple-minded it brooks mystification, but it’s just a simple fact.

A lot of people find the idea “I can do anything I like in ritual” to be really appealing. The thing is, that’s a bit like saying “I can cook any way I like!” You have the freedom to do that. No one’s going to come into your home and stand over you and scold you. But that doesn’t mean that all methods lead to an equally good meal – or an equally good ritual or religious life or spiritual experience. Some methods may just not get the results you wanted. That’s a waste of your time and resources, but maybe a good learning experience. Bread and cake have a lot of the same ingredients, but they’re definitely not the same food. Some methods may be dangerous for you or for other people. For example, if you choose a bad method for cooking or food handling, you might get food poisoning or cause a fire. Those are a problem, not just for you but quite possibly for other people. The same is true for magic and ritual.

One great thing you can do for yourself is try thinking through different ethical situations. What would you do if you were in that situation? (Or what would you do so you were never in that particular situation?) What would you do if someone in that situation asked you for advice? What pieces of the situation would matter to you? Which ones wouldn’t matter?  I read a number of advice blogs, in large part because I’m fascinated by the different ways people think through situations, how they demonstrate what they care about and value, and how people who think differently than I do go about resolving things. If you’re looking for examples to think through, try AskMetafilter (all sorts of things), b (personal interactions), and Ask A Manager (workplace situations). You can read the ones that intrigue you and pick up a lot of how to think through different situations along the way. 

Exoteric religions are those open to the public, and generally accept anyone willing to abide by the requirements of the religion. They focus on the needs and demands of daily life – personal struggles, family and job life, community structures, and they are generally accessible to a wide range of people (all ages, genders, backgrounds, interests, etc.) Protestant Christianity is a great example. Esoteric religions and orders are designed for and focus on a much smaller group – not everyone is considered able, willing, or appropriate to the group’s goals. Just the same way that not everyone may go to (or want to go to) a particular college, not everyone will fit with these goals or practices. Esoteric groups also generally focus on religious mysteries, and often have some initiatory practice. Traditional Wicca is an obvious example, but the Freemasons are another well-known esoteric order.

He writes about the present moment's popular culture as characterised by this stoppage of time: an attachment to retro which means our own period has yet to develop a signature sound that places us in time. He writes that the same distance of time exists between Glenn Miller and Kraftwerk, that exists between us and jungle. And yet, is there anything that's happened musically in the last ten years which would shock a listener of the 1990s, were it somehow piped backwards in time? Anything like the shock of jumping from big band to electrosonic?

Digital art is necessarily abstract - to compress the physical world into binary and pixels that still read to the human eye as real. But unlike the abstractions of life that have existed in art, for as long as humans have created art, the digital is somewhat different. It's designed to be entered. To log on is to be surrounded by unreality - to become unreal.

Here, too, is political possibility: we practice living in a world where social and physical gender becomes an irrelevance.

I think about chance online encounters that have changed my life, and yet there is another sense in which they have not happened at all; nobody saw them happen; nobody intended them; nothing was seen or recorded, ghosts that cannot be picked up on geigercounter, apparitions only i saw.

The web is a necropolis, where the dead will one day outnumber the living. In my years online, people who have been part of my daily life have suddenly, unaccountably winked out of existance. Disconnected or died? or, like ghosts on a stone tape, merely overwiped. On the web we are ageless; our bodies may decay, but text typed at 14 looks much the same typed at 24 or 54.

The early internet used the language of physical space - from "chatroom" to "homepage" - as if we weren't quite ready to relate to the digital world as pages and data. I remember vividly the sense of relating to the web as a series of places. My early pagan spirituality was built from pixels and Times New Roman in little hand-coded cottages with a "Garden" of herbal remedies and a "Library" of articles (sometimes, delightfully, with a little bookshelf you could click).

The digibeaches and flooding Miami malls recreated with loving irony in vaporwave are interpreted in popular culture as commentary on commercialism, nostalgia for the optimism of the 90s, or the garish aesthetic joy of retro. What seems to be missing is that these landscapes felt sinister. Uncanny valley, but for space rather than people.

But if the web is a place, it is one where things from discordant times are jumbled up together - like the lost property offices and antique collections that form triggers for time to shatter in the world of Sapphire and Steel. A girl in sombre victorian clothes skips, unexpectedly, down the hallways of a modern flat; a maid in tudor garb appears, runs and then screams in a certain room of the video laboratory; and in my room, surrounded by wires, Al Bowly lives on as sound - repeated over, and over, and over, until he is interrupted by SOPHIE, and for a moment - we have broken time.

How strange that we are here, in the future, surfing the digital cyberhighway, becoming cyborg as our technology forms such an integral part of our bodies and psyche - and yet our sense of the future feeling "futurey" is gone - because our access to every tune, every era, every evocation of memory and moment, is happening all at once.

