When speaking in public, you do not have the same immediate feedback from your audience. The public audience is diverse, you only hear from a few of them, the ones you hear from are not representative, and you don't get their responses in real time. As a result, where the internalized interlocutor in your head should be, instead you have a vacuum. The natural mechanisms for internalizing an audience don't work, and the results can be painful. You may sit down to write an op-ed column for the newspaper, and find that nothing comes out, or what comes out sounds nothing like an op-ed column. You aim, but you shoot wide, and the result doesn't even sound like you. You *feel* that vacuum, and it sucks all kinds of paranoid fantasies into it. That is where stage fright comes from, or freezing up at the idea of contributing to an online forum.

To have a public voice, you must learn to combine two seemingly contradictory goals: being true to your own experience and values while also serving as a consciously designed intervention in an ongoing public debate.

Paper-based zines have been limited by the limitations of the medium. The Internet, however, promises a new world of popular cultural production -- webzines.

This is a draft. Please do not quote from it.

Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore.

While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today’s Internet suggests that they couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media.

By the early 1970s, habitat destruction and the pet trade had reduced the golden lion tamarin population to as few as 200 individuals. Captive breeding, overseen by 43 institutions in eight countries, increased their numbers to the point that conservationists were able to reintroduce the tamarins into the wild from 1984. But initially, the reintroduced tamarins had a low survival rate, with problems with adaptation to the new environment causing the majority of losses. High casualties are typical of such efforts, says Brakes.So the tamarin researchers developed an intensive post-release programme, including supplementary feeding and the provision of nest sites, giving the monkeys time to learn necessary survival skills for the jungle. This helping hand doubled survival rates, which was a good start. However, it was not until the next generation that the species began to thrive. “By giving them the opportunity to learn individually in the wild and share that knowledge, the next generation of tamarins had a survival rate of 70%, which is just amazing,” says Brakes. The intensive conservation efforts paid off, and in 2003 the golden lion tamarin was upgraded from critically endangered to endangered.

All our animals are raised in a secure compound in Idaho and fed a diet enriched with epimedium, to boost sex drive; Soviet-developed molting insect hormone, to maximize growth; and bacon, to counteract the socialism. From birth, they’re schooled in stoicism and the art of self-restraint: we play Epictitus audiobooks on loop in the barn 24/7—at triple speed.

Stop wasting your time and money and start amplifying your beast potential. Get ready to see serious gains. Get ready to Biff. Biff-TEK’s signature line of meat-based protein powders will help you develop muscle, improve your cognitive function, and facilitate key personal development growth metrics. It’s made with real beef and a proprietary blend of neuro-enhancers.

Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal ignorance can bring. Knowledge is power, of course, but—measured by a purely Darwinian calculus—too much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are prejudice, simplemindedness, blind loyalty, and a militant want of curiosity. These are the virtues that fortify us against doubt or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis. Subtlety and imagination, by contrast, often enfeeble the will; ambiguities dull the instincts. So while it is true that American political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in slogans rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect. In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage. Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.

Salvation is not in our hands anyway. Ours is in the trying; the rest isn’t our business. That’s T. S. Eliot. He’s right about that.

I think the jump is not from sin to salvation. There’s a mediating stage of conversion and transformation. I’m with Augustine here, that we are forever in an endless battle of trying to become better Christians. Even as we convert, sin is still persisting. But we are making progress because the grace available to us is a gift that empowers us to try to make better choices.

My hunch is that those younger brothers and sisters and comrades are deeply spiritual, but many of them have distanced themselves from the churches and the mosques and the synagogues.Green: Why is that?West: Because they failed. Mainstream Christianity is a colossal failure in terms of standing up for poor people. You get prophetic Christians, Catholic Workers, certain nuns. You get Black churches concerned about prisons. But for the most part, mainstream Christianity has been concerned with what American culture has been concerned with, which is success. And success has never been the same as spiritual greatness.

- Bleed-resistant and fountain-pen friendly

Similar to anime and manga, the overhead is low

free downloadable software called Live2D Cubism, originally created by Japanese programmer Tetsuya Nakajo, means that anyone with a decent avatar illustration can become a VTuber for less than $100.

The soft-sell sex appeal of both entertainment models is rooted in moe, a vague Japanese term that, in the pop culture idiom, refers to an attraction to physical beings that exist beyond the bounds of reality and often implies the allure of unsullied youth. That the objects of affection in manga and anime sometimes border on the childlike can make them uncomfortable viewing.

He used to follow a handful of YouTubers and Twitch influencers and gamers, but sometime during the pandemic he switched to virtual entertainment, after he got sick of “thirst traps” and “e-thots” (electronic that ho over theres) — people who post photos or host video streams that lure viewers in with their bodies, only to take their money and rebuff them when they try to build a relationship. “Real women with hot bodies are always showing off, getting naked in a bathtub or little swimming pool, trying to get you to lust after them,” he explains. “They don’t really care about you. They just want your money. A lot of people have gotten their hearts broken by 3D women on streaming, but with a 2D character, she can’t really break your heart. You don’t really know what she looks like, you just see this cute anime girl with this really cute voice.”

Things in this worldview don’t have moral standing, and so to objectify a thing is to deprive it of its moral standing and whatever rights might come from that. And I think it certainly is a lot easier to do that when the process itself has veiled the fullness of the reality of the animal, for example, from view. If we’ve isolated ourselves enough through the different layers of artificiality that we have built up around us, we lose sight of what those layers of artificiality depend upon, whether it’s the land or the non-human world. And so to become attentive to these again, I think, would be certainly, probably very important, morally significant.

part of what I think permits the kind of industrial-scale cruelty we now have — which is not just about the question of eating animals, which we’ve done for human history, but it’s about treating them simply as inputs to an industrial process, and having the technology to do that.

Somebody on a flight is sort of narrating on their Twitter feed the discussion a couple in front of them is having, and it goes viral. That’s just one example, but there are various aspects of what used to be considered private segments of our life, of our experience, that are increasingly made publicly available. And I wonder if some of those aspects of our own lives might not be better left private, that I have no business — I have to learn to avert my eyes, I think, sometimes from those kinds of examples.Not in a prudish sense, but just because there’s a kind of imposition in the autonomy of the people involved. When these aspects of their lives are captured, especially without their consent, and are made accessible to me, I need to learn to look away. It’s not good for me to know that, right?

