Palaeographers know that Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 bc) used an asterisk symbol when editing Homer in the second century bc, because later scholars wrote about him doing so. Physical examples of Aristarchus’ asterisks have not survived, so we cannot know their physical shape, but as the word asterisk derives from the Greek asteriskos, meaning “little star,” an assumption has been made that they resembled a small star. Aristarchus used the symbols to mark places in Homer’s text that he was copying where he thought passages were from another source. By the third century Origen of Alexandria had adopted the asterisk when compiling the Hexapla—a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, the Septuagint. Origen used the asterisk to demarcate texts that he had added to the Septuagint from the original Hebrew. Both these early uses of the asterisk are as an editing tool, to notify the reader that the passage they are reading should be read with caution.

It fell because the dominant schools of thought stopped speaking about the truth of literature. Once the professors could no longer insist, “You absolutely must read Dryden, Pope, and Swift—they are the essence of wit and discernment”; when they lost the confidence to say that nothing reveals the social complexity of the colonial situation better than Nostromo; if they couldn’t assure anyone that Hawthorne’s sentences showed the American language in its most exquisite form, they lost the competition for majors. Students stopped caring about literature because the professors stopped believing in its promises of revelation and delight.

But pluralism in academic settings rarely lasts for long. There has to be a truth at the end of the day, even if it’s the “truth” of an artificial academic consensus. When theory killed literary truth, it doomed the discipline. Into this vacuum, identity professors in English departments poured ersatz truths about race and sex, which have failed to shore it up.

What mattered was the way in which literature illustrated the truth of gender fluidity, heteronormativity, and other key concepts. The gender studies professors were fired up when talking about sexism, but their handling of literature was just as instrumental as any other theorist’s.

When it comes to masterpieces, they take the stance of appreciation, not a hermeneutic of suspicion—big mistake, and we knew better. Our game of endless interpretation aimed to kill those very joys of immersion and identification.

Pragmatist critics regarded words as doing things, not describing preexisting realities. Cultural Studies interpreted texts by detailing the “cultural work” they performed.

Theory had made everyone cannier, or so we thought. You had to be careful not to “privilege” literature. You did not permit yourself overt enthusiasm for great novels or poems. You submitted “texts” to analysis—you “performed” a “reading.”

One had to presuppose something, the Derrideans admitted, or else one could not say anything. But one could get through the impasse by being super self-conscious about it. Hence the endless qualifiers, scare-quotes, parenthetical remarks, and circling-backwards in deconstructive discourse. In this theory of reading, self-reflexivity would never stop. Interpretation must go on! This embrace of the heroic role of the endless interpreter swept everyone away. The search for the central truth of a literary work was over. The rehearsal of the forever-deferred and “problematized” truth of the work took its place. No more truth, only “reading.”

The position that we should not want to make all Americans think alike has an exception, which is that we want all Americans to think that we should not want to make all Americans think alike. I would subscribe to that, but it is a creed. And diversity, too, has a canon. Betty Crocker is excluded. 

McHugh is a “Ban the books” person.

To the extent that self-help and how-to genres flourish in modernizing societies, we could speculate that people consider them useful when they think that their fate is not determined by the accident of birth, when they believe that they can rise above their parents’ social station (or fall beneath it)—when people see life as a game of chutes and ladders.

no one really knows what it means to be a human being.

The honeybee doesn’t ask itself, Is this all there is? But people do ask themselves that question. We think, This is my one shot at existence. Could I be doing it better? And there have always been other people eager to tell us (sometimes for a fee) how we could. Why shouldn’t we listen to them? We could pick up a helpful tweak. Whatever else we might want to say about the books in McHugh’s canon, millions of people have clearly found them empowering.

a person who is no longer producing work of a sort that can meaningfully convince their peers of anything. So now they’re trying to convince people who are less equipped to evaluate it.

Burkhauser et al. also construct their own poverty measure, which they call “full income poverty”. In addition to some technical changes (using households instead of families, using a different inflation index), they make one big change, which is to add in the value of health insurance. Since Medicare and Medicaid were major parts of the War on Poverty, it makes sense to count these things when evaluating how much LBJ’s programs reduced poverty!

And then there’s precarity, which takes risk into account; scraping by is less satisfying when what little material comfort you’ve accumulated could be ripped away from you at any moment by a surprise medical bill or a spell of unemployment.

You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them.

Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer.

The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. . . What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.

The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories.

When, in the course of a dispute, Metellus Nepos criticized Cicero’s lineage, calling into question the status of his father, Cicero replied, “Your mother has made the answer to such a question in your case more difficult.”

That is how it is usually presented, by contrast with the conservative unwillingness to abandon a visceral attachment to basic individual rights, seen as a legacy from the past.

The main point, as Selim Berker has pointed out, is that disagreements over how to respond to information about the psychology and neurophysiology of moral judgment are themselves moral disagreements. It is certainly legitimate to introduce these findings into the process of reflective equilibrium, but in the end, it is we who have to decide whether they should undermine our confidence in the validity of the deontological judgments they are supposed to explain away.

Good is preferable to bad and better is preferable to worse.

John Rawls gave the name ‘reflective equilibrium’ to the process of putting one’s moral thoughts in order by testing general principles against considered judgments about particular cases, and adjusting both until they fit more or less comfortably together.

Hypertexting ‘Constructing a body of hypertext over time—such as with blogs or wikis—with an emphasis on the strengths of linking (within and without the text) and rich formatting.’ ‘Constructing a body of hypertext over time—such as with blogs or wikis—with an emphasis on the strengths of linking (within and without the text) and rich formatting.’

this is why someone who comes into work with a cold but says it’s okay because “it’s not a bad one” is talking nonsense. They can’t predict what immune response you’ll have to their virus. It might be an okay cold for them and a terrible one for you. Again, look at covid. There’s worse variants, but people can respond to the same variant very differently. Hopefully the era of people placidly telling you they have a cold while they sit two feet away from you is over?

it was made only because a relatively free internet is a far more effective means of surveillance and social-control than any top-down old-fashioned authoritarian regulation ever could be

the most dispiriting literature meme I have seen circulating so far: the one that seeks to identify “red flags” on the bookshelf when you “go home with a guy” that should, dear girl, cause you forthwith to flee.

