Much as Gladwell carries water for the official AAF position, so does he lend credence to the narrative preferred by the Japanese government. Never mind that the LDP has been led by many of the very people (once designated Class A war criminals) who plunged Japan into its calamitous war. Never mind that most survivors would beg to differ. Gladwell is perfectly content to parrot this interpretation.

What do we get when we finally encounter a Japanese perspective? An expression of gratitude for the raids that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and wiped out over a quarter of housing in the country. “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs,” states an unnamed Japanese academic at a conference in Tokyo. Of the millions of Japanese impacted by the firebombings, we hear from a sum total of one, who just so happens to tell an American audience exactly what they want to hear.

The answer, in reality, lies in the history of air raid survivors and their postwar crusade for remembrance. It’s no accident that the museum sits in the very heart of the neighborhoods targeted for destruction in March 1945 — the Shitamachi (the Low City), the densely packed, working-class district that had long tantalized American air power strategists. The Center is a site of local as much as national memory, a reminder that not all Tokyoites suffered equally. Area bombing, after all, is not nearly as indiscriminate as its name suggests. From the beginning, war planners set out to concentrate their payloads in the densest, most flammable — and thus usually poorest — parts of urban Japan, giving rise to a particular social geography of incendiary destruction.

The Bomber Mafia is not so much a “case study in how dreams go awry,” as Gladwell claims, as a case study in how narratives of this incendiary campaign sidestep unsettling moral questions about the deliberate targeting of civilians. It pins responsibility for the destruction of 64 cities on one man, thereby absolving the AAF and, by extension, the American government.

the median salary for a college counselor at independent schools is $94,000 but the median salary for a teacher is $60,000, according to the National Association of Independent Schools

Some independent schools enroll a number of low-income students on scholarship, and these “privileged poor,” to use Anthony Jack’s term, account for half the low-income students at some highly selective universities, further evidence of the advantage granted to these schools in the admissions process.

Harvard’s admissions policies gave advantages to legacies, donors, athletes, and underrepresented minorities, which hurt Asian American applicants.

The union threatened vendor Kinki Sharyo that it would launch environmental nuisance lawsuits unless the company agreed that the plant be unionized. In reality, the benefits of this style of protectionism go largely to managers and sitework consultants; blue-collar labor only gets scraps.

Higher education is a proven pathway to opportunity, so we looked for 2- and 4-year institutions successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved

we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.

Any wealth is a product of a collective effort that included them. The social structures that inflate wealth present obstacles to them.

When I caught her slipping back to the one computer still running Mac OS 9 just to take notes, I knew I was going to have to write her a notepad.

I don’t believe in these French-style laws that say you can only work 35 hours a week. If you want to work 100 hours a week, go for it.

I think people are really hungry for an alternative to the Chicken Little narrative that the sky is falling and tech is melting our brains. They want to be able to do something about it, and they just don’t know what to do yet. You could be waiting for Washington to do something about the problem, or you could hold your breath waiting for the tech companies to do something about the problem. Or, instead of waiting, you can do something about the problem today. You can learn one technique to manage your internal triggers better. You can plan one day a week in your calendar. You can turn off your notifications on your phone. You can start small.

Row One = Act 1 Row Two = Act 2A (first half of Act 2) Row Three = Act 2B (second half of Act 2) Row Four = Act 3

Seeing the protagonist come to the smarter, wiser, healthier way of being can be a big part of an emotionally satisfying ending.

As Goldman and McKee say, respectively, endings should be “satisfying and surprising” and “inevitable and unexpected.” So: No, the boy doesn’t get the girl – but here comes another, and maybe she’s The One

Doing so has the effect of making the achievement of the goal more meaningful to the protagonist.

So this event increases the opposition because it weakens Clarice’s position by taking away her source of help, but it’s effective because we understand what it means to Clarice emotionally.