A Chinese philosopher, Yi-Fu Tuan, in the late ’70s has a book on place, and he has this interesting little observation about how place used to structure time.Because the longer it took for information to get to me, the farther away it was, and thus theoretically, the farther away from my own lived experience and what was important to me it might have been. And so once electronic media kind of collapsed that ordering function of distance, then now, we have to become active in deciding what is it important for me to give my attention to right now. I mean, that itself, just having to make that decision, can be very taxing.

But even in our homes, the ordering of this material space through these various artifacts can be more or less conducive to encouraging connection, human relationship, conversation.

I think about how in even just a directly embodied context, we have the capacity to be silent. And that silence becomes meaningful. But we can’t really do that online, which I think is often the source of a lot of our angst.

Not that everything should necessarily bring joy or happiness in a sense, but I think I would oppose the conviviality of the table, the way it relates us and brings us together, to the table-less world of the internet, where we’re all thrown together.

And so with regards to the earth, the digital realm depends upon material resources that need to be collected. It depends on the energy grid. It leaves a footprint on the environment.

So Facebook had a commercial a few years back, where a young girl was sitting at a table with her family. Maybe it was a holiday dinner or something. And all of the relatives are portrayed in kind of stereotypically negative ways, and this young lady is able to escape that world through all of what Facebook brings to her on her smartphone as she’s holding it underneath the table, beneath everybody’s view.And the world sometimes can’t quite compete, if looked at from a certain perspective, with the immediate satisfactions and pleasures and distractions that we can call forth immediately on our smartphones. But it has its own kind of richness that requires a kind of attentiveness. And sometimes it requires us to look very carefully and very patiently to listen, to engage our senses in a more genuine way.

And there’s a very, very funny anecdote in there of a woman who ended up on a date with a guy whose profile was all about how much he hated the rich, about how much he wanted to abolish billionaires, and so on.And then, when they met, after a couple times — and he just kept ranting about how he hated the rich — he’d be like, listen, I’m actually rich. And she was like, oh, well, I still like you. [LAUGHTER] Let’s keep dating.I think a lot of the way we display who we are in flattened profiles is wrong about who we are, what tradeoffs we really make.

And if we come to know a person chiefly, initially, through a profile by looking them up, we’ll bring those preconceptions to the table when we meet them, and it will have the tendency, I would say, to reduce our understanding.

It has displaced certain rituals or roles within a family, certain interactions within a family or within a network of friends, even, who might gather for a meal. That might be a felt loss.Again, not necessarily morally wrong or morally right, but consequential with regards to what is binding that family or that network of friends together. There was a kind of labor involved in putting that meal together, and that labor itself had an important role to play in the dynamics of the relationship that are outsourced when we change the practice by finding technological shortcuts around it to get to the same end, but through different means.

How many times when my map of knowledge to fill something in would simply require, and did require when I was younger, just asking. Do you know? What do you think?Where should I go to dinner? Do you know this person’s phone number? Have you heard of? Do you remember that president? Do you know when this happened?And on the one hand, the information I got from those conversations was probably much less precise. And on the other hand, there was a lot of other information, and there was relationship building that happened in those conversations.

Because if we rely on the search engine, for example, to form our picture of the world, our idea of what others are like, when we try to understand those that are not immediately in our network of friends or colleagues, then it filters a picture of the world of others to us.How are those search results being determined? What is being included? What is being excluded? How is the algorithm calibrating the kind of information I’m going to receive?

An example of this resonates what you just described. I found myself reading a book a couple of days ago, and underlining some passages of note. And immediately, my first thought was, I’ve got to put this on Twitter.And I had to resist the urge, and I consciously thought of, how would I have done this if I didn’t have Twitter? How would my experience of reading have been a little bit different? And why do I feel compelled to share this? Do I feel compelled to share this because I think, oh, this will play really well within my networks?And I think that sense of approval, of — it’s sometimes described as a kind of dopamine hit that you get — and then, we begin to crave that, and then that bending of the self to the perceptions of the audience, that feedback loop, I think, can become really powerful.

And I think part of the point that I often try to make is that something can be morally significant without necessarily being good or bad by itself.

There’s a tendency to just become absorbed in what we’re doing and to forget the needs of the body, right? I’m thinking, for example, of this idea of email apnea, which was coined by Linda Stone, a researcher with Microsoft many years ago.You know, you essentially kind of catch your breath when you’re focusing on what you’re reading online. It’s one way in which it kind of upsets the ordinary rhythms of our bodily existence.

The UK competition regulator has called for Facebook to sell online image platform Giphy, which it bought for $400 million last year, after provisionally finding competition concerns following an in-depth investigation.

Somewhere around then, mothers stopped teaching their daughters how to sew or make clothes—I think less because of any feminism and more because it no longer seems like a particularly worthwhile skill to learn, especially given pressure from other uses of time like sports or homework.

the Shipping Cost of goods has plummeted the Shipping Speeds have dramatically improved, especially for low-cost tiers: consider Christmas shopping from a mail-order company or website in 1999 vs 2019—you used to have to order in early December to hope to get something by Christmas (25 December) without spending $53$301999 extra on fast shipping, but now you can get free shipping as late as 19 December! (“‘Same-day delivery’—what the hell is that?”)

it is now reasonably safe and feasible to live in (most) big cities like NYC, Chicago, or DC

reducing environmental pollution thanks to de-industrialization & eliminating things like dye contaminant waste (see the environmental Kuznets curve & general improvement in US environmental quality)—eg the idea of, say, darning socks is completely alien14⁠, and clothing companies routinely discard millions of pounds of clothes because it’s cheaper than wasting scarce human labor reprocessing & selling them for a song, flooding Africa with discards.

airplane flights no longer cost an appreciable fraction of your annual income12⁠, and people can afford multiple trips a year.

the logical extension of this narrow way of defining language learning.

In fact, CAPTCHA’s old site overtly names Duolingo as existing principally as a tool to help computer systems improve their natural language processing and machine learning, meaning that language “learners” on Duolingo are actually just performing the free labor—or even paying for the privilege—of helping the company improve its proprietary algorithms. In this sense, it is much like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, another model of exploitative human-assisted computer labor critiqued extensively in Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri’s Ghost Work (2019).