We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitive industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?” Hear hear.

the blood of Jonathan Franzen might be more easily hosed away as in an abattoir.

Modern literature, properly understood, has largely been about incels, and the periodic efforts to purge them for something more “optimistic” (1934, 2021) have been waged by people who do not really know what literature is.

Yet at least in the domain of arts and culture, it seems to me uncontroversial to say that in the current moment bien-pensant Americans broadly share Stalin’s view that there is, or ought to be, a concrete purpose to literature, and that that is, namely, to engineer the human soul.

The Romans used timber sparingly, it being a land-hungry material needed for other essentials such as shipbuilding, choosing instead the masonry construction that exploited the abundant labour they had at their disposal.

Thomas Kaminski is professor emeritus of English at Loyola University Chicago.

Taste is the faculty by which we make judgments about art. The term of course has broader social uses: a gift, a comment, any form of public display may, depending on the circumstances, be thought in either good or bad taste.

The sound is rhythmic and sensual, its pleasures emotionally exuberant and rebellious, often Dionysiac. And those pleasures are real. Nevertheless, some of us think them shallow, expending themselves in the endocrine system. Those who dissent from the popular taste will tell you that a Bach cantata, a Beethoven symphony, or a Wagner opera can not only stir our sensual nature but penetrate to the recesses of the human heart. Modern literary theorists and cultural critics sneer at such a claim, decrying it as a form of bourgeois sentimentality or just another attempt by the well-off to justify their “privilege.” Ultimately, the question is impervious to attempts at demonstration: either you have experienced the power of art or you haven’t.

there are still many who find abstract and conceptual art compelling and who derive real aesthetic pleasure from viewing it. So malleable is human consciousness in responding to the artifice of our fellow man, and such is the power of received opinion to shape those responses.

Ours, sad to say, is a decadent age, in which we have allowed the critics to argue us out of our senses. (Of all the arts, music has undoubtedly suffered the most from this deference to the intellect and denial of the sensual. Does anyone outside of music schools really enjoy the latest cacophony foisted upon restive but intimidated concertgoers as “modern” music?)

The late 20th century, when the art that most pleased the experts left the typical viewer cold, was the great age of the aesthetic hypocrite. One could only wonder what someone meant when he said that he “liked” a piece of modern art. Did he find the arrangement of colors in that work, however random or chaotic, beautiful in itself? Perhaps. Was that Cubist disassembly of a female torso psychologically compelling? Maybe the first time one saw that sort of thing. Or was our viewer merely watching out for his reputation, in effect saying to himself, “Everyone knows that Matisse is a great artist, and by nodding approval I show myself a man of taste”? Our motives, of course, are often unclear even to ourselves; and who is any one of us, after all, to dispute received opinion?

We may still know nothing of the work’s original social and cultural meaning, but that does not matter, for we have fit it into our own aesthetic world and conferred our own meaning upon it.

The idea of training one’s taste may seem alien, even repugnant. Perhaps beauty should be recognizable in any circumstances. But one’s own experience will generally tell against this claim.

For the purposes of this essay, there is such a thing as great art.

“Kenneth Clark was saying the other day…that people who look at old masters fall into three groups: those who see what it is without being told; those who see it when you tell them; and those who can’t see it whatever you do.” This remark, cold and hard as it is, seems largely correct. Ask anyone who has taught literature or art history at the college level: the professor will recognize these three groups—the sensitive, the teachable, and the dull. It is not necessarily a matter of intellect. I once heard a brilliant economist talk about a novel: he noticed everything in it but the art. It is a matter of taste.

Li hopes that acknowledging this history—and how it hindered an effective global response to Covid-19—will allow good ventilation to emerge as a central pillar of public health policy, a development that would not just hasten the end of this pandemic but beat back future ones. 

(Fauci declined to be interviewed for this story.)

What must have happened, she thought, was that after Wells died, scientists inside the CDC conflated his observations. They plucked the size of the particle that transmits tuberculosis out of context, making 5 microns stand in for a general definition of airborne spread. Wells’ 100-micron threshold got left behind. “You can see that the idea of what is respirable, what stays airborne, and what is infectious are all being flattened into this 5-micron phenomenon,” Randall says. Over time, through blind repetition, the error sank deeper into the medical canon. The CDC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Randall had studied citation tracking, a type of scholastic detective work where the clues aren’t blood sprays and stray fibers but buried references to long-ago studies, reports, and other records.

Like his peers, Langmuir had been brought up in the Gospel of Personal Cleanliness, an obsession that made handwashing the bedrock of US public health policy. He seemed to view Wells’ ideas about airborne transmission as retrograde, seeing in them a slide back toward an ancient, irrational terror of bad air—the “miasma theory” that had prevailed for centuries. Langmuir dismissed them as little more than “interesting theoretical points.”

Thus comes the slow disappointment of watching movies. First you don’t understand them. Then you understand them, and they’re captivating. Then you understand them too well, and they’re boring. Special effects become ordinary, deep movies become dull, groundbreaking themes become repetitive.4 You realize some revered directors are just hacks.5

Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story. The fundamental constraints of the medium (and to a lesser extent, audience preferences) lead to the same story being told, over and over again.

The 2000s-era teen/adult comedy has died out, despite immense popularity. Why?2 Adult comedy thrives on irreverence. Over the past decade, we’ve become touchy about what’s okay to say or laugh at.

The final benefit is that compression and dense-packing in columnar databases free up space — space that may be used to sort and index data within the columns. In other words, columnar databases have higher sorting and indexing efficiency, which comes more as a side benefit of having some leftover space from strong compression. It is also, in fact, mutually beneficial: researchers who study columnar databases point out that sorted data compress better than unsorted data, because sorting lowers entropy.

The first action a chef will take is often to set a pan on the stove and start heating it. That pan isn’t just a pan. It is also a placeholder reminding him that a dish is in process.