The two most common ways a Midpoint functions to inject new energy are: Increasing the opposition Raising the stakes

That can include: how tough the problem is and/or what the protagonist will be up against by taking on the Act 2 Adventure, what the character believes to be the best or only option for addressing the problem the Inciting Incident created (and the reasoning to come to that conclusion, such as eliminating other options), what happens if he doesn’t attempt to solve the problem at all, what the protagonist is risking by taking on this huge task, what he’ll gain if he succeeds, what’s at stake and why those stakes matter enough to the protagonist to embark on the crazy Act 2 Adventure anyway, plus any additional plot-logistical stuff that needs to happen for us to understand how the protagonist moves from the new problem of the Inciting Incident, to embarking on what they think will be the solution to that problem at the Break into Act 2.

Connect the Inciting Incident and the Break Into Act 2 by creating a problem or opportunity for the protagonist and then showing us how the protagonist intends to solve that problem or take advantage of that opportunity with a solution that is dangerous, risky, or audacious in some way – ingredients for an exciting Act 2.

Instead, the situated needs of letter writers expose the varied historical conditions of what Joy Lisi Rankin terms “acts of computing,” lived experiences with computers almost wholly unrelated to the technical specifications or commercial success of one or another machine.

For Wicks, being a user is a hobby on the basis that he enjoys computerizing everyday tasks, such as managing his local Mensa group mailing list (the remainder of the letter extensively discusses his experience using Mail List Database from Synergistic Systems). Readers like Wicks represented a new “hobbyist” identity uncoupled from as-sembly language arcana and soldering irons. Much as earlier hobbyists enjoyed master-ing the internals of the Apple II, user-hobbyists like Wicks took pleasure in the expert application of microcomputing to everyday life.

Dur-ing the magazine’s final year in print, an overwhelming majority—approximately 92 per-cent—of the letters represented an interaction between readers.

Microcomputer users were users precisely because they used micro-computers at a time when use still embodied a complex range of technical proficiencies, self-education, and confusing possibilities. Engagements with these machines could not yet be passive, plug-in-and-play, or reduced to input-output (even if that is much of what mainstream consumer computing has become).

For decades, our descriptions and imaginations of computer culture have been powerfully shaped by the anecdotal experiences of those who founded or worked in these industries rather than the impressions, actions, or concerns of a broader public. Yet no individual’s historical experience is entirely transparent to themselves nor singularly adequate to explain the massive technological transformation that was learning to live with computers.

ust as the mall, because of its enclosed, surveilled nature, has become a place where parents feel safe leaving their children, the electronic panopticon of the monitored Prodigy network appeals to many parents because they feel their children are somehow safer there.

Rheingold's assumptions about the public nature of cyberspace miss the accelerating shift of new technologies now under public management to private ownership.

What, in the age of virtual environments, is a city, a community, public space, or public life? It is troubling that the illusory language may, if unexamined, subvert the very ideals it promotes, in particular the ideal of 'community'.

Cyberspace is the "American Dream II", according to an August 1995 conference organized by supporters and advisers of Newt Gingrich (http://wvvw.townhall.com/pff).

its killer feature

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.

> When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them.That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.

That’s not why they code, nor are the skills of writing good documentation even vaguely similar to those for writing good code.

In common with almost every other initiative of its kind, this approach assumes that the best people to document macOS are its engineers. Those engineers are often selected at interview by posing them a coding challenge, but have you ever heard of candidates for a software engineering post being selected by or for their ability to document their code?

He believes the fish and chips at Proper Fish on Bainbridge Island might be the best in the Northwest.

The best bagels here, such as Rachel’s Bagels & Burritos, Rubinstein Bagels and Loxsmith Bagels “are just as good as the best bagels in New York,” he said.

Recently, López-Alt started exploring Seattle’s chicken teriyaki scene and found a favorite, Grillbird Teriyaki in West Seattle. One day at lunch, López-Alt laid out trays of chicken teriyaki, fried cauliflower, braised pork and chicken katsu over the hood of his SUV for a photo, an Instagram shot that would be worth gold to the owner of this teriyaki joint when it appeared in a few hours.He held up the deep-fried cauliflower, admiring how the deep-fried shell remained crispy 20 minutes into our interview. The kitchen must use a starch with maybe rice flour to achieve that crunchy coating, he concluded. (It was indeed cornstarch with rice flour, Grillbird confirmed.)