“The Millionaire Next Door” elevated self-abnegation to an investment rule -- what Thomas Frank, another critic of their book, termed the authors’ “militantly Calvinist attitude toward consumption” in which “saving and investing are ends in themselves, evidence of moral virtue, while spending is empty dissipation.”

The bottom line is that high-percentile latency is a bad way to measure efficiency, but a good (leading) indicator of pending overload. If you must use latency to measure efficiency, use mean (avg) latency. Yes, average latency

Some of Shein’s major rivals, including H&M, Zara-parent Inditex, ASOS (ASOS.L), Boohoo (BOOH.L) and Zalando (ZALG.DE), publish statements, as well as more detailed information on their supply chain such as factory lists and codes of conduct, on their websites.H&M’s website includes a downloadable spreadsheet with specific names and addresses of thousands of its factories and processing facilities. Inditex has an eight-page, downloadable code of conduct and a map showing the number of its factories and suppliers in each country.

A new constitutional amendment could bar state and local laws that have the effect of limiting interstate population mobility, freeing the national economy from protectionist and not-in-my-backyard state and local legislation. Such an amendment could be used to invalidate unreasonable land use regulations — such as excessive minimum lot size rules and unjustified density limits — and labor regulations that discriminate in their effects against out-of-state workers.

geographically uniform manner

Some argue that these people benefit from gaining work experience. But those benefits do not require subminimum-wage forced labor.

their data and the metadata created by their actions

the American people declare that international law is part of our law

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed as conferring or protecting a right to abortion.

But a unique human life begins at the moment of fertilization

The absence of strong unions harms not only the workplace and the economy but also American democracy. Without countervailing organizations of workers, big corporations and the wealthy exercise vastly more influence in politics at every level of government.

What does this process resemble? It actually sounds a lot like a legal proceeding, albeit one that’s entirely one-sided, devoid of any semblance of due process or legal protection under the law, and probably carried out by teams of purple-haired Millennials with nose hoops and personal pronoun mood-rings.

Mail providers should care about two things and two things only: The list is clean (opt-in and confirmed)  The mailings aren’t infected with any kind of malware. That’s it. Beyond that it really isn’t their business and it’s the height of grandiosity and hubris to think that it is.

Mailchimp, an email list provider, is known for doing this. You effectively pay Mailchimp to curate what you can or cannot say to your own email subscribers.  You’re using their mailservers, and in their mind that’s what gives them the right and the moral authority to monitor the content of your communications to your own audience.

So much of religious life remains physical, such as sacraments or the laying on of hands for healing prayer.

They decided to try two Facebook tools: subscriptions where users pay, for example, $9.99 per month and receive exclusive content, like messages from the bishop; and another tool for worshipers watching services online to send donations in real time.

A Facebook spokeswoman said the data it collected from religious communities would be handled the same way as that of other users

Bishop Robert Barron, founder of an influential Catholic media company, said Facebook “gave people kind of an intimate experience of the Mass that they wouldn’t normally have.”

“Faith organizations and social media are a natural fit because fundamentally both are about connection,” Ms. Sandberg said.

“I just want people to know that Facebook is a place where, when they do feel discouraged or depressed or isolated, that they could go to Facebook and they could immediately connect with a group of people that care about them,” Nona Jones, the company’s director for global faith partnerships and a nondenominational minister, said in an interview.

When it came time for Hillsong’s grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was “partnering with Facebook” and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform.Beyond that, Mr. Collier could not share many specifics — he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.

What are these titles providing to the narrative, then; how does it impact the way we think about monarchy in real life, as well as ourselves when we identify ourselves with it, when we jump straight to prince or king for "a person who is very good at their specialism, and that others have recognised for their success, and consequently rewarded".

to allegorize like Milton is “to shock the mind by ascribing effects to non-entity,” like labelling figures in a photo with aggressively absurd abstract nouns and posting it on Twitter. This subjection of sex to allegory, horrifically violent content begotten by a violently constrictive form, is one reason why Milton’s Hell is less like the liberatory queer space offered by “Montero” and more like our own hell, by which I mean “the hellsite,” by which I mean Twitter. Or rather, “this hellsite,” because when people are saying that Twitter is a hellsite, it is likely that they are doing so on Twitter, where everything, and especially Hell, can be made into a blunt allegory for Twitter.

I have limited focus as it is. Social media operant conditioning has made it worse. Yet at the same time it is a pillar of modern civic participation, and with the pandemic it has become a vital communication flow for people that were once able to communicate in person easily.

“There aren’t many unique key pieces and trends we can attribute to Gen Z/2020. It’s more so the fusion of trends from multiple eras that makes it Gen Z, you know?” she continues via email. “It’s coming to a point where we may no longer have names or genres in terms of style; style is so much more personalized, especially in the digital space I occupy.”

But middle-class people like myself have far less innocent motivations for choosing the things we like, namely, to gain social and cultural capital. Funnily enough, this contradicts developing a true sense of self and personality. Who we are is enough without commodities and other people, but in-group admission and approval — and the sense of safety and belonging that comes with it — feels like the estimable thing we need to gain in order to self-actualize.

He calls this “secular faith,” i.e. faith that is worldly or temporal, rooted in what we do and how we do it in the time that we have here. “Secular faith is the form of faith that we all sustain in caring for someone or something that is vulnerable to loss,” he says. Finitude, then, is a prerequisite for care.

What if Avi and I hadn’t spent the entire pandemic saying “look” every time Bug moved a paw, or fell asleep, or looked like he always looked, but in a way that hit different this time? We’re not just in love with this stupid little flat-faced cat, he’s the texture of our lives.

He’s just a cat, is what I tell myself when things feel particularly dark. It never feels particularly true.

Underneath the right-wing outrage against Big Tech is the angry recognition that America’s most dynamic and fastest-growing companies all recognize that, when they must choose, choosing the values of metropolitan America is just better business. The Pride flag is more lucrative than the Confederate flag, and nobody knows that better than the Confederate flag’s last standard-bearers.

there's something about standing in a room with someone, sharing a beer, knowing they're your community and you can't just put them on blast, and knowing that what you're doing together cannot really be sold that feels so reassuring

But scenes are crafts honed over time - listening to what your friends make, and then going one better. You know, that remix culture, that - I want to start with someone else's song, but build on it as well. Those kinds of knowledge and development that can only take place in temporal locations. Can they form on a twitter which is chopped up, competitive, and propelled by rage? Does twitter exist in linear time? When the format of where we exist requires me to produce content every day and rewards me for making confident hot takes and never forgets when I fuck up: we lose that gestation time and doubt and room to experiment.