One of the first material scientists I spoke to about making things that last for thousands of years offered a compelling insight: “Everything is burning, just at different rates.” What he means is that what we perceive as aging is actually oxidisation, like rusting. When we imagine materials that may last for thousands of years, most people think of stone or precious metals like gold – because they don't oxidise readily. But even bodies can be preserved for millennia if stored in the right chemical environment, as the mummies of Egypt demonstrate.

bio-concrete. This is where bacteria called Bacillus pasteurii is actually encapsulated and added to the concrete, along with a form of starch that serves as its food. The bacteria stay dormant in the concrete until a crack forms and air gets in. This change wakes the bacteria up, and they begin to eat, grow and reproduce. In doing so, they excrete calcite, which bonds to the concrete, fills the crack and seals it up. So in essence, this type of concrete structure is capable of self-repair.

Bio-cement is formed by taking sand, or other forms of aggregate, and then adding bacteria and urea, a component of urine. The urea triggers the bacteria to secrete calcite – a form of calcium carbonate – binding the mixture together into a solid material similar to limestone.

Sand mining caused a bridge to collapse in Taiwan in 2000, and another the following year in Portugal just as a bus was passing over it, killing 70 people.

And then there’s Singapore, a world leader in land reclamation. To create more space for its nearly six million residents, the jam-packed city-state has built out its territory with an additional 50 sq miles (130 sq km) of land over the past 40 years, almost all of it with sand imported from other countries. The collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that neighbouring Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted exports of sand to Singapore.

Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest goes to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete. 

Archaeologically-speaking, clothes have not been very hard-wearing for much of human history, says Zalasiewicz. "But as soon as plastic came along, we suddenly have super durable techno-fur, as it were – detachable techno-fur."

At first the car will simply rust but, as iron dissolves well in anoxic water, once the oxygen level decreases its metal components will begin to dissolve. Or perhaps a part of the chassis will mineralise, reacting with sulphides to form pyrite. The iron in steel beams or embedded in reinforced concrete, kitchen implements, or even tiny quantities of iron in the speaker of a mobile phone will all acquire a glittering sheen. Even whole rooms – a food court kitchen fitted with stainless steel worktops – might be transformed into fool’s gold.

Actual photo of actual women in the 1890s doing minimal not-really skirt hiking to walk up steps. Note how all they’re doing is holding their long skirts neatly to one side, out of the way of their feet.

here's a small GIF animation of my Ian Knot to prove that it really is the world's fastest.

A coherent and articulated thought does not produce itself automatically, but the process is significantly simplified when all the parts are on the table.

An open protocol for per-user storage on the Web

Fire mindset An approach to circumventing mental blocks by deliberately interpreting everything as fuel for your own progress. "Transform it into something useful" If the outcome is not what you wanted, ask if it still serves your purposes in some way. I have surprised myself many times at how often this is the case.

For some things, however, that artificiality is what people respond to. A cherry flavour almost never tastes like fresh cherries, which are quite mild and defined by the texture of the fruit. Instead it has strong notes of almond, of Maraschino cherries from a jar, and if you leave that out, Wright has found, a client will come back and tell you, that’s the flavour they want.

The flavourist comes up with a first draft at their desk, then puts on a white coat and hits the lab bench, mixing oils, essences, extracts, and synthetic molecules. Wright, who is known for her pear flavours, can reel off the ingredients. There’s a bubblegum, almost banana-tasting molecule called isoamyl acetate, and another molecule called ethyl decadienoate, which has a strong pear taste but that can get a little acrylic.

veryone from Bill Maher to Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson

Over the course of these communications, Weinstein asked if he could nail down the name and contact number of the person with whom he was interacting. “I said, ‘Look, I need to know who you are first, whether you’re real, what your real first and last names are, what your phone number is, and so on,” Weinstein recounts. “But on asking what ‘Christopher’s’ real name and email was, they wouldn’t even go that far.”

Engineering, programming, agriculture (like, actual agriculture, not your shitty organic garden), construction, metallurgy and math—basically a list of things the left is currently allergic to—are all absolutely foundational. Only with actual skills, often gained through work, does the abstract knowledge of these chokepoints become relevant, since sabotage and occupation can then be paired with attempts to build territories. This knowledge also serves to temper our enthusiasm, as most of us must simply recognize that not much is happening and we are quite far from the levers of power. It is necessary, then, to make more friends.

one of the reasons that places like China and Vietnam became ideal locations for factories was precisely the high literacy rates and glut of mid-level engineers they had inherited from the socialist period.

discovering what can and cannot be severed from global production networks requires a process of experimentation carried out by those who have gained some knowledge of how these technologies operate.

Expensive redundancies are built into these networks, for example, to ensure that when strikes do happen at one link in the chain, there are back-up channels to keep production flowing downstream.

On a technological level, it’s surprisingly reasonable.

The actual knowledge required to make a car, a computer, even a hunk of steel, grows more rarefied, itself an expensive commodity rationed to smaller and smaller shares of the population, often pieced apart and distributed so widely that no single engineer or programmer actually knows the entirety of the process, which can only be synthesized at the social level through coordination between many firms via the market. The process is abstracted—not in thought, but materially or “objectively,” by its literal piecing-apart and recomposition in the market, with the mechanism of money as an abstract universal equivalent.

The excess workers are a net cost. In some cases this cost is made up for at the expense of wealthier workers, whose consumption of services pays the bill for poorer workers. In other cases the state takes up the cost in the form of welfare, stimulus spending, prisons or simply through an array of social programs mashed together in an attempt to pay the diffused costs of slow-motion societal collapse. In all these instances, this general cost takes the form of second-hand rents charged on productive work.

The trend is often met with optimism by the highly-skilled, who guarantee that the “second machine age” will create as many jobs as it eliminated, just as previous bouts of mechanization replaced farm work with manufacturing and manufacturing with services. These are often the dreams of people living within today’s Silicon bubble economies, part of the small fraction of the population actually employed in high-end services, STEM fields or, god forbid, “the arts.”