Fishkin's examples sit at one end of a spectrum.

"All I knew about the word 'cyberspace' when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page."

a virtually-integrated society in which our Fortnite costumes will carry over to our Onlyfans accounts and we will never, ever have to log off

I’ve some really interesting threads on Twitter that are full of useful information, but as a consumer of that content, it’s a nightmare to follow. Content creators should make content as simple to consume as possible.

Using the example above, I became aware of it because someone that I follow re-tweeted Tweet number 47 in this ridiculously long thread. Because it was a random Tweet in a very long thread, I (and I imagine most other people reading the tweet) had absolutely no context as to what the whole saga was about.

I assume it’s because these people seem to get a tonne of followers off the back of these threads, thus perpetuating the whole thing and forcing more people onto that bandwagon.

the bandwagon of a very annoying craze. Twitter threads

Instagram is pure PR for the nuclear family, and it totally erases how much childcare has always been shared within communities — and how much families have always relied on each other to raise their kids. Because Instagram is just images, and momfluencers try to have everyone camera-ready for posts, and those posts need to be very easy to “read” while you’re scrolling (here’s the family toasting marshmallows, here they are at the beach, here they are all together in PJs) it’s just easier to control the imagery if it includes only the nuclear family. Like, you’re not going to ask your neighbour Janine who looks after the kids twice a week to put her hair in barrel curls so she can appear polished in a picture, you know? Also, no one’s going to read a caption explaining who some random person in the pic is. The audience is tuning in for the main characters. The upshot is that we see a completely ahistorical representation of family life in most of the mamasphere. Care-work is completely erased. There are no neighbours in the mamasphere!

I joined Gizmodo at the start of 2020 and I think the plan was that I was going to write a lot about political ads. But I find political ads boring for various reasons. Not in content, but just the way that they’re served up. So instead I was just like: Screw it. I’m just gonna cover privacy. That’s gonna be my thing. It’s gonna be great. It was not great.It was a lot of late nights - and I wasn’t getting this at AdWeek as much and obviously I knew that there were men on every panel - but when I would moderate a tech panel it would be men. 99% of the time it was just a sea of white guys, and they’re the sources to my stories, which would also be about men 99% of the time. And when I got to a consumer publication I was writing about these really hardcore technical topics and I would notice that when my pieces would be shared on Reddit or Hacker News people would be saying: oh, this language is so flowery. And I took that seriously. I took that to heart. I’m just like: What does that even mean? Am I doing something wrong?So I went to a friend of mine and she was like: What? No! They’re just saying that you’re a woman. And thankfully that’s the minority and because of my aggressively centrist views I’m actually pretty well regarded. As far as lady tech journalists go. Venture Capital circles hate me because they hate everyone.

So adtech, by extension, you are deciding how advertisers are supposed to make people feel like they are worthless. Adtech is the technology that decides how worth gets distributed. That’s the broad philosophical overview and the idea I have come around on.VFD: I think that’s pretty right.Shoshana Wodinsky: It’s really more philosophical and profound than people would like. Because they like to see their jobs as making beeps and boops that decide where the money goes, and they’re just making software that connects to more software, and it’s not their job to decide whose money is good or bad, or who gets it in the end. That’s somebody else’s job. It’s a job that’s predicated by staying in your lane and kicking the can down the road to somebody else. And when you have enough people deferring responsibility, and enough people just not caring, of course you’re going to get insane shit. Like, you have companies that won’t fund LGBT news outlets but will fund white neo-nazi news outlets – not because they know that’s happening, but because that’s what the tech told them to do. And when you call them out on it they’re just like: Oh, no, I had no idea! And it’s like: why didn’t you have an idea?

Likewise, curated link directories were a thing back when the Internet was in its infancy, but the task of maintaining such a directory is a full time job.

The creation of a bookmark list is a surprisingly fun project, it has some of the appeal of scrapbooking; and the end-result is also appealing to browse through.

relying on feeds shapes everything you write into a blog entry. It's stifling, homogenizing. The blogosphere, what remains of it, is incredibly samey.

It's a bit strange, almost nobody seems to be doing this. Looking through a sample of personal websites, very few of them has links to other personal websites.

Traffic is evaporating, and small websites are dying, which brings even fewer visitors. Rinse and repeat.

There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites. Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit

For veggies, the Irish relied on cabbages, onions, garlic, and parsnips, with some wild herbs and greens spicing up the plate, and on the fruit front, everyone loved wild berries, like blackberries and rowanberries, but only apples were actually grown on purpose. And, if you lived near the coast, edible seaweed like dulse and sloke made for tasty salads and side dishes.

