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Briefs

Thursday, February 20th, 2020

Mike and Rich of Red Letter Media do a re:View of Star Trek: Picard. I hadn’t articulated to myself why I chose not to watch beyond the first episode — they explain it. One criticism though: they mock the term positronic, seeming not to know it comes from Asimov’s robots.

Tuesday, October 29th, 2019

The Tube Ronnies complete with transcript, thanks to the invaluable IanVisits.

Tuesday, October 1st, 2019

The sweaters of Succession. By Vulture.

Friday, August 30th, 2019

Music from Baskets compiled by Josh Moshier on SoundCloud. There is also the Baskets Soundtrack at tunefind.

Tuesday, January 1st, 2019

Chronicling from “below the API line”, as Venkatesh Rao calls it, are Austin Murphy with “I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon” in The Atlantic and Lauren Hough with “I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America” in The Huffington Post.

The depicted harshness of American work life for so many is terrible not just for those involved but for all. (Also these two share a prodigious unmet need to urinate on the job — is this the top new workplace tribulation?)

Wednesday, August 15th, 2018

Clips from the great British documentary The Great British Year. No need for a BBC license; this is the programme’s web page. Just great stuff.

Friday, June 15th, 2018

What a lovely episode of Westworld is the latest, “Kiksuya”. I think the show has been great recently, such as crashing into the Shogun version of Sweetwater in “Akane no Mai”, and James Delos’s incarceration and repeated relaunches in “The Riddle of the Sphinx”.

There is so much death depicted in Westworld; I haven’t watched Game of Thrones nor The Walking Dead so perhaps that is par for the course nowadays on tv but it’s new for me. In reality this level of mayhem only exists in pockets (and of course among the non-human), so I suppose it is important that we be reminded of it.

I love the ongoing reversal within Westworld that the real world shot outdoors is fake while the indoor sets underground, reached through Lost-like hatches, are real. And the music; beautiful! And the scenery, beautiful! Without these two elements, how great can a moving picture story ever be?

Sunday, April 29th, 2018

“Our statement is a non-statement.” In this 2007 interview, Robert Culp (“the talent”) speaks of I Spy and his partner Bill Cosby (“the genius”).

Saturday, April 21st, 2018

We have entered an uncanny valley of algorithmic culture. I believe it’s still easy to step out of, but even easier not to. And maybe it’s merely a speeding up of how things have always worked.

Thursday, April 12th, 2018

It’s nice to see Slant Magazine praise something fulsomely and in detail: Chuck Bowen on Billions, Season 3.

Thursday, March 15th, 2018

The Bloomsbury set thought about work and leisure, with ideas for today as we wrestle more universally with these issues.

Monday, July 3rd, 2017

Giancarlo Esposito talks with Slant Magazine about, among other things, how he created Gustavo Fring. “So part of what I began to do in Breaking Bad was to use my ease of expression—my breathing in and out, my yoga practice—to drop my natural personality. So that I would be calm and relaxed and allow myself to witness a little bit.”

Monday, January 30th, 2017

Fast, clear, cogent, respectful, dominating — what a performance Hugh Hewitt recently gave on Charlie Rose. He even asked Charlie a couple of times what he thinks, and it quickly became two chummy top media guys sharing ideas, not a mainstream media star interviewing a right-wing kook.

Hewitt managed to work in his career in government — which was all very long ago — and the very many people he knows, but without the name-dropping being the point of his responses. He called Charlie Charlie often enough that Charlie finally called him Hugh. “Great to have you,” Charlie ended it. “Good [ie, maybe not so great] to be here,” the response.

I listen pretty regularly to The Hugh Hewitt Show and it would be nice if we could get this fast-talking, super-smart, reasonable and sophisticated guy instead of the dumbed-down base-cultivating borderline bully we sometimes get on his home turf.

Tuesday, November 8th, 2016

I’m thinking it’s the most awesome TV show ever, but I also thought the same about about the other back in the day until close to the end. This insightful piece by Lindsey Romain in Vulture points out the thematic similarities between Westworld and Lost. Let’s hope it all doesn’t degenerate into a flabby Manichaeism.

Friday, August 26th, 2016

Sports are the linchpin holding the entire post-war economic order together.

Ben Thompson, The Sports Linchpin

Saturday, July 16th, 2016

“The Kemalist era in Turkish history lasted for almost 100 years, but finally came to an end in the last 18 hours.” A great balance between up-to-the-minute reports and historical background, Walter Russell Mead live-blogs the failed Turkish Coup.