The flyknits represent the largest mechanization of the notoriously labor-intensive footwear industry in decades. According to a research report by Deutsche Bank, “the technology reduces labor costs by up to 50% and cuts material usage by up to 20%, resulting in .25% higher margins.”

These cities are attractive because they have immense, thriving markets in bullshit—and bullshitting is one of the few skills that hasn’t yet been fully automated.

So the YIMBY solution to the yuppie invasion isn't - or shouldn't be - just to build market-rate housing anywhere and everywhere. It's more like the following:A) Build market-rate housing that appeals specifically to yuppies, clustered in specific neighborhoods away from long-time working-class residential areas.B) Instead of tearing down existing housing to build market-rate housing, replace parking lots and warehouses and other inefficient commercial space with new market-rate housing.In other words, YIMBYism is about yuppie diversion. It uses market-rate housing to catch and divert yuppies before they can ever invade normal folks' neighborhoods.

Knowledge-based industries like tech, medicine, and finance are much more important - for simplicity's sake I'll refer to all of these as "tech".

the details of this section are, as all details about Milo Yiannopoulos are, simultaneously woefully tedious and infuriatingly grisly.

That the phantom authority in question is simply good sense — that it makes sense to refer to trans women as “she” because, well, we look, speak, act, dress, and identify as women, and many of us have estrogen rather than testosterone in our bodies — can be ignored in favor of the paranoid fear that someone else is coming to dispossess us of our language.

Why is Reed not writing manifestos in defense of maiden names? For the same reason that any bully weaponizes referential speech by making up names, repeating cruel epithets, etc. Misgendering and deadnaming are modes of abuse, designed to humiliate and hurt trans people.

Tips for using RSS wisely Beware the hoarder instinct. No algorithm can save you from hoarding feeds "just in case", then being overwhelmed. The only cure is to ruthlessly Marie Kondo that crap – if a feed doesn't consistently enrich your life, cut it. Some feeds only give you the excerpt of a post, with a link to see the full post at their site. Don't follow those: they break you out of the RSS reading experience, and trick you into losing time on their site. (This is a harsh rule: I used to follow Quanta Magazine's feed, but they switched from full-text to excerpts, so I unsubscribed.) Don't follow feeds that update more than once a day. Go for daily digests, or better yet, weekly digests.

Regarding State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts: In the past I have offered to either (a) assist the city—pro-bono—in coming up with a design to address the dangerous crossing or (b) serve as a pro-bono expert witness for the family of the next victim of this deadly design. That offer still stands, although if it comes to (b), the willful inaction in the face of ample evidence that action is warranted makes Springfield grossly negligent, a finding that should cost the city millions. This letter from the public works director will be Exhibit A. There are many more equally powerful exhibits.

Even so, I’ve had my license challenged for speaking out against bad practices in the past. I’m willing to face that scrutiny, if it comes to that, because I believe it is immoral for members of the engineering profession to use their position of authority to assert engineering values over human values, to thwart the will of elected officials and the public when it comes to how their communities are designed.

In this paragraph, it is asserted that the signalized intersection must be designed to prioritize the volume of traffic. Everything builds off of that assertion. The volume must be accommodated, ergo the signal sequence must be long, ergo pedestrians must wait a long time to cross, ergo pedestrians will not wait—they will put their lives in danger anyway—and the HAWK system would be useless.If instead human values were prioritized over the values of the engineer, this entire line of thinking would be turned around. We want humans to be safe, ergo the crossing signal sequence must be short, ergo traffic volume on this street will be reduced. This is perfectly acceptable reasoning yet it’s never presented to elected officials as their choice. Yet, it is their choice.

Gentrification in places like SoDo and industrial Ballard, where breweries and retail storefronts are overtaking traditional industrial businesses

This ethos has consequences. In 1950, U.S. farm land peaked at 1.2 billion acres. Today, there’s less than 900 million acres. Much of this land has been lost to sprawling development patterns, whereby low-density housing oozes outwards from an urban periphery into previously undeveloped rural land.

That means everything bought online and shipped directly from a Chinese warehouse comes in duty free. The Customs and Border Patrol can close parts of this loophole, but ultimately Congress should get rid of it. There’s just no reason to have one set of import rules for stuff that’s bought online and a different set for everything else.

“Don’t get me wrong” is usually a tell — a kind of backpedaling that sets off an internal alarm and suggests I’m a) reading a hyperbolic argument (which, admittedly, describes the majority of online writing these days) or b) that the writer is just lazy.

To summarise, we went from modernism—”Make it new!” Let’s shape History!—to postmodernism—everything sucks! Nothing really matters!—to metamodernism: maybe things are not this black-and-white? Maybe there’s a middle ground?

To diffuse the heat and avoid overcooking the bulbs on the edge, line the slow cooker well withwashed thimbleberry leaves, soaked corn husks, or crumpled parchment paper.

Star backgrounds are one of the most significant things on the web for me. When they started to disappear it was the first sign that the web was changing.

Cyberspace is star backgrounds with blue underlined links on them.

Laurel Schwulst (born 1988) is an American artist, educator, and writer. Schwulst is recognized for her internet art, her interactive design work, her websites, her writing about the internet[1], and her innovative teaching methods.[2]

It could be, though, that academia is not a cult itself, but rather was a cult for me, because like many of the women Montell writes about, I joined because I hoped it would protect me from capitalism. The student health center was my socialized medicine, and tenure a Scandinavian safety net. In exchange, I willingly participated in language that demoted all other career and life paths. A “job” was an academic one, and all others were “alt-ac” (alternatives to academia). I kept my doubts to myself lest I wanted to hear the thought-terminating cliché: “good people get jobs.”

In the absence of robust social welfare programs, many turn to tightly knit groups that seem to provide an alternative space that can save them from the worst ravages of the market: “America’s laissez-faire atmosphere makes people feel all on their own.”

Their respective paths to the dark side though, Montell tell us, often begin with increased levels of esoteric terminology and choice epithets for outsiders. “Language,” she explains, “can do so much to squash independent thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible.”