Which raises the question: What was Irish food like for the 1500 years between Patrick and potatoes?The short answer is: milky. Every account of what Irish people ate, from the pre-Christian Celts up through the 16th-century anti-British freedom fighters, revolves around dairy. The island's green pastures gave rise to a culture that was fiercely proud of its cows (one of the main genres of Ancient Irish epics is entirely about violent cattle rustling), and a cuisine that revolved around banbidh, or "white foods."

Still

Still, looking across the political landscape, it is unclear who the David is to take on the tech Goliaths. Republicans are cozy with big business, [4] Democrats are cozy with tech interests, and constituents may not rally behind the issue on their own if the flow of information is controlled by the companies under threat.

Hindman’s underlying claim is that if one website has a wide array of content that frequently updates itself and is also tailored to users’ interests, then that website will dominate their attention. But, again, the advantage of bigness holds: the expenditure behind a feature like personalization is only feasible for the largest companies.

For instance, in his memoir, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announces that he has come up with a new “social good”–oriented definition of capitalism (fact check: he is actually just repackaging Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “The Gospel of Wealth,” a treatise justifying the concentration of wealth as a means of promoting public welfare).

Research in 2013 from demographer Richelle Winkler shows that in the U.S., age segregation is often as ingrained as racial segregation. Using census data from 1990 to 2010, Winkler found that in some parts of the country, old (age 60+) and young (age 20–34) are roughly as segregated as Hispanics and whites.

“I think we’re in the midst of a dangerous experiment,” Cornell University professor Karl Pillemer told The Huffington Post. “This is the most age-segregated society that’s ever been. Vast numbers of younger people are likely to live into their 90s without contact with older people. As a result, young people’s view of aging is highly unrealistic and absurd.”

In his book How Old Are You? Brown University historian Howard Chudacoff demonstrates that age was not an important part of everyday life for most of the 19th century. According to Chudacoff, “The country’s institutions were not structured according to age-defined divisions, and its cultural norms did not strongly prescribe age-related behavior.” (Birthdays were rarely celebrated or noticed — and the happy birthday song wasn’t even invented until 1934.) However, during the industrial age in the U.S., an assembly-line mentality led to grouping people by age, in the hopes of standardizing everything from the education of the young to the care for the elderly. And it brought some benefits. But the extreme degree to which we’ve shunted young people into educational institutions, middle-aged adults into workplaces, and older people into retirement communities, senior centers, and nursing homes has come with costs.

For all the hype that surrounds them, neural networks can’t reflect or explain anything deeper about cultural or societal phenomena any more than sharing a favorite character from The Office can predict long-term compatibility with a Tinder match. These systems can only instrumentalize taste; they turn any expression of self into a reductive data point meant to generate more data at the same level. They presuppose that “liking” just means more “liking” and that is as deep as our desire can be. As with vibes, these metrics carry no context or narrative; they can tell you nothing about how or why something might be desirable, only that they vaguely seem like they might be desirable because they seem similar to other things that are desirable. This opacity encourages users to disregard the possibility of understanding their desire at a deeper level, of probing it, developing it, attenuating it, or even negating it if need be.

While seemingly open-ended and allowing for an infinite recombination of elements, the idea of “vibes” is reductive. It discourages the more difficult work of interpretation and the search for meaning that defines human experience. It diverts attention away from narrative and moral implications in favor of foregrounding the idea of affect as inexplicable, ineffable — a matter of chance correlation of elements rather than something that requires deliberate causal explanation. The vibes framework may hone our abilities to identify settings like “cozy” or “cursed,” but it doesn’t give instructions on how we might build them or avoid them in our lives. As an analytic, vibes don’t connect feelings and consequence; as such, it is symbiotic with passive modes of media consumption.

The vibes are off, but they’re off fundamentally because they focus only on feelings and emotional connections that have already existed. They don’t provide or imagine pathways to new futures; they allow only for an understanding of what feels good or bad based on experiences that have already happened, things that have already been seen.

Content systems optimized by machine learning amplify the repetitive quality of internet content by identifying and recycling the same topics that generate interest and controversy, and the tendency spreads elsewhere in culture, such as in the continuous, unnecessary reiterations of movie franchises like Star Wars or The Matrix. The vibes are gamed until they become stale, and an increasing facility in vibes makes this trend all the more evident and noticeable.

In other words, “vibes” are similar to the approximations that machine learning systems use, and the two feed off of each other synergistically.

These masked bad vibes are actually pointing toward urgent questions: How do we break out of this loop? How do we escape this cycle of political deadlock, Covid lockdown, and the dread of climate catastrophe? How do we create new art forms that aren’t just remixes or nostalgic revivals of existing ones? PC Music can pose the question but can’t become the answer; it can only manifest the problem in a heightened, intensified form.