Can't I just like watching films and collecting cheap ceramic? Why does it have to be a career choice. How do we resist capitalism in the world when we cannot even resist it in our souls?

The point at which something becomes commodifiable is the end of innovation; it becomes a tightening noose of fewer and fewer visual/social signifiers.

In a magical context, this could be disagreeing with someone's theory of magic they're trying to sell - that can't be a conversation, because they can't ever approach you as an equal instead of a threat to their dominance.

You're attempting to building an income on the blurring between shopping spaces and social spaces, but simultaneously quite angry when people try to treat it as social spaces.

doing the emotional labour of running an online business (which is degrading to everyone and everything involved).

The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place.

More broadly, changing this sorting mechanism requires transforming our whole moral ecology, such that possession of a Stanford degree is no longer seen as signifying a higher level of being.

Both embrace the symbolic class markers of the sociologically low—pickup trucks, guns, country music, Christian nationalism.

We’ve pulled these parties further left on cultural issues (prizing cosmopolitanism and questions of identity) while watering down or reversing traditional Democratic positions on trade and unions. As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave.

A sensible society would not celebrate the skills of a corporate consultant while slighting the skills of a home nurse.

the caring class and rural working class, unheard and unseen

the red one-percenters have economic power, but scant cultural power

A level below the people of the populist regatta, you find the rural working class. Members of this class have highly supervised jobs in manufacturing, transportation, construction. Their jobs tend to be repetitive and may involve some physical danger.

Yet they too have been reshaped by the creative class’s cultural dominance. When I interview members of the GOP donor class, they tell me they often feel they cannot share their true opinions without being scorned.

On the lowest rung of the blue ladder is the caring class, the largest in America (nearly half of all workers, by some measures), and one that in most respects sits quite far from the three above it.

Yet wokeness is not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker, a strategy for personal advancement. You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx. By navigating a fluid progressive cultural frontier more skillfully than their hapless Boomer bosses and by calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them, young, educated elites seek power within elite institutions. Wokeness becomes a way to intimidate Boomer administrators and wrest power from them.

In a study for The Atlantic, Amanda Ripley found that the most politically intolerant Americans “tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves.” The most politically intolerant county in the country, Ripley found, is liberal Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes Boston.

Members of the younger generation see the Clinton-to-Obama era—the formative years for the creative class’s sensibility—as the peak of neoliberal bankruptcy.

The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls.

When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing, they are going to react badly—and they have.

And I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity. Over the past five decades, the number of working-class and conservative voices in universities, the mainstream media, and other institutions of elite culture has shrunk to a sprinkling.

I didn’t anticipate how aggressively we would move to assert our cultural dominance, the way we would seek to impose elite values through speech and thought codes.

A student with ease knows when irony is appropriate, what historical quotations are overused, how to be unselfconscious in a crowd. These practices, as Khan writes in Privilege, his book about St. Paul, can be absorbed only through long experience within elite social circles and institutions.

We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic “localist” tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.

Members of the creative class see their career as the defining feature of their identity, and place a high value on intelligence.

Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.

An analysis by Brookings and The Wall Street Journal found that just 13 years ago, Democratic and Republican areas were at near parity on prosperity and income measures. Now they are divergent and getting more so. If Republicans and Democrats talk as though they are living in different realities, it’s because they are.

The 50 largest metro areas around the world house 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of global wealth.

Enormous wealth was being generated by these highly educated people, who could turn new ideas into software, entertainment, retail concepts, and more.

These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is.

Still, some worry that the pass will be a financial windfall for people from privileged backgrounds while doing little to help others expand their cultural horizons.“A kid from the projects will lean toward what he already knows,” said Pierre Ouzoulias, a senator for the French Communist Party who has pushed to scrap the pass. “I can’t for one moment imagine a kid using the pass to go listen to Baroque opera.”

It was the women’s suffrage movement that coined the idea of “bread and roses.” Humans are not entitled to basic needs only, but to joy and beauty and the abundance that God embodies. James Oppenheim’s poem notes: “Hearts starve as well as bodies. Give us bread, but give us roses.” Is this not what LGBTQ+ Catholics need from their church? Rather than lip service of welcome, we need to find ways to truly affirm the fullness of people’s multifaceted identities, to discard the rhetoric and embrace the difficult and messy work of creating the kin-dom of God.

Experts have identified the species of animals used for British legal documents dating from the 13th to 20th century, and have discovered they were almost always written on sheepskin, rather than goatskin or calfskin vellum. This may have been because the structure of sheepskin made attempts to remove or modify text obvious. Sheep deposit fat in-between the various layers of their skin. During parchment manufacture, the skin is submerged in lime, which draws out the fat leaving voids between the layers. Attempts to scrape off the ink would result in these layers detaching—known as delamination—leaving a visible blemish highlighting any attempts to change any writing. Sheepskin has a very high fat content, accounting for as much as 30 to 50 percent, compared to 3 to 10 percent in goatskin and just 2 to 3 percent in cattle. Consequently, the potential for scraping to detach these layers is considerably greater in sheepskin than those of other animals.

Upon completion of harvest in some parts of Germany during medieval times, farmers preserved the last remaining grain as “Wödin’s Share” (Vergodendeel, Vergodenstruss), an offering to the ancient pagan Allfather (Norse Odin, Slavic Volos). To solicit Wödin’s favor for the coming year, the cuttings were left for his thundering herd of horses sometimes glimpsed swirling aloft as heaps of roiling clouds. Four-wheeled “Wödin’s Wagon” was known in some German traditions as the four stars of Ursa Major with the three that descend from the corner forming the wain’s tongue. German folklorist-philologist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) found evidence of these traditions persisting well into the nineteenth century.

This is what happened with the introduction of household appliances. Instead of spending less time doing laundry, for example, we do laundry more often.

At a time when demand for transport fuel is under pressure from government vehicle-efficiency mandates and the rise of electric cars, the oil industry is doubling down on plastics. Plastic production – which industry analysts forecast to double by 2040 – will be the biggest growth market for oil demand over the next decade, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

I made it through the entirety of the Trump presidency without once having to meet Bannon but here he was, recording his War Room podcast with Lindell. Bannon has been decomposing in front of our eyes for some years now, and I can report that this process continues to take its course.