“I told him, ‘This is the best Chicago pizza I have had anywhere, including in Chicago,’” López-Alt recalled. “I still maintain that.”López-Alt went on social media then as he did again this year to coronate Windy City Pie.

(The “Food Lab” update may instead turn into an expanded, 10th anniversary edition, tentatively scheduled for 2025.)

even in dating women demand millionaires, average Joes are treated like disposable good for nothing who women say are creeps because they don't have money to build their IG brand and devour women with lavish gifts.

"Cancer" was applied to tumors because the swollen veins around a tumor were said to look like a crab. "Cancer" had an alternative meaning, "enclosure" (which is, historically, where the meaning "crab" was derived, because of the way a crab's pincers form a circle). This alternative meaning helped the word evolve into the Latin "cancellus" - a barrier dividing two parts of a building. Applied metaphorically, this eventually became the English "cancel".

"Pay" takes a slightly longer journey than "peace", coming from Latin "pacare", meaning "appease", as in "appeasing a creditor". So etymologically, to "pay" someone means to "create peace by settling a debt".

It’s interesting to me that we so assume that online interaction is about conversation via blogging, tweeting, commenting — and ONLY about conversation that we assume this is the way things must be.

the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.

Images were easily discoverable on the public web using simple RSS feeds.

in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format.

“Made with Love, Not in Lab” is a favorite catchphrase at Akua, a start-up that produces burger patties from farmed kelp. (They are very good, but I wish the company's otter mascot didn't make me think of them as otter burgers.)

an Impossible or Beyond burger, while environmentally superior to beef, is said to have five times the carbon footprint of a classic bean burger

What Impossible and Beyond simulate so perfectly isn't ground beef so much as cheap ground beef—which is to say, precisely the industrially produced meat that I most want to remove from my diet because of its cost to animal, human, and planetary welfare.

raised on Annie's mac 'n' cheese and trips to Whole Foods

simple fried vegetables are a beautiful thing—and not necessarily the better for being labeled wings or oysters or shrimp.

encased in a batter as crisp as tempura

But when Jolet and his sister resurrected their grandfather's tamale business, they sensed enough demand to invent a vegan corn version, using an ample amount of coconut oil. “It has the look and feel of lard,” he says, a description that may not make the Coconut Oil Council's marketing materials but does impart a satisfying lushness to the sweet corn filling.

Lastly, when a carrier feels unsafe, mail service could be interrupted, not only for the dog owner, but for the entire neighborhood. When mail service is interrupted, mail must be picked up at the Post Office. Service will not be restored until the dog is properly restrained.

the company’s habit of encouraging employees “to tear each other’s ideas apart in meetings,”

“Malarkey” and “C’mon, man” are as fundamental to Joe Biden’s brand as “Lock her up!” was to Trump’s.

Many cults and cultish communities—not to mention individuals as disparate as Boris Johnson and my mother—also rely on expressions called “thought-terminating clichés,” which affirm positivity while shutting down debate. Cultish cites some of the catchphrases used by the conspiracy theorists of QAnon as examples: “Trust the plan,” “The awakening is bigger than all of this,” and “Do your research.” Thought-terminating clichés, Montell writes, are “semantic stop signs,” and a cue that everyone present should halt independent inquiry and accept the party line.

Cultish language, she proposes, does three things: It makes people feel unique but also connected to others; it encourages people to feel dependent on a particular leader, group, or product to the extent that life without them feels impossible; and it “convinces people to act in ways that are completely in conflict with their former reality, ethics, and sense of self.” The last two effects are what tend to separate brands or people who inspire cult followings (e.g., SoulCycle) from more malign groups and leaders.

I also have learned that my friends and colleagues without kids are uninformed about how broken, expensive, and unfair our childcare system is. They, too, need to see the kids in their community as everybody’s kids.

When sociologist Annette Lareau observed 9- and 10-year-olds, she found that affluent children spent time shuttled between adult-organized activities, while poor and working-class children spent much of their time hanging out with neighbors, siblings and cousins. As a result, poor children became used to managing their own time, though they spent leisure time distanced from adults. Their middle-class peers are not used to managing their own time, and have frequent sibling conflicts, but do become practiced at talking to adults as near-equals. They ended up feeling entitled to adult attention.