Consider the vibes-based music categories like hyperpop and PC Music, which serve as an avant-garde of the moment, mixing a wide variety of other genres with hyper-specific cultural references and inside jokes.

Instead it effectively identifies a “rainy” vibe through correlations of an initially arbitrary set of parameters.

As the salience of vibes as a way of (not) explaining experience has grown, so too have the applications of machine learning and neural networks. This parallel may not be a mere coincidence.

Intuitively, the question seems to me to be this: Can societies without religion reproduce themselves over the long run? 

When a civilization stops giving birth to its future, and ceases to understand why it’s important to do so, it’s in trouble. This is a global crisis of the industrialized world, the collapse in fertility

Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman’s classic work Family And Civilization said that the collapse of the Greek and the Roman empires had to do with the collapse of the social forces that formed families.

Wokeness in America as hegemonic left-wing illiberalism is our own Cultural Revolution.

“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”

Who asked for this? Who asked for superheroes to have sex lives, or gay sex lives? What does it mean that the ideological colonization of the superhero genre, the modern mythology of our times, means that transgressive sexual desire is now a definitive characteristic of our pop culture god figures?

In this respect, I don’t think our meritocracy is all that different from previous aristocracy. The definition of aristocracy is just the rule of the best, and people who have merit are also by definition the best. It’s the same kind of rhetoric. Yes, aristocracy usually relied more on birth, but that’s just a mechanism for identifying the people who are going to be perceived to be the best.

I think the underemphasized concern here is the extent to which the other 90 percent end up buying into this value system to some degree. I’ve been in the child-rearing game, and I see a lot of the madness firsthand — parents freaking out when their child takes a sip of soda out of the refrigerator because they somehow imagine this is really going to make it impossible for them to demonstrate enough virtue to get into the right college. They will curate every experience for their kids — every travel experience, every friendship. I mostly see it among members of the upper-middle class who can afford it. But increasingly, the same sets of values and practices are clearly spreading to where people can’t afford it and where it doesn’t make sense. They’re also buying into this idea that kids have to be absolutely optimized, maximized so they can get onto the narrow path that leads to a stable upper-middle-class life, and otherwise it’s Starbucks until the end of time. It basically takes away a potential countervailing mechanism. If society were such that you produce this one noxious class but then that gives rise to a reaction of people angry with this class and then acting out, you might have some conflict. Hopefully, it’s not violent but can be mediated through political institutions, but you have at least a mechanism that might lead to a solution. But when the ideology starts to spread, it effectively removes the basis for that conflict, it neutralizes the opposition in a way, and that’s a problem. It means that the system just continues further down the road toward greater instability.

The canonical example of a contagious idea would be some kind of evangelical religion, where they would say: "Hey, this is the way the universe is structured. This is how the cosmos exists, but also convert other people to this way of thinking, go out and find people and tell them this as well."But there's a way simpler idea of memes: a contagious song, a catch phrase, a political slogan, or even a symbol that's easy to draw. Wouldn't that be a meme as well? So looking at this I thought that some ideas are more contagious than others and some ideas aren't contagious at all—they just kind of sit there. So what's at the other end of the scale: what kind of ideas resist being spread? What information would you intrinsically not want anyone else to find out about? Or maybe you do want to spread it, but you can't for whatever reason?

And the vine-dressers would sacrifice goats in honor of Dionysus—for the goat is an enemy of the vine; and they would skin them, fill the skin-bags with air and jump on them.

If, in their effort to scan the literary field from Amazon’s point of view, the pages that follow try to see things as if this margin of autonomous creativity weren’t so, and as though the whole world were already Amazon, they also watch for signs of the enduring limits of the corporation’s power as the super-author of our time.

Our interest in fiction is in part an interest in encountering different degrees of (albeit, properly formatted) otherness, the better to assimilate it to ourselves in the spirit of personal augmentation.

Fiction in the Age of Amazon is the symbolic provision of more—above all, of more various and interesting “life experience” than can be had by any mortal being, let alone one constrained by the demands of work and family.

I could run my server on my own hardware – e.g. my laptop or a dedicated Raspberry Pi – but that’s unwieldy, subject to downtime, and so on. The alternative is to host a virtual server on a third-party cloud provider. This is unbelievably ironic. The best way for me to participate in Urbit’s decentralized, peer-to-peer universe is… to run a server on AWS.Obviously neither of those two options are desirable for hosting my Urbit server. Hosting on my own hardware is annoying, hosting in the centralized cloud defeats the whole point.This is where Urbit shows its age: it has no ambition for decentralized server ownership. The notion of a user running their own server, having to guarantee its uptime, backup its data, etc., is antiquated. If Urbit were reimagined in 2021, it would be running on Sia or Ethereum: your data is stored on the blockchain, your applications are running as perpetual smart contracts, and you can access it from anywhere in the world with just your private key. That’s compelling. In that world, both uptime of your personal instance and storage of your data are guaranteed as long as the network is healthy.