Saturday, June 18th, 2016

Likely the canonical review of Mr Robot, Season #1. By Matt Zoller Seitz.

Friday, February 5th, 2016

We must never forget that PBS aired Are You Being Served as a public service.

ASK

Monday, November 9th, 2015

Antinomy

a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox

Given that television must revolve off antinomies about being and watching, about escape from daily life, the averagely intelligent viewer can’t be all that happy about his daily life of high-dose watching.

David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”

Anaclitic

relating to or characterized by a strong emotional dependence on another or others

Solipsistic ads are another way television ends up pointing at itself, keeping the viewer’s relation to his furniture at once alienated and anaclitic.

David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”

Otiose

serving no practical purpose or result.

What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It’s not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It’s that any such connection has become otiose.

David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”

Saturday, April 4th, 2015

And for their next trick… Marvel’s Daredevil TV show is ‘extraordinarily good’, says Den of Geek.

Monday, December 15th, 2014

Season 4 of Homeland is I believe significantly more worthwhile than the previous ones. At the Daily Beast, two versed CIA agents opine that it “accurately present[s] the mission, intensity, pace, contradictions and complexity” of such a mission.

Tuesday, August 5th, 2014

Not only isn’t the Israel Broadcasting Association listing the names of the child fatalities from the Gaza bombings but refusing to let B’Tselem pay for an ad doing so. And the Attorney General has upheld the decision. This seems to me a mistake. We must fully own these deeds.

Thursday, April 24th, 2014

Beyond bracin’, stormin’ Norman Podhoretz eviscerates the Palestinian position in the wake of the Kerry talks collapse.

Saturday, May 25th, 2013

Why, by the William Shatner School of Toupological Studies.

Monday, August 20th, 2012

The Making of The Spy Who Loved Me by the BBC for the Open University, 1977. Episode #1: Cubby Brocolli, Producer. #2: Ken Adam, Production Designer (“not indispensible”, “preferable”, “unique”, “important”). #3, Barbara Bach, Bond Girl.

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

From the comments section: “I feel sad that a supposedly respectable publication would allow a disturbed person to humiliate themselves by publishing a rant as perverse as this.” ‘Breaking Bad Karma: How the cancer victim at the center of the AMC series justifies my skepticism of Holocaust survivors’ by Anna Breslaw. [via Commentary]

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

Exhaustive and wonderful list of what Alli Magidsohn expects to miss upon leaving Israel after 7 years, published by the impressive David Horowitz’s new The Times of Israel. (Not so sure about “the ferocity of celebration here” though, at least among the non-religious.)

Monday, June 25th, 2012

Alec Baldwin’s calm, grown-up, entertaining talk show, Here’s the Thing.

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

TV too is dying. The percentage of people who watch video on a computer once a month—84%—is now higher than the percentage who watch TV.

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

The Ad Age blog on Mad Men is professional and enjoyable.

Monday, May 7th, 2012

“He was no longer so worried about becoming a man; he felt that to an extent he had become one. But in his heart he wondered if he would ever learn the language of men.” A study of Mad Men‘s Pete Campbell character, interspersed with quotes from Norman Mailer’s immortal short story, “The Language of Men”.

Monday, December 12th, 2011

Irit and I were discussing this regarding ET, which still feels contemporary: in arts, entertainment and style, it’s been Groundhog Day for 20 years. “Now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past.”

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Behold, “The Book of Highdef” as told by Eric D. Snider.

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Saxondale tells The Sun how it is — an in-character interview.

Saturday, May 29th, 2010

24 and Lost are dead. Long live 24 and Lost! From The New York Times and the Huffington Post.

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

On second thoughts, let’s not go to Camelot, said Captain Kirk. It is a silly place.

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

As I suspected, it looks like it’s all going to be previously on 24.

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

The internet is... any number of silly things.

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The authoritative Mad Men blog, Basket of Kisses, interviews Elisabeth Moss, AKA Peggy Olsen.

Lileks riffs on Mad Men. “If you don’t watch Mad Men, and you think it’s some Austin-Powers view of the sixties full of madcap over-the-top cultural schtick – they’re smoking, indoors! They’re drinking, at noon! No.”

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Patrick Swayze, 1953-2009, with Chris Farley auditioning at SNL for Chippendales.

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

The Office, UK vs US.

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Dharma Initiative magazine ads circa 1977.

Friday, March 13th, 2009

Great for Lost fans: a compilation of characters saying “What?” Similarly, Fucking Midnight Run (loved the movie but hadn’t remembered the preponderance of the term). Fuck it, see the original post of video collections at the brilliant Waxy. Also, Fucking Pulp Fiction. With this one you can almost follow the plot of the movie!