Obviously, with comics hosting sites like tapas and webtoon becoming more common than self hosting, the main type of hypercomic these days is the vertical scroll format, gifs, and sometimes sound. Anything more complex than that is often not feasible for long running comics. But there are so many amazing possibilities to explore, especially for shorter comics!

A new study published in The Condor by Dr. Andrea Townsend et al. examines the relationship between urbanization, junk food, and the body conditions of crows.

“In 2004, the bulk of the land in Disneyland was taxed at 1975 values, at a rate of five cents per square foot,” CTRA says. “Subsequent Disneyland expansions show land taxed at growing amounts as new properties were acquired, until, in 2002, new property is assessed and taxed at 37 cents/square foot of land. If the under-assessed and under-taxed Disney land were brought up to 2002 values, Disneyland would pay Orange County $4,672,217.74 more per year in tax. This amount is likely to be larger in 2010, because at an increase of 2% per year as permitted by law, the tax difference between the vast amount of property valued at 1975 values becomes even greater.”

Anyway, it gets even dumber: We understand that nearly everyone who provides material to a reporter is doing so in ways that reflect their worldview, agenda or biases. We have long held that those motives are irrelevant if the information is reliable.This is an … insane statement? — both rationally and morally. Truth can't ever be a sole criteria for publishing. It's necessary, but not sufficient. To suggest otherwise ought to flunk someone out of first year journalism school.

I've never been a fan of second hand markets as a thing, like these records go like hotcakes and resale for megabucks, and everything about that feels like a perversion; the concept of objects becoming pristine collectables rather than being available to people who want to enjoy them, the concept of finding $400 that won't even go to the artist, label or cover-designer

You could create communities around ideas and information. It was really exciting for a little while.Then we screwed it up.At some point, we started creating communities of selfish little monsters and internet trolls. We created Swifties and Beliebers. We created a cult around the idea of the autonomous individual.

Tim Ferriss spends the rest of the book encouraging people not to read, to ignore the news, and to browbeat everyone into giving into their demands. He brags about interrogating college teachers for hours over bad grades instead of, you know, trying to learn something about the world. He recommends treating friends like personal assistants and tasking them with research.

jet around impoverished countries where the dollar is strong (a legacy of colonialism) while running businesses online.

It’s a little more rustic, but still light years beyond what most people will ever get to enjoy, regardless of how hard they work.

Specifically, the lawsuit seeks a legal declaration that Google is a "common carrier," like phone, gas and electric companies, which must provide its services to anyone willing to pay its fee.

Such a lens pans away from virtue and instead focuses on mere inner tranquility, created by the not becoming perturbed by other people’s thoughts, actions, and problems. In this respect, “indifferents” get wrongfully defined as things not worth being concerned or bothered about! 

Agiatis, the Spartan Queen, is another powerful female who plays a significant role in Stoicism’s history. Yet, she is barely mentioned in Stoic circles, despite her role in standing up and succeeding against an oligarchical regime that murdered her first husband, Agis IV, and her in-laws (Agis IV’s grandmother Archidamia, and mother, Agesistrata) and added to their wealth and property by impoverishing and disenfranchising her people. It is rather telling that life-hackers who show such an appetite for Stoicism do not go further than highlighting how a “Spartan” flavored Stoicism can help them lift heavier weights in the gym or become more resilient in the rat race. What can be more Spartan or Stoic than taking the fight to the powerful and passing socioeconomic and land reforms in the name of justice at great personal cost?

The rules as I understand them: Protect your good habits at all cost. When you lose them, fight to regain them. Quit before the bad habit fully sinks its claws in or else you’ll spend years trying to get rid of it.Hard work rarely feels good.Choose emotionally healthy people who don't aggravate your attachment issuesIf you lie you’ll have to keep lying. Don’t lie if you can’t sustain it. Get over your fear of rejection. Fear of rejection is very expensive.Continually assert your boundaries.Then there are the more nebulous rules about how to be a good human in the world, which vary person by person (well, depending on how utilitarian you are). But they usually aren’t that complicated, either.In the end all we have to do is to stay faithful to the same basic guidelines. And yet we never learn, do we?