In this timeless land the dialect was richer in words with which to measure time than any other language; beyond the motionless and everlasting crai every day in the future had a name of its own. Crai meant tomorrow and forever; the day after tomorrow was prescrai [sic; should be pescrai — see update] and the day after that pescrille; then came pescruflo, maruflo, maruflone; the seventh day was maruflicchio. But these precise terms had an undertone of irony. They were used less often to indicate this or that day than they were said all together in a string, one after the other; their very sound was grotesque and they were like a reflection of the futility of trying to make anything clear out of the cloudiness of crai. I, too, began to lose hope that anything new might come forth from maruflo or maruflone or maruflicchio.

Toadying and pusillanimity define much cultural writing — “Please, shoot me last; I will happily denounce myself!” cry the white males; “No, shoot them first,” coldly reply the children of affirmative action who seek to take their places and turn all culture into a question of competing claims of superior victimhood.

Indexing flowered at a time when readers saw books as great mosaics of useful tags and examples that they could collect and organise for themselves. The chief tool they used to do this job was not the index but the commonplace book: a notebook, preferably organised by subject headings known as loci communes (common places), which provided both a material space in which to store material and a set of designators to help retrieve it.

The crafty and energetic Paris publisher Charlotte Guillard decided to reprint his edition of the Letters of Jerome. The Sorbonne had condemned Erasmus’s works, so Guillard (or a press professional in her shop) drew up an index of the passages in Erasmus’s commentary that most contradicted conventional Catholic wisdom. It took the form of a letter to the pious reader, warning that Erasmus’s paratexts ‘did more to cover the texts with darkness than to shed light on them’. Then it quoted a long series of passages in which Erasmus argued against practices including excessive veneration of the saints, supposedly in order to help the pious reader avoid them – but also, of course, to help the Protestant or critical Catholic reader discover them. A single index, creatively compiled, could make a big book respectable and subversive at the same time.

Konrad Pellikan, who compiled the index for Erasmus’s 1521 edition of the church father Cyprian, explained that he had gathered his lemmas quickly and keyed his references only to full pages, not to smaller segments of each page, ‘to avoid easing the way for gross laziness’. Conrad Gessner, who explained in detail how to compile an index on slips of paper, insisted that indexes were vital: without them, life would be too short to master more than one subject. But he also worried about those ‘who rely only on the indexes ... and who do not read the complete texts of their authors in the proper order and methodically’. The index gave its users formidable power to find and quote adages and examples, narratives and poems, scriptural and patristic texts, whether or not they had actually read the full works they cited. That power in turn inspired anxiety, especially among those who had learned what they knew in the old-fashioned way, or claimed that they had. Would the index kill close reading?

The world surely contains some usurious Jews, gay paedophiles, muslim fanatics, sexually aggressive black men, hysterical women. But if you tell those ‘truths’ without the truth of others, who do not conform to such precise clichés, and without the truth that telling these certain individual truths as constitutive is a technique of oppression, then your ‘truth’ is in the service of a coercive lie. The comedian Wanda Sykes has joked that it is only since Obama that she’s able to buy watermelons: before a black president, the truth of her taste was too costly to indulge. Not because of anything intrinsic to the desire, but because of the gaze under which it fell. ‘Look at all these white people looking at me’, she says. ‘I ain’t buying a whole watermelon for your enjoyment.’

This is a whole other level at which the search for a ‘progressive’ content in culture can blind us. Underlying the suppleness of the system is the fact that not only does it fundamentally not matter to it which symbolic content you choose from an either-or on offer, nor even does it if you exercise that Boolean literalist rejection of the choice, except if and insofar as you undermine its power – which in capitalist culture means that you refuse its commodity-logic. We beat the system that throws up the art, the culture, not if we hate it or resent it – only, ultimately, if we stop it making money.

It is by this reversibility that such binaries works. The point of the familiar Madonna-Whore syndrome is that you can’t win by choosing one over the other. The deck is stacked, the dice loaded. It is the dyad, not one or other of its terms, that is the problem. That old insight helps show the limitations of the hunt for ‘empowering’, ‘progressive’ depictions, as well as for oppressive stereotypes. Of seeking problem and solution in representation’s content, rather in the range of choices made available.