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

Charlie Rose and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn bond (minute 27:00) over carrying 3 cellphones: iPhone for web, BlackBerry for email, regular for speaking. I say Nokia N95 for all.

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Jason Hunter’s mad convoluted theory of the mad convoluted events of Lost.

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Earth’s sexiest television?

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

Lucky Man: A Memoir

Michael J Fox

♦♦♦

index topics television television

Denver Met

Tuesday, May 8th, 2018

My intent here is not only to participate in a conference but to suck up myriad Americana as a thirsty exile catapulted back in for a primer.
Yes

It’s a Somewhat Rauschenberg World

Tuesday, April 4th, 2017

I don’t like this use of animals, like Damien Hirst’s. The artist could not have asked the goat for permission so should not have assumed it was granted.

Black Tracks the Presidents

Monday, January 30th, 2017

The great virtue of Conrad Black’s Flight of the Eagle is its steady track across the entirety of the nation’s history, treating each president equally under its own law and order.

Homepage Design 2016

Monday, August 15th, 2016

No matter the screen size, a web site should feel like itself, even if it doesn’t look it. So do “mobile first” second.
Yes

From iPhone 4S to 6S: An Appreciation

Monday, December 21st, 2015

The increased size, something I was so hesitant about, feels fine to me now. And because it’s thinner it feels less obtrusive in my pocket.

Spectreview

Thursday, November 12th, 2015

With the villain’s quasi-sibling bond to the hero, 2015’s 007 movie deflates to an incestuous Möbius Strip.

In Gaza, Israel Should Own its Terrible Tactic

Sunday, August 3rd, 2014

Although such excoriating labels as “collective punishment” and “state terrorism” aren’t entirely wrong regarding Israel’s application of the Dahieh Doctrine in Gaza, history does suggest that the method is effective in fighting a fundamentally defensive war.

Go Deny Yourself

Monday, June 17th, 2013

This four-letter little word undermines our modern values of tolerance and presumption of innocence.

Some Consumer Affairs

Monday, December 17th, 2012

I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.
Yes

From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.

2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

The dancers in the ape-suits; how they move is an incredibly energetic output for us. Contrast their physical reaction when witnessing the monolith to that of the astronauts in the newly-minted 21st century.

The Mouse and the Cantilever

Sunday, October 9th, 2011

Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.

Friendship is for Weenies

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust US President Obama.

Before the Setup

Monday, March 8th, 2010

It’s 1983: Go for the Apple IIe with 64k that could be opened up as a hobbyist machine? Or the smaller, sleeker and newer IIc with double the memory but a closed case?

At Modi’in Mall

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown: Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Yes

The Israel I Love, the Bad So Far

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

If the signage were a bit more effective, the staff’s diction and demeanor more professional, then we might have avoided this testy altercation.

Shanghai Europe

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

So, finally, we stopped yesterday; the Israeli assault on Gaza of late 2008/early 2009 is over. With it, Israel lost moral purity and made vital strategic gains.
Yes

Panning for MacBook Pro

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Even if it did nothing, was just a prop in a futuristic movie, the MacBook Pro would be impressive; it’s like a sculpture of my previous computer, the MacBook, except it’s actually an improved computer!

Stop Yesterday

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

Is the goal of Israel’s current assault on Gaza to discourage Hamas from firing rockets or to render them incapable of doing so? These are two quite different projects.

Short-circuiting Place-based Longing

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

If there’s one tangible benefit to having lived in a variety of places it’s that it furnishes evidence of the futility of longing to be elsewhere.

A Crawl Across Crawley, Part 1

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Irit, the Jam and I walk from Brighton to Gatwick Airport.

Clash of the Midgets

Monday, March 10th, 2008

I was annoyed to have my sauna moments despoiled and dominated, reverberating with this old geezer’s most naff yap.
Yes

Israel’s Greatest Victory Since Osirak?

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

If Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza was part of a masterplan to staunch the damage done by the victory of the Six Day War in 1967, then today we see another step in its unfolding.

The Small Adventures, Part 2

Monday, January 7th, 2008

There in the empty restaurant by the water at Dieppe I had toast with foie gras, a carafe of red wine, a huge plate of mussels and chips, and finally a crème brûlée. Somehow, though I’ve eaten in restaurants hundreds of times, I felt grown up.
Yes

The Small Adventures

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Late for the 11pm train to Milan, we enquired frantically among the taxis for one who’d accept the two dogs and take us to Termini Station so I could begin our journey to Britain.