Just America’s origins in theory, its intolerant dogma, and its coercive tactics remind me of 1930s left-wing ideology. Liberalism as white supremacy recalls the Communist Party’s attack on social democracy as “social fascism.” Just American aesthetics are the new socialist realism.

The parameters of acceptable expression are a lot narrower than they used to be.

The jobs their parents took for granted have become much harder to get, which makes the meritocratic rat race even more crushing.

Just America is a narrative of the young and well educated, which is why it continually misreads or ignores the Black and Latino working classes.

In the summer of 2020, the protesters in the American streets were disproportionately Millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 a year.

I’m exaggerating the suddenness of this new narrative, but not by much.

Just America can’t deal with the stubborn divide between Black and white students in academic assessments. The mild phrase achievement gap has been banished, not only because it implies that Black parents and children have some responsibility, but also because, according to anti-racist ideology, any disparity is by definition racist. Get rid of assessments, and you’ll end the racism along with the gap.

It can’t talk about the complex causes of poverty.

The most radical version of the narrative lashes together the oppression of all groups in an encompassing hell of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, plutocracy, environmental destruction, and drones—America as a unitary malignant force beyond any other evil on Earth.

What had been considered, broadly speaking, American history (or literature, philosophy, classics, even math) is explicitly defined as white, and therefore supremacist. What was innocent by default suddenly finds itself on trial, every idea is cross-examined, and nothing else can get done until the case is heard.

Any talk of progress is false consciousness—even “hurtful.”

Everyone sensed their power. Not everyone resisted the temptation to abuse it.

A whole system of oppression can exist within a single word.

But in identity politics, equality refers to groups, not individuals, and demands action to redress disparate outcomes among groups—in other words, equity, which often amounts to new forms of discrimination. In practice, identity politics inverts the old hierarchy of power into a new one: bottom rail on top. The fixed lens of power makes true equality, based on common humanity, impossible.

The self is not a rational being that can persuade and be persuaded by other selves, because reason is another form of power.

Critical theorists argue that the Enlightenment, including the American founding, carried the seeds of modern racism and imperialism.

American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists.

In some versions of the narrative, the country has no positive value at all—it can never be made better.

But racism alone couldn’t explain why white men were much more likely to vote for Trump than white women, or why the same was true of Black and Latino men and women. Or why the most reliable predictor for who was a Trump voter wasn’t race but the combination of race and education.

Early in the campaign, I spent time with a group of white and Black steelworkers in a town near Canton, Ohio. They had been locked out by the company over a contract dispute and were picketing outside the mill. They faced months without a paycheck, possibly the loss of their jobs, and they talked about the end of the middle class. The only candidates who interested them were Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Self-government didn’t require any special learning, just the native wisdom of the people.

And because people still live their lives in an actual place, and the nation is the largest place with which they can identify—world citizenship is too abstract to be meaningful—patriotic feeling has to be tapped if you want to achieve anything big.

She meant that she no longer lived with any security.

Graduation from an exclusive school marks the entry into a successful life.

None of this brings them in contact with fellow citizens outside their way of life.

The winners in Smart America have withdrawn from national life

Earnest purpose mingled with self-congratulation; virtue and success high-fived—the distinctive atmosphere of Smart America.

Their assumption was that all Americans could do what they did and be like them.

It was cosmopolitan, embracing multiculturalism at home and welcoming a globalized world.

As for unions, they hardly exist in Smart America. They’re instruments of class solidarity, not individual advancement, and the individual is the unit of worth in Smart America as in Free America.

They were early adopters of things that make the surface of contemporary life agreeable: HBO, Lipitor, MileagePlus Platinum, the MacBook Pro, grass-fed organic beef, cold-brewed coffee, Amazon Prime

You have a hard time telling what part of the country they come from, because their local identities are submerged in the homogenizing culture of top universities and elite professions.