As a supplement to paranoid reading, Sedgwick draws from Klein to propose a different kind of analysis. ‘The greatest interest of Klein’s concept [of ‘position’, rather than analytical ‘type’ or ’stage’] lies … in her seeing the paranoid position always in the oscillatory context of a very different possible one: the depressive position. … [This] is an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting’. From this position, Sedgwick suggests as methodology a drive to pleasure, including aesthetic; amelioration of the everyday; and openness to surprise, both good and bad. She calls this process ‘reparative reading’. ‘The desire of a reparative impulse … is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self’. This is perfectly compatible with the paranoid critique of un-nurturing culture. Where it differs – complements – is in what it wants to do with that culture’s objects: [T]o use one’s own resources to assemble or “repair” the murderous part-objects into something like a whole – though … not necessarily like any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn. Sedgwick closes with a beautiful aspiration, to ‘extract[…] sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them’.

In an inversion of the fury of those ragefully defending texts from critics, those critics can be invested less in rigour than in the attack itself, going from diagnosis to performative dismissal, policing transgressions with surplus enthusiasm. In the addictive affect-economy of social media, this can come to mean a bleak and border-guarding backslapping.

Thus we were granted one of the great political autocritiques in literature, a text that interrogates and subverts its own predecessors.

Unlike Tokyo, a vast city held together by slippery threads of ramen

London’s appetites generate a colossal amount of food waste: with better organisation, it could be reduced. bio-bean is a company that collects waste coffee grounds from King’s Cross, Liverpool Street and other big London train stations and converts it to biofuel.

asparagus (or, in cockneydom, ‘sparrowgrass’)

There used to be a common language of food in the city, whereas now we have incoherent Babel of many cuisines, often exciting but hard to decipher

But when it came to seasonal produce, the whole city ate in sync. Sellers put notices in The Times to announce that Jersey pears had just come into season or that East Lothian potatoes had arrived.

n Germany, some doctors still practice Hildegardian medicine. In the town of Allenbach, for example, a clinic focuses exclusively on Hildegardian treatments. Beyond the realm of modern medicine, though, Hildgard’s work is alive and well at monasteries. At St. Hildegard Abbey, founded by Hildegard herself in Eibingen in 1165, nuns carry on her culinary traditions, making and selling “cookies of joy” along with galangal-ginger cookies, wine, and a selection of herbal liqueurs and teas.

she was struck by a mysterious illness after the abbot at Disibodenberg initially refused to let her leave and found her own monastery. (The abbot was reluctant to lose the prophet-nun, who’d attracted a fair share of visitors and revenue.) Hildegard lay in bed for months, unable to do anything until the will of God (i.e., her founding her own abbey) was completed. When the abbot finally relented, she made a miraculous recovery.

Born on the cusp of the prosperous 12th century, she was poised to reap the benefits of a booming era in European history. “It was just this far-out time,” Sweet says, adding that Hildegard was born into an era of scholastic advancement, population growth, and agriculturally beneficial weather. Although she would have lived separate from the men at the coed Disibodenberg monastery, Sweet notes that Hildegard would have likely communicated with educated monks and had access to the library, the medicinal garden, and the infirmary. The result was an education that rivaled those of leading medieval minds. “So Hildegard would have gotten the Latin-age academic tradition … the existing infirmarian tradition, and then, third, this sort of medical-women tradition with the midwives and the healers,” Sweet says. “So what she ends up giving us is a wonderful mixture of all that.”

The Hildegardian pharma-bakery didn’t just prescribe cookies to counter depression, but also recommended licorice-flavored cookies for nausea and ginger varieties for constipation.

Hildegard’s pharmacopoeia revolved around the kitchen and the garden. In her books Physica and Causes and Cures, she outlines herbal and culinary remedies for a vast array of ailments. For a weak heart, she proposes a daily teaspoon of “wine for the heart,” consisting of boiled parsley, honey, and wine. For stomach pain, a nightcap of wine mixed with powdered ginger, galingale (a ginger relative from Southeast Asia), and zedoary (another ginger cousin, from India). And for matters of melancholy, she offers her “cookies of joy” (or “nerve cookies”), wielding the key ingredients of spelt flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves to “calm all bitterness of the heart and mind, open your heart and impaired senses, and make your mind cheerful.”

The real scandal, if I may, is the fact that so many people who attended one seem to have no idea what it’s for. So let me come out and tell you what a university is for: a university is a place where people help each other access the highest intellectual goods.

In the real world, Plato’s view seemed to be that philosophers arise because occasionally a human being—for no reason, following no plan, and certainly not because he was secretly marked out as One of the Special Ones from birth—manages by sheer luck to find his way to the lone worthwhile life. Thus Socrates’s shortcomings with respect to the intellectual “talents” most valued in his era—memory and rhetorical cleverness—are often thematized by Plato. Plato’s explanation for why most people don’t get access to the best things is unsatisfying to those who are expecting either a tale of justice, such as the noble lie of the triumph of the talented, or a tale of injustice, such as the liberal account of how the equal potential in all of us is squandered when the powerful oppress the weak. But you don’t need to oppress people in order to withhold intellectual treasures from them if there is simply no reason they would find them in the first place. The intellectual goods lie hidden in plain view.