Tony Blair and the Four-State Solution

Friday, December 7th, 2007

Ariel Sharon’s disengagement policy reflected an understanding that ownership of the Palestinian issue is shared with Egypt and Jordan. If Tony Blair were to acquire this view, perhaps he really could help facilitate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A Restoration and Return

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

There she was, sitting outside the apartment block! How did she do it? Dogs—or at least Jam—must have some sort of navigational sense we don’t understand.

Curs to Fate

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

Yesterday I lost Jam in Villa Borghese, the central park here in Rome, some five miles from Talenti, the neighborhood where we’re staying. She has not turned up since.
Yes

Jam and Bread, Jam and Bread!

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

My dog Jam has spent over a third of her time here in Italy as her fixtures have fallen away—first Maddie, then me. But now I’m back!
Yes

This Trip’s Last Day

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

I went to Astor Place Haircutters. I crossed Manhattan Bridge on foot. I walked west along Canal St, seeking a bamboo steamer.

I, Thou and Pastor Bob

Friday, October 5th, 2007

At the Calvary Church here in Fort Lauderdale the Biblical locations feel so far away that they can be abstracted and spiritualized. There is religious energy here.
Yes

The Big and Easy

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

The American stage is grand, as are the achievements and ambitions, but daily life seems lamed by a compulsive denaturing.

A Drop in Time

Monday, August 27th, 2007

The camera hit the ground lens first, bashing it in so that it would no longer wind in and out, and couldn’t switch on. Without it, my perception of an important personal era was degraded.

A Ride to Gatwick Airport

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

Airports. They’re so charged, so symbolic, and so empty once you’re at one; I dream of them so often.

Only the Rustle in the Trees

Friday, June 29th, 2007

Grief, loss — these are the great teachers surely. What one has will pass.

A Cabaret, Old Chum

Monday, June 18th, 2007

It’s a last bastion of civility, being allowed to drink at Penn Station, Brian mused ruefully as we carried our beers to his train home to Great Neck.

Fatahland and Hamastan

Saturday, June 16th, 2007

Now Israel has a dog in a real Palestinian fight: the nationalists rather than the Islamists.
Yes

Stars, Stripes & Superlatives

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Here in Los Angeles I am bombarded with superlatives. Daniel’s record collection. The Bikram Yoga College of India world headquarters. Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. All mixed in with the most ravaging mediocrity.

Shite on Brighton

Friday, May 18th, 2007

“Like many provincial towns,” the Private Eye reviewer stabs, “Brighton, as depicted in this hacked-together tribute, defines itself more by what it isn’t than by what it is. It’s not London, for one thing.”

Daily Yin

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

For my first test of the day as day, I open the back door and step outside to the little patio to see the sky and feel the air. I realize not everybody does this, so if people tell me I’m a miserable bastard then perhaps this little habit will correct their impression.

Mind the Dream

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Dreaming about our passed companions as if they are alive requires tricks to the dreaming mind to overcome what it believes and knows to be true.

The Dharma Tits

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

Buddhism is the philosophy and psychology closest to Cognitive Therapy and vice versa.
Yes

Still Got the Jam

Monday, March 12th, 2007

Jam was one of Maddie’s nine puppies, the one who remained after the others were all taken. That was always my plan, to keep the runt.

Such a Tramp

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

Maddie, who died 18 months ago today, was a mangy mutt and stank, but she was also among the most beautiful dogs I’ve ever seen and for me the longest, richest, widest, deepest streak of feeling lucky.

So You Noticed

Monday, February 26th, 2007

I have had something very flattering: a request. Juan Carlos has asked me for comments on Casino Royale.

Reminds Me of Tel Aviv

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

You get to a stage in life where you are already formed by the past. Thoughts and dilemmas about place are either central questions or a distraction from real issues.

Fly the Blag

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Ryanair has brought wretchedness to the skies. Rather than existing on a privileged plane, you stew in a poisoned atmosphere.

Approaching Infinite Justice

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Immediately after 9/11, the burgeoning war on terror was named “Operation Infinite Justice”. Within days it was renamed “Operation Enduring Freedom”, but is the new name a mere cloaking of the first?

On the Seventh Day

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

The Mrs is skeptical of David Allen’s Getting Things Done self-management system because it eschews the rigors of time management in lieu of what feels right. But GTD is about informed feeling.

Don’t Panic!