Montell says it is language that can best clue us in as to whether an organization we have joined is a cult or is at least engaging in cultlike behavior to extract resources out of its members.

“The most compelling techniques” espoused by cults have had “little to do with drugs, sex, shaved heads, remote communes, drapey kaftans, or ‘Kool-Aid,’” says Montell.

if you suspect that your fate is tied up with that of other human beings and the planet we live on, as the pandemic harshly reminded us, you just might want to think of yourself as a universal owner. If you do, you’ll know to switch banks, to bother your pension fund to apply ethical exclusions to its bond portfolio and to vote against the directors of problematic companies (especially banks and insurance companies), and tell everyone you know to do the same.

Why do we associate white with wedding gowns? And how long has this tradition existed?

In July, police began investigating a hate crime. The crime in question? A defacement of a statue commemorating SS Troops from World War II. In layman’s terms: Someone defaced a memorial to Nazis. A memorial that has been standing proudly in the middle of Oakville for decades. 

Technique became universally totalitarian in modern society as rationalistic proceduralism imposed an artificial value system of measuring and organizing everything quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Like cancer in a living organism, the systematization of technique pervades every cell of our modern technical and technological society. The subtle illusion of this invasive methodology of technique is that people view technology as the liberator of mankind, the operational instrument that sets them free from natural function. Quite the contrary, says Ellul, “technique enslaves people, while proffering them the mere illusion of freedom, all the while tyrannically conforming them to the demands of the technological society with its complex of artificial operational objectives.”

Ellul’s issue was not with technological machines but with a society necessarily caught up in efficient methodological techniques. Technology, then, is but an expression and by-product of the underlying reliance on technique, on the proceduralization whereby everything is organized and managed to function most efficiently, and directed toward the most expedient end of the highest productivity.

Technique obeys a specific rationality. The characteristics of technical progress are self-augmentation, automization, absence of limits, casual progression, a tendency toward acceleration, disparity, and ambivalence. Nevertheless, technique is lacking in one of the essential characteristics found in any organized ensemble, reaction. It is not yet able to control its errors and dysfunctions, to react on its source and modify itself. However, we may now be in the presence of the progressive elaboration of such a reactive capability.

This technical milieu involves, on the human side, a complete re-examination of ancient modes of behavior, or physiological capacities

Technique now constitutes a fabric of its own, replacing nature. Technique is the complex and complete milieu in which human beings must live, and in relation to which they must define themselves. It is a universal mediator, producing a generalised mediation, totalizing and aspiring to totality.

The link-anchor is thus a pernicious idea, based on the notion of small numbers of links to eligible locations which must be individually prepared.

Inter features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o", tabular numbers, etc.

David Nutt isn’t the UK drug czar anymore. He got fired after he refused to retract a speech in which he stated that cannabis and other “recreational” drugs are less dangerous than legal drugs, particularly alcohol and tobacco. I think it was the comparison with alcohol that really did it. After all, booze is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, with just a few companies producing nearly all the beer and spirits we drink. What’s more, Nutt had made a particular enemy of the booze industry. It’s been long understood that the UK alcohol industry’s profitability was entirely dependent on unsafe binge drinking. If everyone in Britain “enjoyed responsibly” as the industry’s ads urged, they would no longer be in profit.

Consider the tale of David Nutt, an eminent neuropsychopharmacologist who served as the “drug czar” to the British government in 2008. Nutt was in charge of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the body that sets out the rules for which drugs should be made illegal and under what circumstances. As part of a review of drug rules, Nutt convened an expert panel and asked them to classify an array of substances, ranking each one based on how harmful it was to its users, to their families, and to wider society. He used this quantitative data to group drugs into three categories: drugs that would be considered very dangerous irrespective of how you ranked harms to society, family, and self; drugs that would be considered not very dangerous irrespective of how you ranked harms to society, family, and self; and drugs whose danger-rating would change substantially based on how you ranked harms to society, family, and self. Nutt then took his categories to the UK Parliament and asked them to tell him how they prioritized these different forms of harm: the question of whether we want to protect individuals, families, or society is a political one, irreducibly qualitative, without an empirical solution. However, once those subjective political priorities have been established, there is an empirical solution to how drugs should be classified in light of these priorities.

Today, the Big Six publishers are the Big Four, because Random House, the largest publisher in the world, gobbled up Penguin and Simon & Schuster. When RH, S&S and Penguin were three companies, it was illegal for them to collude on pricing. But after their mergers, the three former CEOs – now presidents of divisions within an unimaginably giant company – can meet in a board room and plan exactly the same price-fixing strategy, and that isn't illegal under "consumer welfare" antitrust – it's "efficient."

As Ellul saw it, technique colonized realms of life to which it did not properly belong. The key, then, is to recognize where and when it is appropriate to allow technique (or quantification or optimization) a place and where and when it would be good to circumscribe its scope. In order to do so we must have before us a clear sense of the good we seek. But, as Ellul warned, technique becomes a problem precisely when it becomes and end in itself. This may happen because we ourselves lose sight of the ends we were originally seeking or because the focus on technique itself gradually blinds us to those ends. It would seem that when a framework within which questions of the good can be meaningfully taken up is unavailable, then quantification rushes in to fill the axial vacuum.

It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the internet.

My hobbies include playing guitar, learning French, reading, and passing credit checks. I love credit checks. Ohh I love credit checks so so much. I actually love them so much that maybe we shouldn’t do one. I wouldn’t want to overwhelm you with how much I love them.

     In the play, the father is a traveling salesman.      In life, my father never left us. Not even for a night.

Baba Yaga’s Garden

Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (Russian: Ядерные взрывы для народного хозяйства, romanized: Yadernyye vzryvy dlya narodnogo khozyaystva; sometimes referred to as Program #7[1]) was a Soviet program to investigate peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs).