While the sunny narrative of Free America shone on, its policies eroded the way of life of many of its adherents. The disappearance of secure employment and small businesses destroyed communities. The civic associations that Tocqueville identified as the antidote to individualism died with the jobs. When towns lost their Main Street drugstores and restaurants to Walgreens and Wendy’s in the mall out on the highway, they also lost their Rotary Club and newspaper—the local institutions of self-government. This hollowing-out exposed them to an epidemic of aloneness, physical and psychological. Isolation bred distrust in the old sources of authority—school, church, union, bank, media.

After years of high inflation with high unemployment, gas shortages, chaos in liberal cities, and epic government corruption and incompetence, by 1980 a large audience of Americans was ready to listen

Libertarianism speaks to the American myth of the self-made man and the lonely pioneer on the plains. (Glorification of men is a recurring feature.) Like Marxism, it is a complete explanatory system. It appeals to supersmart engineers and others who never really grow up.

Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country.

The favorite era for the Swashbuckler, the 17th Century is the age in Europe when lusty musketeers dueled with each other and got sucked into intrigues involving dauphins, Corrupt Churchmen and vampish courtesans. Hats with large feathers and big bucket-topped boots were in fashion for men. Also The Golden Age of Piracy on the High Seas, when eyepatched and peg-legged buccaneers buried stolen gold, brandished cutlasses, and tied up buxom, bodice-wearing maidens and then forced them to watch as their hapless boyfriends walked the plank.

WikiJousting is a competitive sport where 2 or more individuals race to reach a target page. Whomever reaches the target page in the fewest steps wins the joust.

The company told the CPSC that it knew of 14 infant deaths in the sleeper as of February 2018, more than a year before it recalled the roughly 4.7 million units that had been sold. Fisher-Price earned at least $200 million in revenue from a decade's worth of sales of the sleeper, the report noted.

She noted patients' health insurance plans sometime don't cover weight-loss treatments, putting expensive drugs out of reach.

The Danish company hasn't disclosed Wegovy's price but said it will be similar to the price of Saxenda, an 11-year-old weight loss drug injected daily that now typically costs more than $1,300 per month without insurance.

In company-funded studies, participants taking Wegovy had average weight loss of 15%, about 34 pounds (15.3 kilograms). Participants lost weight steadily for 16 months before plateauing. In a comparison group getting dummy shots, the average weight loss was about 2.5%, or just under 6 pounds.

was the algorithm itself designed to overblock third-party ads as potentially fraudulent while applying a more lax standard to the ads that Google sells – and makes more money from?

Ron Wyden has proposed a capital gains tax on unrealized gains:

the orifice they emerged from

In 1920, Rep Cordell Hull ("the father of income tax") warned that the Supreme Court's ruling in Macomber would let rich people "live upon the value" of stock "without ever paying" tax.

Siriasis - Inflammation of the brain due to sun exposure

Costiveness - Constipation

Cacospysy - Irregular pulse

Bone shave - Sciatica

Ablepsy - Blindness

Someone recently made me a hot drink containing cinnamon, espresso, oat milk, and lion's mane mushroom powder, and it was delicious

if you cut a perfectly human-shaped hole in an unlocked door do you think more people would open the door or try to squeeze through it

In a July 16 policy speech, U.S. Attorney General William Barr took aim at studios, saying they have provided “a massive propaganda coup for the Chinese Communist Party.” Barr added that Paramount told producers of 2013’s World War Z to remove a scene in which characters speculate that a virus, which triggered a zombie apocalypse, may have originated in China. The film, which grossed $540 million globally, never received a release in China, likely because the government frowns upon themes of the undead, ghosts or time travel. (A knowledgeable source says China’s zombie film ban is the biggest reason that Paramount wouldn’t greenlight a $200 million David Fincher-Brad Pitt pairing for a sequel.)

For platforms, there could hardly be a more powerful story about the significance of their amplification mechanics. By now, many of the platform executives I know are tired of the constant drumbeat of stories about how their networks spread misinformation, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content. But the Trump story illustrates vividly why they matter. For the worst actors on their platforms, free reach is almost the entire appeal of using them.