Monday, July 12th, 2004

An academic romp through Jewish American comedy starts out as a veritable rollercoaster ride, but grinds to halt with its obsession with one Bob Dylan.

Photographing a Handsome Old Man

Saturday, July 10th, 2004

I want to get people in my pics, but it’s tougher when you’re no longer a wide-eyed teenager, because people generally don’t like to think they are a spectacle.

The Beauty of Rain

Friday, December 19th, 2003

Rain makes the rocks shine. It puts in motion things that are otherwise static. It illustrates gravity most prettily.

Ode to Salame

Monday, December 1st, 2003

It’s supposed to be the arsehole of Tel Aviv, Salame Street, running east-west at its southern tip, but it always does me darn good.

I Love Laundry

Wednesday, November 19th, 2003

How pleasing it is to have my own washing machine. If all isn’t right with the world, not even in my world, at least the laundry cycle is functioning.

Lovely Scenery, But Walks Getting Boring

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003

Unless I drive somewhere new, it’s not much fun to just step out the door and wander. But driving to go for a walk seems a tad ridiculous.

For Love of Economy

Monday, November 17th, 2003

It disturbs me to be driving a car that gets fewer kilometers to the shekel than did my previous.

Shinui and the Seven-Year Itch

Tuesday, May 20th, 2003

How refreshing to see Asian faces out shopping in Tel Aviv, or Africans riding the bus to Ra’anana. With them Israel is given fresh wellsprings of culture.

Allah Help the Jackals

Tuesday, May 13th, 2003

While it’s obvious that overplaying your power can result in a downfall, it’s less obvious that underplaying it also leads to trouble. America did this in the 1970s under Carter. Israel seems to have done it almost perennially.
Yes

For Tel Aviv, Better a Skylift Than a Subway

Wednesday, March 12th, 2003

Rather than copycatting a transportation system from the 19th century, Israel could inject into its civic planning the same audacity and resourcefulness that it has historically brought to agriculture and defence.
Yes

Canada Obscura

Monday, July 8th, 2002

There’s not a patch of water to be seen—the most liquid thing is the word “Coffee” on one of the low-slung strip-mall buildings. It’s a scene more artful than art itself.

Tour of Kitchen Duty

Monday, May 20th, 2002

There was yelling and spray and I raced to keep up. One can enjoy, briefly, the company of men.

Shiny Bright Toadstool

Thursday, August 27th, 1998

In Israel’s case, burgernomics don’t add up because significant factors contribute to the 30%-odd surcharge on a Big Mac.

The Fresh Jewels of Spring Mound

Tuesday, July 14th, 1998

Quality of life in Tel Aviv is fundamentally enhanced by two simple factors: trees are everywhere, and so are apartments.

Independence Park Up for Grabs?

Tuesday, July 7th, 1998

To this day men of many ages walk these bushes, they delicately lurk these bushes, and stand in places odd to choose.

We Tri Harder

Monday, January 19th, 1998

A land could be governed not only by the three separate arms of government, but by three sovereign states.
Yes

Tira Saunters

Sunday, August 18th, 1996

The one-lane road is empty; down below is the Sharon Plain, looking vast. Israel may be a small country but we’re still speaking here of land.

A Call to Thumbs

Friday, October 22nd, 1993

When you hitchhike it’s out of your hands, and that’s therapeutic. Paradoxically, you also see how much control you do have.
 

Briefs (cont’d)

Saturday, July 11th, 2020

A nice straightforward yet telling piece in Prospect Magazine on ambivalence towards domesticity.

Tuesday, July 7th, 2020

From an interview with Yuja Wang at steinway.com:

Sometimes when I play Prokofiev, I try to extract the groove or beats from other rock music.

Other rock music!

Sunday, July 5th, 2020

The animated line-drawing illustrations at Ralph Ammer blog definitely make me want to read every post!

Poolside.FM, the lovely Mac throwback to 1997.

Ash Kyd built his web site to look and act like Windows 95 — cool!

Trump at Mount Rushmore:

We are the nation that gave rise to the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, General George Patton, the great Louie Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley, and Mohammad Ali.

Yet the media called the speech “dark and divisive”.

Friday, July 3rd, 2020

Lester Grinspoon’s “A Cannabis Odyssey: To Smoke or Not To Smoke”.

Tuesday, June 30th, 2020

Amalgamated from a dialog in the comments at a Marginal Revolution post “How to Live in a World Gone Mad?”:

The mob is saying silence is violence. Funnily enough, the mob also says speech is violence. They also say violence is not violence.

Fun, fun, fun!