America’s hatred towards the poor and the working class are laid bare in these naked feuds. In 2000, 42 units of federally-subsidized housing for teachers who could no longer afford to live in San Francisco was overthrown by homeowners in the Sunset District who in a fit of cruel hysteria claimed that “[the teachers] don’t even do a good job educating our kids,” and that the project was a slippery slope to public housing tower blocks that would usher in “rampant crime.”

In fact, one study featured in a paper on neighborhood early warning systems for gentrification cites historic architecture as one of five predictors of gentrification in the DC area.

A new way to connect with readers.Break the fourth wall and speak directly to your readers using Author Notes. Readers can also share what they think by giving episodes they like a Thumbs Up and by using Faves to vote for a story they enjoy most each week.

And in 1984, while living on the Mendocino coast of California, he fell in love. With mushrooms. "Outside my cabin were these beautiful mushrooms," he says. "And it was as if these mushrooms looked at me and said, 'Taylor, go out and tell the world how beautiful we are.' And I said, 'OK, I'll do it.' " Lockwood bought camera gear and became passionate about photographing mushrooms. One of his images is even on a U.S. postage stamp. He says sometimes he would dig a hole next to a mushroom for his camera so he could get just the right angle. "I wanted to see them just as a frog would," he says.

Identity issues, far from posing any genuinely liberatory demands, are weaponized time and again against genuine dissent and criticism.

But the concepts that fuel the ascendant ideology come more from the HR department than the grassroots. As in the 1960s they are produced and amplified mainly by the offspring of prosperous elites, for whom genuine exploitation is often involved only as a background abstraction giving a feeling of moral heft to what amounts to office politics.

It helps explain why the current movement tends to accept, echo, and appeal to the general logic of the administrative power structure, rather than genuinely criticizing or resisting it.

These exaggerated rejections of the system ensured their failure by depriving themselves of the resources of rationality and argument necessary for reform

The protests of the New Left began with the recognition of the failures of an over-administered society. The young activists, Adorno’s former assistant Jürgen Habermas wrote in his 1967 book, Toward a Rational Society, sense acutely that something is wrong: “They have become sensitive to the costs for individual development of a society dominated by competition for status and achievement and by the bureaucratization of all regions of life.” Coming predominantly from the upper economic strata of the society, students were uniquely positioned to see the inhumanity of increased bureaucratic control, atomization, and competition that began to colonize every facet of life. They saw more clearly than their prospering parents the hypocrisy of Western institutions using the veneer of “neutrality” and bureaucratic disinterestedness to enable atrocities in the developing world and whitewash historical wrongs. But they also knew nothing else.  So their struggle to find a way outside of it tended to dissolve into fantasy and a rejection of the whole system, root and branch.

Far from being “anti-science” or “anti-Enlightenment”—as Horkheimer and Adorno are sometimes interpreted by commentators both sympathetic and unsympathetic—they were concerned with showing how the Enlightenment fell short of its self-understanding. “On their way towards modern science,” they wrote, “human beings have discarded meaning.” The Enlightenment elevated instrumental calculation and technology as goods in themselves, leaving behind a dangerous ideological vacuum. According to Adorno and Horkheimer’s harrowing account of modernity, reason stopped serving human needs and started generating its own kinds of nightmarish absurdities.

The reason that so many of these “websites as the new emergent artform” sites disappeared is because advertising campaigns aren’t really preserved. In many ways what made Flash the most popular is also what ended up being the least preserved.

You could make a game targeting the Wii because of the Flash Player. This was pretty amazing to a lot of people because now anybody and everybody could make games for the Nintendo Wii, bypassing Nintendo’s very strict development process. Your hobbyist work could be on a Nintendo. All the player had to do was open the Wii browser, and go to one of these Wii specific portals, or the URL you gave them. The community around this even went so far as to release libraries that let the Flash Player interface with the (at the time new and very exciting) WiiMote. Sites like the WiimoteProject.com, and WiiFlash.org served as Wii specific development resources for people. With just a simple bit of ActionScript you could have access to all the buttons and features for the WiiMote AND the end result ran in the browser. It just worked and was accessible to everyone. This was Flash in a nutshell. Because it was easy to run it everywhere, anyone could make things for that once inaccessible platform as long as it had a browser. No approval process. No strict store standards. No licensing agreements to gain access to anything… Just that creative freedom and sharing.

Websites certainly were more culturally relevant.

A lot of pioneering took place here in terms of setting standards for the modern web. Flash is often unfairly equated to being unusable or disability unfriendly, but it had support for things like screen-readers, bookmarking and parsing pages, Google could even search them at one point… The issue was often unfamiliarity with what it could do and how it could be used.

I find that change in how we perceive Flash, and what we remember about it really interesting. In these “professional” communities (among the big brand agencies making The Flash Website), games were almost an afterthought. Flash’s production use, and popular industry use, were these popular, rockstar designer, high end and experimental online experiences. It was at this point too that a lot of pioneering for accessibility was taking place. Ideas for how to merge immersion and accessibility were being explored. I do not exaggerate when I say that these were hugely influential websites. People became famous from making them. They would make or break careers. They were talked about and excitedly shared the same way you would share and talk about games today.

Outcome maximalization across sports has created "smarter" games with less variety and more all-or-nothing play. The fixation with quantifiable success can lead to a collective flattening of the human experience. Perhaps we need to include more randomness in the game. Each home field or home court should have distinctive features, different playing surfaces, or outdoor elements.

Feemasons have historically celebrated two feasts of Saint John: the feast of John the Baptist on 24 June, and that of John the Evangelist on 27 December, roughly marking midsummer and midwinter. Several important masonic events have taken place on those days, including the first meeting of the Grand Lodge on 24 June 1717 and the union of the two English Grand Lodges in London on 27 December 1813.

yes, of course you can give the path name component any valid name, such as "💩": https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls/💩

The other edge condition is that RFC3986 does not specify a maximum value on the port number (which per RFC1340 / RFC6335 is in the range of 0 - 65535) or how e.g., zero-padding is handled, as that of course depends on the client processing the URL. Which makes this a valid URL: https://www.netmeister.org:0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000443/blog/urls.html

or even a fully decimal address: http://172.217.78 http://1.1 http://2790524771

your username and password cannot contain a ":" or "@", but all sorts of other characters otherwise illegal in the hostname component, making this is a valid URL: https://!$%:)(*&^@www.netmeister.org/blog/urls.html

And of course there is plenty of room for abuse here: imagine a URL like http://accounts.google.com:signin@evil.example.com, which may trick a user into thinking that the site they're connecting to is trustworthy. Phishers gonna phish.