A university is a world inside the world, a haven, a bubble, and those who reacted to the college-admissions scandal tried to pop that bubble. My initial impulse was to see this as an act of aggression and hostility: they are trying to blame us for everything! But with hindsight, I have begun to entertain the possibility of a different interpretation. Maybe the sentiment driving the scandalmongering was marked as much by envy as indignation. After all, one reason you might try to pop a bubble is because you want in.

And it’s totally amazing that human beings can do this

“It is happening right here—this is what universities are for: reading Aristotle together.” All the arguments about elitism and corporatization and donations were as irrelevant as the ivy growing on the walls.

If I had left the university after college, I believe the intellectual life I occasionally glimpsed as an undergraduate would have faded into a nostalgic memory.

Our society has many questions and uncertainties about the just and correct manner of distributing wealth, or health care, or honor, or political power; but these difficulties seem insignificant in comparison to the gaping chasm of total cluelessness we have when it comes to the problem of distributing the very highest goods of all—the intellectual ones.

The same is true for many of my close high-school classmates: If they left for college, most have never returned for longer than a few months at a time. Practically all of them now live in major metro areas scattered across the country, not our hometown. The kinds of jobs they are now qualified for—in corporate or management consulting, nonprofits, media, and finance—don’t really exist in Yakima.

Plavchan has considered offering a separate course on directory structure — but he’s not sure it’s worth it.

Plavchan agrees that there are limits to how much he can bridge the generational divide. Despite his efforts to tailor his teaching, “some of the tools we use rely on some knowledge that our students just aren’t getting.”

A cynic could blame generational incompetence. An international 2018 study that measured eighth-graders’ “capacities to use information and computer technologies productively” proclaimed that just 2 percent of Gen Z had achieved the highest “digital native” tier of computer literacy.

It could also have to do with the other software they’re accustomed to — dominant smartphone apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube all involve pulling content from a vast online sea rather than locating it within a nested hierarchy.

The primary issue is that the code researchers write, run at the command line, needs to be told exactly how to access the files it’s working with — it can’t search for those files on its own. Some programming languages have search functions, but they’re difficult to implement and not commonly used. It’s in the programming lessons where STEM professors, across fields, are encountering problems.

Guarín-Zapata was taught computer basics in high school — how to save, how to use file folders, how to navigate the terminal

Colling’s courses now include a full two-hour lecture to explain directory structure.

despite the slick approach of several of these businesses, at the heart of it, the broad objective of almost all of them is to protect the Indian cow from slaughter. The profit surpluses generated by many of them are either entirely offered or generously shared with cow shelters. They believe that unlike cows of foreign species, which have undergone many genetic mutations, the Indian cow is special.

Unadulterated cow urine and dung have always been procured from cow-shelters by the traditional for use at home and in temple pujas. What’s recent is the array of therapeutic and beauty products flooding the market that use these as ingredients. There are face packs, bath scrubbers, mosquito coils and incense sticks that contain cow dung. There are creams, cough syrups, body oils, health tonics, weight-loss tonics, and floor disinfectants that contain distilled cow urine. You name it, they have it. And the names of gau mutra or gau arka (cow urine) or cow dung are not hidden away in long lists of fine print on the packages. It is star-lighted right up front as the chief ingredient in bold letters.

The peaks correspond to the symbols: “a”, “c”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “s” and “y” of the EVA alphabet.