This fellow Guy Stagg did what I failed to do in reverse: walked from Canterbury to Jerusalem.

Monday, June 29th, 2020

Cancelled Canadian Hal Niedzviecki is still at it, as deliciously elucidated in the rather literate comments.

Jordan Peterson is back, warning that the hard sciences are next.

Thursday, June 18th, 2020

#LoveAShortMale

Wednesday, June 17th, 2020

Theodore Dalrymple on “Silence is violence”, “No justice, no peace”, and other ominous bits of what he coins moral thuggery.

Monday, June 15th, 2020

Capping off a triumvirate of essays I’ve come across in the past few days that elucidate the current moment is Ross Douthat on the successor ideology.

David Goldman produces a fact-filled yet overarchingly-theoried analysis of the mid-pandemic race-themed disturbances. Like for Palestinians, he argues it’s about humiliation. Goldman is sympathetic but not sycophantic, analytic but not caustic.

Sunday, June 14th, 2020

This is the most cogent, bracing clarification of the non-Covid aspects of our current moment that I’ve yet to encounter.

Thursday, June 11th, 2020

The problem is that you have people who are so exhausted from their lousy diets and poor lifestyles, that the idea of putting any effort into anything is overwhelming.

Alan Goldhammer, Is Water Fasting Safe? In-depth Interview w/ Dr. Goldhamer & Dr. Group

Most of the food in the grocery store is nothing more than a few heavily subsidized grains like wheat, corn and soy cooked with oil, salt and sugar, and smashed together in different forms — that’s essentially what people are eating.

Alan Goldhamer, Is Water Fasting Safe? In-depth Interview with Dr. Goldhamer & Dr. Group

Sunday, June 7th, 2020

Conrad Black eulogizes his dog Maya, 12.

Saturday, June 6th, 2020

Each week, Fathom writers recommend Israel-related books, films or podcasts.

“Who is an Arab Jew?” is an essay by Albert Memmi written in 1975.

“The Problem of White Efficacy” by Rebekah Frumkin in Guernica. Totally mental.

Thursday, June 4th, 2020

Rejecting “false equivalency between rule of law and rule by law”, the USA has published its Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China.

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020

“Opposing an aspiring Eurasian hegemon is the American prime strategic directive.” Donnelly’s back!

Saturday, May 30th, 2020

The editor of Spiked castigates the media for misreporting facts on Dominic Cummings’ lockdown behavior. But Brendan O’Neill’s focus on possibly disingenuous facts misses the larger disheartening truth.

Which is that a senior head needs to roll for the UK Government’s humiliating and deadly botching of its initial response to the pandemic. (That many of the leaders themselves contracted the disease is emblematic of this failure.)

Since elections will not be held for years, the next best thing to the PM’s head is that of his high-profile advisor. And this is fitting: as the great visionary and strategist, Cummings should have been the one who got the PM to take the pandemic seriously in good time.

So the details of Cummings’ hypocritical behaviours under lockdown are merely the pretext for some just humiliation for him and this Government. His firing would be the catharsis that marks entry into the next phase of this pandemic; indeed these are political norms. Instead however we slouch further into uncharted territory — political as well as medical and economic.

Thursday, May 28th, 2020

Sauna: The Finnish Bath

H J Viherjuuri

♦♦♦

Even in English translation, this relatively slim definitive work on Finnish sauna is filled with the dignity that seems to come with everything Finland. The author notes that the Finnish way of hot bathing — heating rocks and occasionally pouring water on them to produce steam — is the only one that can be both dry and wet.

Something new to me is that feet can take — and require — more heat than the rest of the body, so that not only should one be mostly prone in the sauna rather than sitting in order to heat the body equally (the hotter parts of a sauna are closer to the ceiling), but the feet can be even higher, so that a ledge or feet stirrups might be good.

Wednesday, May 27th, 2020

“We’ll be lucky if we just get a cold war.” Nouriel Roubini seems on the money that we’re outta money.

He says it’ll be a decade of depression, but why even only a decade? Covid-19 aside, massive change is coming, because Peak Stuff.

So a thought: why must retail be the heart of the economy? What if we were to become a civilization not of shopkeepers, nor even of marketers, but researchers?

Marketing could move from the core to the margins, with us only buying what we need, which is a lot less than what we’ve been buying to date, while taxes — collected on the profits gathered by a select few conglomerates manufacturing super efficiently with automation — pay for tons and tons of scientific research.

Most people being scientists: perhaps less chimera than inevitability?