Since last March, Midge and I have been testing the bounds of what it means to live in my very small apartment together. In many ways, she’s been a perfect pandemic pal: She hates interacting with others; she loves to sit on the couch; she long ago assessed sneezes as an existential threat.

The first pets tended to be tiny, manicured lapdogs, and were an extravagance of the wealthy

A lot of subsidized and low-income housing refuses pets or limits the type and number that residents can have, and homeless shelters generally require people to abandon their pets to get a place to sleep.

They’re a class marker and a way of coping with deep status anxiety. Dogs broadcast stability—Midge is not nearly as expensive as a child or a single-family home, but she is an indicator that I have mastered enough elements of my own life to introduce some joyful chaos into it.

People without kids adopt pets not only as a dry run for eventual children but for lots of other reasons, too, including as an outlet for caring impulses that have nothing to do with parenthood.

Dogs are, for some of us, a perfect balm for purgatorial anxieties. If you have time and care to give, they love freely, they put you on a schedule, they direct your attention and affection and idle thoughts toward something outside yourself.

As I looked around for an opening through which to push my life forward, the gap that was available to me was roughly the size of a hefty chihuahua.

After commenting on how we’ve idealized the early web, McNeil writes that “when I think I feel nostalgic for the internet before social media consolidation, what I am actually experiencing is a longing for an internet that is better, for internet communities that haven’t come into being yet.”

It also had monetization built into its design. When a user connected to a service — users could access news, games, sports updates, topical message boards, and much more — they were charged for every minute of access, creating a revenue stream for the service provider and the telephone company, which took a cut. This business model incentivized companies to keep people on their services as long as possible without having to turn to advertising or tracking. In fact, Minitel had a certain privacy built in; when a user’s bill arrived, it would not identify which services had been used.

Amazon recently launched its own “distributed” network consisting of its own products

platforms drive a superstar economy that hollows out the “middle class” of professions. A small number of people with huge followings can leverage the new tools to generate more revenue, while a vast pool is left playing the virality lottery.

Despite all that she mines from alchemical manuscripts, Rampling nevertheless implies that for her reader-practitioners, the manuscript was only a fallback format, second to the printed book. The absence of English alchemy in print is presumed to have driven this “active culture of sharing and copying alchemical books.” To me, the whole of The Experimental Fire suggests an opposite explanation: that reader-practitioners cultivated this subculture of reading and writing alchemica in manuscript to evade the publicity and impersonality inherent in print. Consider Norton, who appoints himself to write the Key only after stumbling on a precious, “secret” copy of Ripley; or the books of Robert Greene, with the accumulating signatures made by successive owners. The very title of Ripley’s Bosome Book suggests an intimacy between the owner and their book, hugged close. Old manuscripts, as Rampling acknowledges, were valued because they preserved English alchemy to be rediscovered. But newly copied manuscripts, too, had their advantages. Privately produced and circulated, they bespoke the owner’s special access to networks of alchemical knowledge in ways that mass-produced printed copies of the same text could not. Rampling gleans so many of her discoveries from manuscript sources but declines to take up alchemy’s peculiar attachments to the medium as a subject of much analysis or speculation.

Alchemy comes down to us already encrypted by its own conventions: those elisions of proximate sources, misattributions, a fondness for codewords, and attempts to recycle the old as new and pass off the new as old.

Concrete, rebar, and other building materials also have massive footprints and contribute to a range of complex ecological problems. Geofoam’s artificiality is in no way unique. It’s just visually striking,

Most large scale engineering projects have a number of competing requirements to solve for when choosing a building or fill material. Project budgets should be affordable, materials should be readily available, labor costs should be minimized, and substrate should be stable and unlikely to decay. With its light weight (11 to 45 kg per cubic meter), ease of installation, and stability, geofoam checks a whole bunch of these boxes.

(flame retardant chemicals used to treat geofoam were shown to be accumulating in the ground, which led to their discontinuation in Europe but not the US)

And you look around the internet, and itʼs all like this:  How would you change Facebookʼs design?  Twitterʼs?  Instagramʼs?  I donʼt fucking know.  Fuck, I donʼt even want to touch it.  Maybe Iʼd break something. I donʼt think itʼs very surprising, then, that most people donʼt have any desire to go out and make websites of their own.  Browsing the Internet of today, one sees little reason to make more of the same, and little inspiration for anything different.

to give Web 2.0 its due:  At first, « millions of users all collaborating on a single site » seemed pretty awe‐some. But what we now know was so awe‐ful was the manner in which it enshrined platform ownersʼ dominance and control.  One single organization having complete, unfettered access and control over millions of peopleʼs social interactions isnʼt a good thing, after all.

Iʼll save the analysis of Riot Grrrl culture for someone who was actually socially conscious at the time it was happening, but I think itʼs important, when we think of the word resource, that that is what we have in mind.  That specifically:  Resources by and for young queer girls, young trans girls, young enbies, young aromantics and asexuals.  The very sorts of resources that might help you find a community, might help you navigate an oppressive medical system, might help you escape an abusive relationship, might help you stay alive.  Not some bullshit news article or social media post.

Revival of Neoclassical architecture (reintroduction of Roman/Greek features), as one of the cornerstones of Postmodern architecture and design

filtered through the lens of a more conservative and aging Baby Boomer population that was settling down, becoming more wealthy and suburban

ElectroclashcircaVery Late 1990s - Early 2000sLiquid Sky revival, loud and clashing makeup palettes, androgynous glam fashion, revival of some Pacific Punk Wave graphic design. 

In Japan, Latin-alphabet characters — in an effort to make two different systems fit together — feature extremely short ascenders and descenders.

People are spending a lot of money to express themselves online and most of what they’re paying for is basically the digital equivalent of an emo kid’s backpack covered in Hot Topic pins, random little digital artifacts that bely some kind of personal identity.

While an individual website could be any of those metaphors I mentioned above, I believe the common prevailing metaphor—the internet as cloud—is problematic. The internet is not one all-encompassing, mysterious, and untouchable thing. (In early patent drawings depicting the internet, it appears as related shapes: a blob, brain, or explosion.) These metaphors obfuscate the reality that the internet is made up of individual nodes: individual computers talking to other individual computers.

How could a website complement what you already do rather than competing or repeating?