D0 Soil is dry; irrigation delivery begins earlyDryland crop germination is stuntedActive fire season beginsWinter resort visitation is low; snowpack is minimal D1 Dryland pasture growth is stunted; producers give supplemental feed to cattleLandscaping and gardens need irrigation earlier; wildlife patterns begin to changeStock ponds and creeks are lower than usual D2 Grazing land is inadequateProducers increase water efficiency methods and drought-resistant cropsFire season is longer, with high burn intensity, dry fuels, and large fire spatial extent; more fire crews are on staffWine country tourism increases; lake- and river-based tourism declines; boat ramps closeTrees are stressed; plants increase reproductive mechanisms; wildlife diseases increaseWater temperature increases; programs to divert water to protect fish beginRiver flows decrease; reservoir levels are low and banks are exposed D3 Livestock need expensive supplemental feed, cattle and horses are sold; little pasture remains, producers find it difficult to maintain organic meat requirementsFruit trees bud early; producers begin irrigating in the winterFederal water is not adequate to meet irrigation contracts; extracting supplemental groundwater is expensiveDairy operations closeFire season lasts year-round; fires occur in typically wet parts of state; burn bans are implementedSki and rafting business is low, mountain communities sufferOrchard removal and well drilling company business increase; panning for gold increasesLow river levels impede fish migration and cause lower survival ratesWildlife encroach on developed areas; little native food and water is available for bears, which hibernate lessWater sanitation is a concern, reservoir levels drop significantly, surface water is nearly dry, flows are very low; water theft occursWells and aquifer levels decrease; homeowners drill new wellsWater conservation rebate programs increase; water use restrictions are implemented; water transfers increaseWater is inadequate for agriculture, wildlife, and urban needs; reservoirs are extremely low; hydropower is restricted D4 Fields are left fallow; orchards are removed; vegetable yields are low; honey harvest is smallFire season is very costly; number of fires and area burned are extensiveMany recreational activities are affectedFish rescue and relocation begins; pine beetle infestation occurs; forest mortality is high; wetlands dry up; survival of native plants and animals is low; fewer wildflowers bloom; wildlife death is widespread; algae blooms appearPolicy change; agriculture unemployment is high, food aid is neededPoor air quality affects health; greenhouse gas emissions increase as hydropower production decreases; West Nile Virus outbreaks riseWater shortages are widespread; surface water is depleted; federal irrigation water deliveries are extremely low; junior water rights are curtailed; water prices are extremely high; wells are dry, more and deeper wells are drilled; water quality is poo

However, he added, “I don’t know of a medical society that doesn’t serve alcohol.” Even the attendees at the Research Society on Alcoholism get two drink chits at the opening reception, he said.

“When you extinguish a learned habit, it doesn’t disappear,” Koob said. “All you’re doing is replacing that habit with a different habit.” Volkow compared my behavior to a binge. “It’s an automatic compulsive behavior,” she said.

Also, as a young father, I was thinking of the positive impact this could make

I could manage a meal in a restaurant, but if anyone proposed a toast I felt as if I were inviting bad luck to the table by raising my glass of water.

But here’s the truth: Annotation is just a comment box you can put anywhere on a web page. Some annotations are great! If you have a coherent community with shared goals and common values, they can be amazing and create something on a Wikipedia scale. But they have all the flaws of the comment box, too — namely, they’re a great place to see people be assholes to one another, and most people don’t much of unique value to add to the discussion.

To my surprise, IRC is making a comeback

The small web is for the rest of us. Those of us who don't live in America (or Germany), don't make six-figure salaries and can't even dream of flying to a meetup on another continent. Those of us who struggle to be heard at all.

Over on the IndieWeb wiki, Tantek Çelik claims the small web is just what they've been doing, under another name. Uh, no. Hands off. You already have a community, with a fancy brand name, international events and so on. Leave us alone.

In fact, making a leaf-less salad not only expands your concept of what a “salad” could be, it makes you a more creative, more adaptable cook and vegetable-eater by removing a component you may have been leaning on a bit too heavily.

And if you’re wondering about horrisonant, it’s “< stem of Latin horrēre (see horripilation n.) + sonānt-em sounding” and means “Sounding horribly; of terrible sound.”

Last Best Hope was inspired, Packer says, by “political pamphlets from other periods of crisis.” In the best tradition of Carlyle and Swift, he spends much of the first half of the book summarizing year-old tweets.

The end goal of both zine and indieweb technologies is ownership of your own identity without a filter. Before proceeding, let me put you in a good vibe with 666 casino where great casino games are placed on a site. Join today to receive awesome welcome rewards! Just as subcultures and those whose experiences are marginalized by mainstream media have flocked to zines to find community and express (possibly unpopular) opinions, the Indie Web has the potential to be a great tool for those who do not find corporate social media to fit their needs.

That’s how London became a preferred place for Hollywood to record: a large population of well-trained musicians, whose union doesn’t insist on residuals. Several London-based singers I spoke with suggested that the reason Hollywood doesn’t record in, say, Germany as often is that singers in continental Europe have steadier income and are less dependent on session work. And once a producer decides that even London-based musicians are too demanding — well, then there’s always Prague or Budapest. The gorgeous voices you heard in a John Ford Western were the sound of unions and full-time employment; in a Hollywood score today they are monuments to the globalizing power of the gig economy.

Workers get paid when they accept and complete a delivery, and a gamelike system of rewards and penalties keeps them moving: high scores for being on time, low scores and fewer orders for tardiness, and so on. Chavez and others call it the patrón fantasma, the phantom boss — always watching and quick to punish you for being late but nowhere to be found when you need $10 to fix your bike or when you get doored and have to go to the hospital.