Freddie deBoer has a pretty good crap detector. This time, it’s Effective Altruism. (can’t promise no paywall). “It’s not nut-picking if your entire project amounts to a machine for attracting nuts.”
Freddie deBoer has a pretty good crap detector. This time, it’s Effective Altruism. (can’t promise no paywall). “It’s not nut-picking if your entire project amounts to a machine for attracting nuts.”
It occurs to me, reading Jessica Grose, that I have completely lost track of all the multiplying generational monikers. I know I’m a Boomer, but I have no idea what the boundaries are for “GenX,” “Millenials,” “GenZ” or all the other labels I’ve omitted.
Sincere question: are the labels actually helpful for some worthwhile taxonomical purpose?
I know there are a lot of techies around MB, and I have a question for y’all.
Why is it that, seemingly, everytime my MacOS updates, websites cease recognizing it. Isn’t there some kind of unique MAC number or other hardware signature that remains constant?
It would be ironic if, as suggested by how many Wendell Berry fans there are around MB, this eminent writer about limits an simple living had become a gazzilionaire from that writing.
From the Founder of Patagonia, The High Stakes of Low Quality
Reading Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. 📚
I reached my 75th birthday recently, having never read one of her novels. I’m thinking that was a terrible mistake. If the same thing happens with Annie Dillard, I may never read nonfiction again.
I confess to knowing little (not nothing) about Taylor Swift, but here one of my contemporaries pays tribute in a characteristically Wall-Street-Journal manner: We Should All Give Thanks for Taylor Swift.
I now return to my regular enthusiasms.
Three died 60 years ago today: JFK, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis. I miss Lewis most; I’d have loved another 25 years of writing by him.
(Did you know, BTW, that some students today mistake Brave New World for a utopian novel?)
My only real sportsball passion: Purdue men’s basketball. Last night they eked out a 4-point win in a game that saw 78 free throws. Very physical, fantastic Tennessee defense, stars from both teams benched with foul trouble.
I don’t know if Purdue can recover physically in time to threaten #1 Kansas 18.5 hours later. Oops! Strike that. Marquette thumped Kansas.
What a great Maui Invitational Tournament!
“A tongue-and-cheek poll by OnlineCasinos.com listed Hoosiers as the least likely to survive the ‘Hunger Games.’”
My local Gannett rag put that on the front page today. And, yes, they did spell it “tongue-and-cheek.” Glad we have an ink-stained wretch Substacking local news.
Put not your trust in fact-checkers. They are useless or worse than useless against propaganda.
I have joined @JohnBrady in making Kagi my search engine. I was very well pleased with my 100 free searches, which took more than one month to exhaust, so I have settled for the $5 plan.
Oh, dear! I hope not!
To quote investor Balaji Srinivasan, “The future is TikTok Democrats vs. 4Chan Republicans.”
I suppose that when Ayaan Hirsi Ali sought asylum from Sudan, decades ago, she had even worse than this in mind: Washington Court Refuses to Enforce Saudi Child Custody Decree.
We do well to remember the benefits even of post-Christendom (until the fumes from the empty bottle dissipate).
News I never would have noted had I not been looking for the URL on a Buzzfeed clipping from years back:
Gigi Hadid Slammed Reports That She And Selena Gomez Are Concerned About Taylor Swift’s Relationship With Travis Kelce
I would not recognize photos of any of these people besides Taylor Swift.
Magnificent, scatalogical rant: Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder. It even drove me to the dictionary twice. (I had no idea what a fluffer was.)
Others post what they’re grateful for, so I’ll follow suit just once, and at a fleshly level: I’m grateful that some obscure engineer at ResMed continued work on full-face CPAP masks even though they had a pretty good array already. My new AirFit F20 is astonishingly better than good prior masks.
How to beautify a brutalist building. James Howard Kunstler mocks “green band-aids” on bad environments, but this kinda works.
I began several years ago using Readwise to capture my book highlights and then feed me ten of my highlights daily. Sunday, it feeds me ten of my favorite highlights, which today includes some worth sharing.
How do we become uncomplicated and unsophisticated? Can we simply unlearn all that we have learned?
No, we cannot, but what we can do is to separate ourselves from it in order to look at it with new eyes. For us Westerners to truly enter into the ancient Christian transmission and catch the essence of Christ’s teaching, it is necessary for us to crucify our rationalizing minds and arise above the level of thought and emo for a society founded on Descartes’ proposition “I think, therefore I am,” this of course means a kind of suicide; and it is to precisely such an ego-death that Christ calls us. Contemporary western Christianity trained us how to think and what to think; whereas Christ himself, as did Lao Tzu before Him, taught us how not to need to think.
Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao
We did not downsize as a gesture of protest against consumer society. We simply found ourselves with a reduced income and set about discovering the things we could do without. We were helped by situating ourselves in a place where it is quite difficult to spend money in the ways we spent it before. Patmos did not have available the range of goods that eat up income at an expanding rate so that you never feel you have quite enough. And doing without them has the therapeutic effect of slowing you down. It takes time to hand-wash clothes or to jump up and down on sheets, rinse them, wring them out and hang them on a line between trees in the garden; to top and tail the beans; to mix, whip and grate by hand; to haul up buckets from a well. A life without gadgets develops a different, slower rhythm. And, oddly, more time seems to be available in a life without labor-saving devices.
Peter France, Patmos: A Place of Healing for the Soul
To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known… . To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns… . But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.
Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry
One of the best things you’re likely to read today: David Brooks, Love in Harsh Times and Other Coping Mechanisms. I have already pretty well internalized a tragic sensibility; leading with love in harsh times not as much.
I have a smile on my face. Your mileage may vary, though I hope not.