This is why websites are so important. They allow the author to create not only works (the “objects”) but also the world (the rooms, the arrangement of rooms, the architecture!).

However, clarity is one of many possible intentions for a website. There are other legitimate states of mind capable of communication—a surprising, memorable, monumental, soothing, shocking, unpredictable, radically boring, bizarre, mind-blowing, very quiet and subtle, and/or amazing website could work.

Inspired by the grimoire of Fred Bednarski, this is my place to put assorted snippets of code (which may or may not be cursed, so use at your own risk).

In other words, “the socioeconomic gap between black and whites is doubtless an important contributing factor.” The disproportionate killing of blacks may reflect not bias, but the probability of encountering the police, which itself is a function of the probability of living in poverty. That said, given the base rates of encountering the police, there may be a higher rate of bias that surfaces in interactions between police officers and residents in neighborhoods where the rate of poverty is high (which may surface because officers feel emboldened to act with impunity, in part because law enforcement has too much power and not enough accountability, as Musa al-Gharbi recently argued compellingly). Nonetheless, ubiquitous and vivid media narratives that emerge from such tragic events as the horrific death of George Floyd can activate availability bias, leading us to believe such events are more common than they are or, alternatively, that “the names change but the color is always black” when, in fact, they are not.

Base-rate neglect, for example, may explain why people are inclined to believe that results from the Implicit Association Test reflect prejudice rather than appropriate judgments about underlying base rate probabilities that prevail in the world.

Midwestern states like Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana all have quick access to cities when compared to Appalachia.

that wasn’t horrifically online in middle school

I was in Detroit doing my usual thing when a man across the street began yelling at me. You have no right to photograph me without express written permission! He came at me with righteous indignation. I handed him my card, told him I was visiting from San Francisco, and said I was curious about what Detroit was really like. I will sue you if you publish any photos of me in them! How dare you violate my rights! I scrolled though the images on my camera screen and showed him I wasn’t actually photographing him at all. His expression flickered for a split second before he redirected his tirade. You have no right to invade our community. You think this place is yours to do with as you please, but it’s not. The conversation went on like this for a while. I wanted to know who he thought I was and what he thought I was doing. I wanted to know about the specifics of his grievances. Anything I tell you will only be used against me and my people.

Though paranoid readings can be enlightening and grimly revelatory, they also have a tendency to loop towards dead ends, tautology, recursion, to provide comprehensive evidence for hopelessness and dread, to prove what we already feared we knew. While helpful at explaining the state we’re in, they’re not so useful at envisaging ways out. An “altogether different approach” is “reparative” reading, reading that “isn’t so much concerned with avoiding danger as with creativity and survival.” A useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments. I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: “To be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.” Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death.

I am fascinated by the Farmer’s Almanac, and the “Planting by the Moon” guide in particular, which has advice such as: “Root crops that can be planted now will yield well.” “Good days for killing weeds.” “Good days for transplanting.” “Barren days. Do no planting.” I think it’d be funny to make up an almanac for writers* and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.

Their prospective students are diverse: a mix of first generation college students without mentors to guide them, high achievers enthralled by their perception of the academic lifestyle, international students desperate for a Green Card, students lacking the prestigious undergraduate degree or network needed to gain entry into exclusive creative industries, and students who believe that the degree they earn will be the career collateral they need to be successful. 

Students told me that in practice, MAPH and MAPSS attendees are often treated as second-class students, and must convince professors to allow them into courses and perform elaborate courting rituals to find one willing to serve as a thesis advisor. Students from PhD programs in other departments told me that it was an “open secret” that the MAPH was a “cash cow” for the university. One MAPH graduate told me of a professor who only allowed students into his seminar if they agreed not to speak during the first half of class. 

Thee iota/jot thing and the WW2/Swiss watches thing are both instances of the intrinsic joy in finding out how two separate pieces of knowledge connect, and start to build a web.There’s a couple of quotes from Damon Knight’s essay in Turning Points that relate to that joy:It seems to me that the more you train your mind to perceive order, the more joy you are likely to get from the perception. (Order in the sense of patterns and heuristics, not “proper behaviour and rules”.)Once you learn one thing, whatever it is, however niche, it becomes easier to learn other things:Any system that helps you understand the world around you is valuable. Natural history, biology, ethnology, physics, geology.... You must have knowledge to make the nets in which other knowledge is caught.

So, when a mystery writer is writing a book / film / tv show — let’s say show — their target is for you, the audience, to figure out who did it just a few minutes before the detective does. If you figure it out too early, you’ll get bored. And if you figure it out after the show reveals it, you lose the joy of solving a puzzle and feeling clever. (The writer is not aiming to outsmart you, because they’re not in competition with you. They’re trying to create something fun for you. If you figure it out just a bit before it’s revealed, I’m sorry, you have not outsmarted the writer, you have fallen exactly into their trap, the trap of “having an enjoyable experience”.)

Vogue writer Emma Specter recently sent out emails for her upcoming birthday party, and had a different gripe.“It’s very hard to organically and subtly get a crush’s email,” she tells me in a voice note. “The nice thing about Facebook invites was it suggested people so it could seem like, ‘Oh Facebook suggested you so I invited you!’

There’s an idea called “gray man”, in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. They assume, actually, that the bad guys will shoot all the guys wearing combat pants first, just to be sure.

With J.Crew, say, or Urban Outfitters, claims to authenticity tangle bizarrely with economies of scale, and we see “value-mining”, hollowing out the individual unit for maximum profit. T-shirt weaves conceived to require less cotton (“it looks authentically worn”). That’s when you get into seriously sad simulacra territory.

Many visions of technological progress anticipate the existence of ubiquitous high-speed networks and plentiful, cheap power. I would suggest that for every localized instance of ‘techno-utopia’, a desert of extraction is created.

The sensibility connects to the past- it resurrects older hardware and software platforms and aesthetics and reconnects them to the present. Programming new art tools for vintage hardware and software is a common exercise.

The Merveilles visual aesthetic restricts color palettes to black and white, vector or pixel art, with at most a single accent color (usually a sea-foam aqua).

There is a tendency towards salvaging older computer equipment and avoiding electronics waste, as well as preparing for a world where the electronics distribution chain breaks down

an assertion that individuals should create their own personally tailored tools to serve their own objectives and values.