I learned PHP to make changes to the site. I hardened the server to make it less vulnerable to attacks. I decided I wanted to get into Computer Science because of jred.

We make posts on a 5 apps, half of which are screenshots from the another of those apps.

Narcotizing dysfunction is a theory that as mass media inundates people on a particular issue, they become apathetic to it, substituting knowledge for action.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.”

many officials, including his own India secretary, Leo Amery, an arch-imperialist who crushed wartime Indian anticolonial rebellion ruthlessly, found Churchill’s racist defenses of his decision — that Indians breed like rabbits, that if the famine was so bad why was Gandhi still alive, that the starvation of Bengalis mattered less than starvation of “sturdy” Greeks — remarkable. 

His defiance of his times is evident in the contrarian phrasing of his statement to the Peel Commission on Palestine in 1937: “I do not admit … that a great wrong has been done” to Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals by their replacement by “a stronger race.”

Whether these views were “of” his time is a misleading and impossible question: In every time, including ours, multiple value systems are in contest.

Impressively, the color red is never used in the cockpit except for high-level warnings — that’s how much thought the industry has given to these standards.

the coercive apparatus doesn't have to be the secret police knocking at the door

For fear of losing a job, or of losing an admission to school, or of losing the right to live in the country of your birth, or merely of social ostracism, many of today's best minds in so-called free, democratic states have stopped trying to say what they think and feel and have fallen silent.

Content Warning

I saw a TikTok the other day of a 60-something woman talking about how differently she was treated after a facelift.

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I started wondering whether these practices were making me love or hate myself.

no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50%, even if it was never turned in,

The teacher email I mentioned above was from one of the conference threads, but the emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments.  This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types. 

Most teachers seem to take it as a given that of course half the class is going to wander in half an hour late during first period—​it’s so early, you know!—​and during fourth period, because you know how long those lines can get at the lunch places the kids all go to, halfway across town.  I’ve sometimes even had to remind myself that, hey, wait, when I was in school, class started when the bell rang because everyone was there! 

Former council member Bruce Harrell, who’s leading (after “undecided”) in recent polls, has really embraced the idea that private donations will help solve the city’s biggest problems, including not just homelessness but transportation infrastructure.

High technology requires much more tacit knowledge than the American system usually admits. The understanding of how to mass produce a car or solar panel is not stored in a book or patent filing; it exists in the brains and bodies of workers, foremen, and engineers on the line. That’s why the places where engineers, designers, and workers come together—whether in Detroit, Silicon Valley, or Shenzhen—have always been the fount of progress.

R&D might seem like an unfathomably boring topic, akin to arguing about medical data or grant approvals, but it revolves around some of the most profound—and unanswered—questions of industrial civilization: Why do some technologies get developed instead of others? Why do some countries become richer faster than others? How can we materially improve people’s lives as fast as possible—and can the government do anything to help? Above all, where does economic growth come from? This is what we’re fighting about when we fight about R&D.

people would spend hours in them.

There’s no reason that software needs to be this indifferent space meant only to maximize output

To me, desktop pets are kind of like this surviving relic from a time when computers were viewed more as our own “personal spaces” and not so much as something we rent from corporation’s like Apple or Microsoft.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP had thriving communities that specialized in creating themes for these OS’s. People would change everything from the default cursors, screensavers, wallpapers, and even the bootup screen for the OS. They would share all that. It was ridiculously popular, and kind of the era where desktop pets really came into their own.

Social housing, by contrast, could have units set aside for market-rate, poor people, and middle-income folks. This would provide new housing supply where it is most needed: across the whole income spectrum, from poor to rich.

Rents should be controlled, which will provide more neighborhood stability, and again level the playing field with owners — after all, the 30-year mortgage functions just like rent control for the middle and upper-middle class.

First, renters ought to get equal policy priority with owners. Rental vouchers ought to be boosted to something like what homeowners get in terms of subsidy, while the worst ownership subsidies like the mortgage interest deduction (almost all of which is claimed by the rich, and mainly produces pointlessly larger homes at the top end) should be removed

Buying a house ought to be roughly analogous to buying a car — a thing that (with rare exceptions) decreases in value over time, because it wears out. Indeed, that is how it works in countries like Japan.

The humanities PhD is still a vocational degree to prepare students for a career teaching in academia, and there are no jobs. Do not get a PhD in history.

Saint John's Fires, explained the monk of Winchcombe, were to drive away dragons, which were abroad on St. John's Eve, poisoning springs and wells.

In England, the earliest reference to this custom occurs on in the 13th century AD,[17] in the Liber Memorandum of the parish church at Barnwell in the Nene Valley, which stated that parish youth would gather on the day to sing songs and play games.[17] A Christian monk of Lilleshall Abbey, in the same century, wrote:[17] In the worship of St John, men waken at even, and maken three manner of fires: one is clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John's Fire.[17]

If Christ's conception and birth took place on the 'growing days', it was fitting that John the Baptist's should take place on the 'lessening days' ('diebus decrescentibus'), for the Baptist himself had proclaimed that 'he must increase; but I must decrease' (John 3:30). By the late sixth century, the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June) had become an important feast, counterbalancing at midsummer the midwinter feast of Christmas.— Professor Éamonn Ó Carragáin

Neutrophils also harbor one of the immune system’s most terrifying armaments: They can unspool the genetic material that’s normally packed into a tight wad at their center, freckle it with toxic proteins and compounds, and then spew it out their side like a lethal sneeze—a weaponization of their own DNA. The end product is a gummy, poisonous net called a neutrophil extracellular trap, or NET, that can massacre scores of microbes at once. But NETs are a double-edged sword: When cast under the wrong circumstances, they can harm their host, seeding serious blood clots or driving the symptoms of diseases as catastrophic as cancer, lupus, and COVID-19.