Tuesday, May 26th, 2020

John Gruber awakens me to the difference between coding and programming. Coding is a means to a more distant end, the software product, whereas programming has a nearer end, a program.

A program is a thing worthy itself of attention and appreciation, whereas code, lacking the definite article, is not.

technovelgy.com, where science meets fiction, and a glorious taste of the old web.

Monday, May 25th, 2020

Deep Work

Cal Newport

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I’m doubt there’s much in Deep Work by Cal Newport that I didn’t already know, but I nonetheless had a hankering to see these ideas conveyed in an organized and impassioned way. My own way of working is already akin to what Newport suggests — for instance I disabled push email on my laptop years ago, and stopped using social media a couple of years ago.

Although he refers quite frequently to David Allen and GTD, one thing he does encourages that is not a GTD emphasis is setting time limits to work sessions with a view to working quicker — like say the Pomodoro Technique but not necessarily stuck on 25-minute periods.

I personally have eschewed this because I feel that with my work, you keep plugging away until the problem is solved. But I do see that there are many benefits to limiting the time on a task, one of them being (though I don’t think Newport mentions this) that it can make the task feel less onerous and intimidating if you know you’re only going to need to work on it for a limited period of time.

One immediate application for me was to start working on a somewhat mindless administrative task that normally takes me one or two full boring days. I realize that if I work on it an hour a day for a week or so, it will be all in all less onerous (and on time).

Sunday, May 24th, 2020

An anonymous employee beneficiary of Twitter’s IPO: “I think a lot of [people in Silicon Valley] care about basic income for everyone, because we’ve lived with it ourselves.”

Friday, May 22nd, 2020

Launch

Jeff Walker

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So now I understand the source of the myriad of preposterously-priced online courses I come across with preposterous limited-time-only sign-ups. Preposterously-priced because they are book projects broken up into series of articles or videos then priced an order of magnitude or two higher than a book; and preposterously time-limited because these are digital products and so can be purchased at any time. They are from the “secret formula to sell almost anything online” from this book Launch by Jeff Walker.

To be fair, Walker stresses that limited-time-only purchasing should be a genuine constraint resulting from the nature of the product, even if many acolytes seem to ignore this part. And his general admonition that a product launch matters and requires much preparation is something to take seriously. But I think regarding a SaaS, launches can be multiple and almost irrelevant to the product itself; launches are marketing activities that can be about any new feature no matter how trivial.

But I’m not responding directly to the book here, rather to my irritation at what it spawned. There is some good marketing advice here certainly, it’s just that I don’t find marketing very interesting. More fool me.

Thursday, May 21st, 2020

SARS-CoV-2 apparently interferes with the body’s one-two process of knocking out a virus, reports Stat News on discoveries made by Benjamin tenOever of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The virus blocks the production of interferons by infected cells, which slows down viral replication. But the signal to bring in killer cells goes unabated. The result is an arms race of virus and inflammatory cytokines within the lungs. Ingestion of interferons could redress this problem.

Monday, May 18th, 2020

Hail Freedonia, a Covid-19 vaccine is in sight! Hail Moderna, hail Massachusetts!

Sunday, May 17th, 2020

The Making of Prince of Persia

Jordan Mechner

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Video game maker Jordan Mechner wrote a rich diary of his life in the mid-1980s. This book covers the creation his second hit game, Prince of Persia, so we gain access of unique immediacy to the heroic tale of producing a universe-dent-making hit.

I wanted this book, which I discovered via Tyler Cowen’s most recent What I’ve been reading, as inspiration during a small lull in morale as I work on a digital product of my own.

Thirty years on there is some poignancy in that this early period of Mencher’s life was the peak: after graduating Yale, already dreamily successful, he shuttles between San Francisco and Hollywood creating video games and pushing screenplays, a digital Orson Welles (in his later game The Last Express, Mechner combines these passions, relying on cinema to produce an impressive commercial failure).

That said, perhaps it is no failure at all that one can point to the creative peak of a life — Mechner’s arguably was working within the memory constraints of the Apple II to create a foe, Shadow Man, based on the hero character. Here I’m reminded of Ken Kocienda’s not dissimilar Eureka moment when up against a constraint, that of using a dictionary to help create the iPhone keyboard.

Perhaps it would have been a better book if he had fleshed out the journal with an italicized retrospective written now, but count me a late-arrival Jordan Mechner fan. And don’t get the Kindle edition lacking the illustrations; I think I’m gonna need to buy the actual book.

Thursday, May 14th, 2020

The comfort of having an organization is largely illusory; it still comes down to one programmer in the end.