Merveilles is associated with, but distinct from sensibilities like ”Solarpunk”, “Cyberpunk” or “Junkpunk” in that it is practical rather than speculative.

As more and more bright young people devoted themselves to this discipline, new technological subcultures were born out of dissatisfaction with the systems these tech workers found themselves serving under. These subcultures are not monolithic, but tribal.

Throughout her work, she was critical of the infiltration of scientific terminology and methods into all aspects of human life. Couching an argument in language that sounded scientific, she thought, was a way of claiming the ability to know or predict things that could never be predicted or known. Fact-checking was a part of that larger trend: the practice, she wrote to McCarthy, was a form of “phony scientificality.”

Forem Self-Host allows you to spin up your own Forem community using our open guidelines available here for an experience that’s entirely yours.

“So if I’m not wearing makeup or if I think I don’t necessarily look my best, the beauty filter sort of changes certain things about your appearance and can fix certain parts of you.”

In October 2019, Facebook banned distortion effects because of “public debate about potential negative impact.” Awareness of body dysmorphia was rising, and a filter called FixMe, which allowed users to mark up their faces as a cosmetic surgeon might, had sparked a surge of criticism for encouraging plastic surgery. But in August 2020, the effects were re-released with a new policy banning filters that explicitly promoted surgery. Effects that resize facial features, however, are still allowed. (When asked about the decision, a spokesperson directed me to Facebook’s press release from that time.)

Since then, several dozen other U.S. municipalities, including Denver and New York, have either passed or proposed measures that ban or restrict natural gas in new or substantially renovated buildings with the hopes it will help achieve goals of reducing the carbon emissions linked to climate change. In turn, a number of states, including Texas and Georgia, have moved to prohibit local jurisdictions from enacting such bans before more cities can catch on.

We found that we can actually use table salt, sodium chloride, to basically extract the lithium from the ore. Nobody has done this before to the best of my knowledge. He didn’t go into more details about the process, which raised quite a few eyebrows in the lithium industry. But now we have obtained a new patent application for Tesla’s new lithium extraction process, which comes with a lot more details about this mysterious “table salt” method.

Following Eve’s death, the Gender & Sexuality Studies Group at Boston University had been hosting an annual lecture in Eve’s honor.1 For 2014 they invited Lauren, whose title (and poster) were so scandalous that the lecture’s usual venue refused, at the last moment, to allow it; so, the organizers led us to the Physics Department, which was above scandal (and also had a better auditorium).

Their writing tallied the psychic costs of capital but seldom called for its abolition outright. Instead, they focused on how our painful and hopelessly compromised ways of trying to get through the day flicker with the promise of something more satisfying, equitable, and free. Fantasy helps us forget how bad it is and that’s not good, but fantasy also poses this necessary and implacable question: “What is to be done,” in Kay Gabriel’s words, “given that we have the desires we do?”

One of the most popular activities for volunteers, say the experts, is helping children in orphanages. That demand, as a result, has created perverse economic incentives. "In places like Kenya and Cambodia, Nepal and Tanzania, orphanages are prolific. But the children within them are not orphans and in many cases are being placed in orphanages in order for orphanage directors to profit from the [volunteer] tourism demand to engage with orphans," says Leigh Mathews, founder of Alto Global, an international development consultancy group and the co-founder of Rethink Orphanages, a group that helps volunteer groups terminate their orphanage programs and repatriate children with their families.

If a vervet monkey sees a snake and reacts with fear, other monkeys in the group will do better if they can react quickly by internalising that fear, rather than waiting to see the snake for themselves.

Later, the anthropologist James Dow, who spent decades studying healing practices in the Caribbean and Mexico, built upon deep structure in linguistic theory to identify certain common steps: there’s a body of symbols shared between the healer and the suffering person; the healer persuades the sufferer that the problem can be explained; the healer attaches the suffering to a transactional symbol through emotion; the healer manipulates the symbols to create emotional change and alleviate suffering.

Emotions work a bit like a social immune system: social relationships provoke an emotional inflammatory reaction when something threatens them. But there are also ways to dampen that response and avoid a state of social sepsis, bringing people back into the fold when relationships have been ruptured.

Emotion regulation to reduce distress appears to be a fundamental human behaviour that doesn’t just happen within us, but between us. We’re constantly consoling others and being consoled, from instances of forgettable disappointment to life-changing traumas. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatry and psychology, as well as the self-help movement, is burdened by the expectation that self-regulation skills must be mastered to achieve wellbeing.

Cooler regions are not immune. Boreal forests ringing the northerly parts of the globe are in fact projected to experience the greatest warming of all. In central Siberia, conifers are already dying at greater rates and are expected to retreat upslope and to the north. One boreal forest researcher told Yale Environment 360 that “the boreal forest is breaking apart.” He added: “The question is what will replace it?”

“Now’s a good time to go visit national parks with big trees,” said Nate McDowell, an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the lead author of a paper forecasting that in southwestern US forests more than half of conifers, the dominant type of trees, could be killed by 2050. “It’s like Glacier national park – now’s a good time to see a glacier before they’re gone.”

I can never tell whether the writer has their tongue in their cheek or their head in their ass

If you see a picture of a minister and then a picture of a prison inmate, you’ll probably assume they have very different characters. But, Ross and Nisbett wrote:Clerics and criminals rarely face an identical or equivalent set of situational challenges. Rather, they place themselves, and are placed by others, in situations that differ precisely in ways that induce clergy to look, act, feel, and think rather consistently like clergy and that induce criminals to look, act, feel, and think like criminals.

The panel couldn’t conceive of an alternate path for the officers to have taken, and the plaintiffs didn’t seem to offer one, so it was decided that setting Olivas on fire was reasonable under the circumstances. Olivas’ family provided cases where courts found the use of a taser was excessive, but the panel declined to even consider them “given the degree of granularity involved in the qualified immunity analysis.” In other words, unless a court has identified an incredibly specific manner of excessive force, this court won’t reason by analogy.

But China had for decades been engaging in mercantilist policies against the U.S. that were far more aggressive than anything Trump or Biden has done — mercantilism that is increasingly difficult to justify on the grounds of national development. So China really started that.