Boiling Wand "This portable water heater—the better to make tea or bouillon in the privacy of your hotel room—was a must for every Soviet traveler," Idov says. "Russians abroad had a reputation for shorting out whole city blocks by plugging these babies into 110-volt sockets. The infinitely more terrifying homemade version consisted of an electrical cord, two matchsticks and two razor blades."

And so we wander through our country as if in parallel realities. We walk through teeming, crowded cities where only a few other people really exist — the other residents of our tiny stratum. Our class equals are real to us, manifesting in living color — people we might laugh with, do deals with, make love with, confess our frustrations to. The members of adjacent classes are a bit less real — washed-out caricatures we deal with using simple heuristics. And the members of distant classes are mere shadows to us — moving objects to be avoided on the street, automated kiosks to service our economic needs, statistics in our daily news. The Walgreens cashier, the BART conductor — who could they ever be to you? And who could you ever be to them?

A rich White boat dealer with a college degree is of a different class than an equally rich White software engineer who went to the same school.

I find that these people often have in mind an entirely different image of the working class — a member of the educated, downwardly mobile, mostly White “precariat”. In other words…themselves. A deli worker who graduated from Michigan State but can’t figure out what to do with her humanities degree; a struggling public school teacher; a writer for a leftist magazine who gets priced out of superstar cities by dastardly tech workers, etc. It is to the rescue of this precariat and their frustrated expectations that the government must ride, with student loan relief and free college and so on.

Big Tech’s acquisitions might be better evaluated on a case by case basis by regulators

“Having a buyer always available is what makes the risk worth taking.”

Facebook, for instance, began testing its Clubhouse clone in public this week, a move that typically would’ve been preceded by an attempt to buy the company. Facebook’s contemplation of a deal, and the ensuing negotiations, would’ve given Clubhouse some time to grow independently. But instead, Clubhouse is now looking at a carbon copy of itself on a 2 billion-user platform.

And startups typically press forward even when it’s clear they won’t reach IPO scale, anticipating they’ll sell to a bigger company and deliver a decent “exit” to investors and employees.

The prospect of an acquisition — regardless of whether it takes place — tends to encourage productive behavior. Potential acquirers often hold off on copying startups’ products, understanding there’s a chance they’ll one day join forces.

To a modern reader, the case of nested relations might seem a rather obscure special case.

I’ve talked before about the non-team team dynamic that is “one person per task”. Where the management and engineers collude to push the organisation beyond a sustainable pace by making sure that at all times, each individual is kept busy and collaboration is minimised. I talked about the deleterious effect on collaboration, particularly that code review becomes a burden resolved with a quick “LGTM”. People quickly develop specialisations and fiefdoms: oh there’s a CUDA story, better give it to Yevgeny as he worked on the last CUDA story. The organisation quickly adapts to this balkanisation and optimises for it. Is there a CUDA story in the next sprint? We need something for Yevgeny to do. This is Conway’s Corrolary: the most efficient way to develop software is when the structure matches the org chart. Basically all forms of collaboration become a slog when there’s no “us” in team. Unfortunately, the contradiction at the heart of this 19th century approach to division of labour is that, when applied to knowledge work, the value to each participant of being in meetings is minimised, while the necessity for each participant to be in a meeting is maximised. The value is minimised because each person has their personal task within their personal fiefdom to work on. Attending a meeting takes away from the individual productivity that the process is optimising for. Additionally, it increases the likelihood that the meeting content will be mostly irrelevant: why should I want to discuss backend work when Sophie takes all the backend tasks?

In all of my meetings outside of Amazon I had one of three outcomes: * No one read the email/document and I had to explain everything in the meeting * Some people read the document but forgot what it said because they read it days or hours before

(six-pagers are the longest)

our scheduling tools have check boxes to automatically create a document.

Simply put, one of the major reasons Germany has a healthy book publishing industry, beyond its pricing law, is because Germans (like the English, the Irish, the Japanese, the French, and many other nationalities) tend to read more, and more seriously, than Americans. I can’t cite statistics to prove this, but after traveling much of the world I know in my bones that it’s true.

uch crisp professionalism is the norm in German bookstores because clerks are required to study for several years – literature, accounting, and the mechanics of the book business – then pass a standardized exam before they can become certified booksellers.

The fiscal interests of cities therefore align with the financial interests of property owners in rising property values. Because the quality of public goods and amenities is capitalized into housing prices, homeowners prefer higher to lower quality in public services. At the same time, homeowners prefer lower property tax rates. One way to prop up property values though high-quality public goods without paying exceedingly high property tax rates is to concentrate spending on high-quality services near wealthier homeowners while providing them at lower quality for renters and poorer homeowners. But this is impossible if these populations are mixed in together. To gerrymander the quality of public goods, each population needs to be clustered together and separated in space. Because proximity to poorer populations is bad for property values anyway, the motivation of wealthier homeowners to keep their neighborhoods uniformly higher-class is overdetermined. Segregation allows them to focus public spending on themselves (they’re paying for most of it, after all!) and leave those on the “other side of the tracks” with rusty water, overflowing sewers and self-patched potholes.

Whites and wealthier people receive substantially more ideological representation both from local government officials and from municipal policy outputs than do nonwhites and less wealthy individuals. The inequities in representation we identify are frequently shocking in their magnitude. For example, we find that it is only when blacks make up 80–100 percent of the community population that they receive the same amount of ideological representation from elected officials on municipal councils that whites attain when they represent only 20–40 percent of the population.

[L]ocal institutions, designed to enhance participation, actually empower an unrepresentative group of residents — who we call neighborhood defenders — to stop the construction of new housing.” Compared to all local voters, commenters at public development meetings were considerably whiter, older, more male and much more likely to be homeowners.

Local land-use power just is delegated state power.