Jordan Mechner, The Making of Prince of Persia

In the morning I put in the stair-climbing, and in the evening, the sword-sheathing.

Jordan Mechner, The Making of Prince of Persia

Monday, May 11th, 2020

What a fandango by Tel Avivi Hagai Farago.

#CORONASPEAK.

Saturday, May 9th, 2020

Writing in The New Atlantis, Yuval Levin explicates in “Prudence in a Storm” the terrible opportunity cost of the politics of partisan catastrophizing:

We should be capable of seeing the difference between a crisis rooted in a chronic problem that demands to be addressed within the normal bounds of our political culture and a rare, extreme emergency that requires us to suspend some of the usual frameworks of our politics and mobilize massively but temporarily to respond.

Wednesday, May 6th, 2020

In a crisis, nimbleness is what’s required.

Tuesday, May 5th, 2020

American conservatives for animal welfare.

Saturday, April 25th, 2020

The biggest balagan ever, the USA’s flailing then failing pandemic response:

By the time the virus broke on American shores, the problem was not that the United States didn’t have a single plan for an international pandemic. The problem was it had dozens of plans, totaling thousands of pages, issued by different agencies and by different administrations, apparently with little thought to how they would be combined or who would implement them.

Friday, April 24th, 2020

Some reflections on the pandemic by Yuval Levin:

Rather than a sense of mutual dependence … we might walk away from this crisis as even more capable loners.

Thursday, April 23rd, 2020

More people will die from Covid-19 because we cannot study drugs more quickly, writes Matthew Herper in STAT.

Yes. Anonymized data from all patients should be accessible to all. The social media giants have demonstrated that it can be done — data entered from all over the world into a single system that produces meaningful output. Indeed, the web is the perfect medium for it. Rather than setting up trials to evaluate the efficacy of a treatment, researchers could instead be checking the global treatment knowledgebase.

Using their web-connected devices, registered medical practitioners would log each step of a patient’s treatment as it happens; in medicine a new understanding would take hold that the practice is to both treat the individual at hand and publish that treatment because every facet of every case history can contribute to a myriad of studies.

A standards body could set the data model that is a medical case. Presumably the model would emanate out to include such information as the identity of the treating hospital, so that, eg, the geographical locale can be factored in by researchers.

One problematic aspect of a case is the patient’s anonymized identity, required for factoring in pre-existing conditions. A new price of our medical care would be its worldwide publicization, and the understanding that motivated organizations could connect even anonymized medical data with other aspects of a person’s life, such as a cessation of credit card use during hospitalization. Yet given what we now see is the catastrophic fallout of a pandemic, we will surely come to accept this cost, just like say driving licenses. Moreover, perhaps this could justify to Americans why healthcare should be free: one is contributing one’s medical biography to the knowledgebase.

Such instant availability of global treatment data would be useful not only to researchers but also — and possibly primarily — to doctors devising treatments in the moment.

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2020

Cool made with Zoom music video (though if this is the state of contemporary pop music, count me out of the tune).

Sunday, April 19th, 2020

Marc Andreessen: Build, baby!

The eleven days in question are 12th–23rd March. Eleven days in which the [UK] government decided to give up with contact tracing and do, well, nothing. Mass gatherings were still allowed (because “science”). Concerts and racing and Champions’ League football. Pubs. Public transport. Everything. The over-70s, it must be conceded, were advised to avoid cruises.

We, the ultra-lean.

Friday, April 17th, 2020

Israelis make masks.

 
 

•••

Newsroll ↻

A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute, edited by Brian C. Anderson.

experiments in refactored perception

  • The Venus Effect

    Velázquez’s Venus is perhaps the most naked on record: with nothing but her lovechild, Cupid, to hold up a mirror to her difuse reflection (deflection?), she lacks most of the mythic giveaways of her traditional representations. She is unlandscaped, unjewelled and unmyrtled. She can’t be [M]arsed. If not for the luxuriant fabrics she is recumbent on, […]

  • Notes: A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

    I just finished the heaviest read so far in my pandemic reads list, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, about the 14th century, loosely an account of the European experience of the Black Death. It is a 784-page monster and I read it in 15-30 minute chunks at bedtime over 68 days, while live-tweeting it. I […]

  • Mansionism 1: Building-Milieu Fit

    In politically turbulent times, when it is not clear which way the arc of history will bend, it is useful to reframe the question of political futures in terms of built-environment futures. Instead of asking, what kind of milieu will we inhabit, you ask the potentially easier question, what sort of built environment will we […]