In the Nineties, scientists at Nasa fed a variety of psychoactive substances to spiders to observe the effect on their web-making. The spider given caffeine spun a completely useless web, with no symmetry or centre, and holes large enough for a bird to get through. The web was much more dysfunctional than those spun by spiders high on cannabis or LSD. It’s unclear from the book (and from my subsequent Google searches) whether the spider was given the arachnid equivalent of a single cappuccino or a more Balzacian dose, which makes the comparison with other drugs less helpful, but Pollan’s point is that caffeine changes us more than we realise. Anyone who has accidentally overdosed on coffee and found themselves too jittery to function will identify with the caffeinated spider, who was extremely busy being unproductive. Perhaps the spider could even serve as a symbol for low-paid workers under present-day, hyper-caffeinated capitalism, for whom hard work yields so few personal rewards.

Each year, at the end of their first laying cycle, the hens who survive the ordeal of multiple rapes, are discarded and replaced with younger "breeding stock".

The chicks are incubated in metal drawers where the complex and constant communication that flows between mother hen and her growing embryos is replaced by the cold silence of machines.

By far the most common case for joins is following foreign keys. SQL has no special syntax for this: select foo.id, quux.value from foo, bar, quux where foo.bar_id = bar.id and bar.quux_id = quux.id

I don’t offer a program of resistance except to say: when culture is a literal click away, you should want to slow down and conjure some hurdles, make consumption a gradation harder. Cut down on your web-based content, maybe. Balk at the bingeable. Use the internet, if you must, but as a delivery system. (Go ahead and buy those expensive Criterion DVDs.) Revel in what arrives in the good old mail and spurn what comes too easily. Seek out first editions, rare albums, out-of-print movies, old numbers of magazines someone took the care to shrink-wrap. When not in lockdown owing to a global pandemic, visit bookstores and record shops, and often. Arrange to forget your smartphone and contrive to be alone. You will be amazed at what lies just out of view of the scroll.

Who needs all that tramping around cumbersome cities with boon companions? In a matter of clicks, armed mainly with a thumb, you can call up a consumer report, make your decision, and then head over to Amazon to seal the deal. You have your afternoon back. Not that you’d fill it with quiet reverie, of course: the new efficiencies merely make room for yet more scrolling.

Academic friends have expressed surprise when I tell them about spending time listening to local activists talk to, and about, the people who live around us in the decayed industrial city where I live. Their sentiment runs something along the lines of ‘I suppose activism can be local too.’ The trick for intellectuals is to imagine continually what’s actually obscured by what we read: the languages of people who don’t read Antonio Gramsci, or Paulo Freire, or Fred Moten. Darren Green, an extraordinary activist in Trenton, New Jersey, walks around 11 public housing projects every day, several of them more than once, to talk with, and listen to, the people who live in them. He likes to say that the elderly are like walking bookshelves. As the example of Bourdieu shows, even the most intellectually committed, even the smartest – perhaps especially the smartest – of us can all too easily overlook the script of those lives, the language that might remain hidden for too long.

When the Europeans came upon the magnificent medieval ruins of Great Zimbabwe in the 1870s, they had a great deal of difficulty in accepting that they could have been built by the ancestors of the Shona people who still lived there. They had so much difficulty, in fact, that they hypothesised – or even believed – that they had to have been built by a white – indeed Anglo-Saxon – race. Given that there’s absolutely no evidence that Anglo-Saxons ever inhabited sub-Saharan Africa until the 17th century, that posed a problem. It was a problem that was solved by arguing that the Phoenicians had colonised southern Africa centuries before. That was a solution only because the Phoenicians were regarded, for the purposes of this theory, as white.

In fact, the Classics scholar Denis Feeney has argued that the destruction of Carthage goaded the Romans into thinking of their language in exceptional terms, as a language that was, after the Punic Wars, the language of an empire.

At one point, Carthage was poised to become the greatest empire on Earth. It failed only because the great Carthaginian general Hannibal didn’t destroy Rome itself when he invaded Italy. If Hannibal had succeeded, Punic rather than Latin might have been the language of European intellectuals until the post-Enlightenment.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, rich, strange, and Scottish, died at eighty-four in 1799. He was known for exposing himself: he exercised naked before the open windows of his estate and eschewed travel by carriage, insisting instead on riding his horse Alburac through the damp gray of every Scottish season.

One of the most appealing features of “Highly Irregular” is its stock of poems and brain-teasers illustrating the language’s more absurd quirks. My favorite is this limerick, which, 140 years ago, graced a weekly newspaper in small-town Ohio: “There was a brave soldier, a Colonel, / Who swore in a way most infolonel; / But he never once thought / As a Christian man ought / He imperiled his own life etolonel.”

Ms. Okrent notes that establishing a model of correct usage became an obsession only in the 18th century, amid a more general zeal for organization and codification. There were sticklers before that, like the poet John Dryden, who insisted that it was inelegant to end a sentence with a preposition. Yet it was customary to exalt Latin as a language of rules and logic, whereas English was “just . . . something people did.”

the utopians and oddballs who have tried to create alternatives to natural means of communication

Clearly, though, David Reuben and William McGuffey aren’t devoted to exactly the same process of cultural homogenization for its own sake. And this is ultimately why Americanon, for all of its energetically reported detail, ultimately adds up to considerably less than its bestselling, culture-making parts.

Webster’s obsessive, orthographic brand of American homiletics, meanwhile, already augured a profound shift in national identity, McHugh suggests: The young New York schoolteacher who published the Blue Back Speller in 1783 was already entertaining visions of America as a bona fide New World empire, and spent a tour as a newspaper editor touting his high Federalist vision of New World dominion.

(One McGuffey lesson in consonants contained this didactic-yet-casual outburst: “He cannot tolerate a papist.”)

Yet, as McHugh observes, Webster’s pocket dictionary of 1806 appears to mark the first introduction of the word immigrant into print usage—prior to that, all border crossers were simply “migrants,” no different from citizens who pulled up stakes within their countries of origin. By the time the full dictionary was published in 1828, Webster had further defined “immigrate” as “to remove into a country for the purpose of permanent residence,” thereby effacing the widespread practice of seasonal migration across national borders. The battle lines for future high-nationalist culture wars were drawn.

Online and on instant messaging, asterisks have become increasingly useful and now provide a series of services; for example, to show emphasis, in the way italics are used on the printed page. This use probably started on certain online forums where to make a word show up as bold it needed to be surrounded by asterisks, like *this*. This convention then crept online where, rather than using bold to show emphasis, the asterisks serve the purpose instead.