The disconnect highlights the actual utility of social platforms for Trump — especially of Twitter, where he focused almost all of his efforts. The power was not that they offered him a place to speak. Rather, it was that they amplified it in crucial ways, for free, to a massive worldwide audience.

There are two primary questions we wind up asking about problematic users of social networks. The first is whether they should have the ability to post at all — platform-level freedom of speech. And the second is whether the platform should amplify their account or their posts to other users — what the technologist Aza Raskin has called “freedom of reach.”

You’re aimlessly scrolling through your feeds, minding your own business. An un-looked for stray data point catches your attention: a statistic, an anecdote, an image, a video clip, a chart, a meme … whatever. Maybe it’s not even from someone you follow. Perhaps it’s a tweet someone you follow has commented on, so it pops up for you. Or, out of curiosity, you click on a trending topic and inadvertently stumble upon it. But however it happens to cross your path, this stray bit of information sticks with you, like the after-feeling of a dream you can’t quite shake. The truthfulness or accuracy of the thing is not theoretically irrelevant, but may be practically so. Maybe it bugs you, discomfits you, troubles you, makes you anxious for a time, and then fades from memory. Or it lingers unexpectedly and becomes the first step toward a radical re-ordering of your worldview, for better or for worse.

We are not as narrowly rational in our thinking as many would like to believe. Which is why conventional “solutions” to the problems associated with our information ecosystem prove inadequate and may be intractable. The human person, to say nothing of human communities, is not a cognitive machine susceptible to technical tweaks. 

The more seasoned and experienced a UX person is, the more likely they are to be asking whether realizing user-centered values is even possible under capitalism.

Foundational UX is where the stuff that makes people really care about UX happens: the human insights, the collaborative exploration, the creative experimentation. For people joining the field, the disjunction between the dream and the reality can feel like a terrible bait and switch. Sold in school on UX as a noble and creative pursuit, they hit the job market to find roles where every chance for nobility and creativity has been carved out and cleaned away in the name of shipping product.

Research-driven persona development. Concept models. Cocreation sessions. Task flows. These things didn’t get cut out of UX processes because they were unnecessary. They simply didn’t fit a development process that demands clear accountability for every activity and has no space for foundational work that can’t be predictably packaged up into two-week units.

Shein’s success is not built upon unfair government subsidies

Before that sci-fi future, while consumers are still buying online and having things made and shipped to them, the logical interim conclusion is manufacturers going direct on a global scale, cutting out all of the middlemen, and replacing local know-how with algorithms. 

Shein understands what clothes consumers want now better than anyone with the possible exception of Amazon. 

Everyone knows that China is good at manufacturing. That’s been true for decades. What’s changed is that over the past five years, Chinese companies have caught up, and in some cases surpassed, the rest of the world in its understanding of mobile ecommerce consumer experience. 

By 2015, the newly rebranded SheIn, moved to Panyu in Guangzhou. Panyu is to clothes manufacturing what Shenzhen is to electronics (i.e. ground zero, global best-in-class supply-chain ecosystem). All of Shein’s suppliers moved with it. It’s not hard to understand why.Shein had built a reputation for doing something completely revolutionary and unheard of in China’s apparel industry—they actually paid people on time.

Believe it or not, wedding dresses were the first killer category for Chinese ecommerce firms exporting direct to markets like America.

The company’s logo, branding and products are indistinguishable in their professionalism and quality from global industry peers. 

Shein describes itself as an “international B2C fast fashion e-commerce platform” with business in more than 220 countries and regions around the world. Nothing Matthew could find on their official website, app or social media accounts references the company’s Chinese origins. In fact, the company is so serious about hiding its Chinese roots that it voluntarily claimed to be from New Jersey. Previously, the About page of Shein’s official website said the company began as “a small group of passionate fashion loving individuals in North Brunswick, New Jersey.” This has since been removed.

I am a professional tech newsletter writer. I’ve written almost 20,000 words about Chinese giants Tencent and Alibaba. I am an Internet people. And I’d never heard of Shein either.To be fair, though, no one really has.

In terms of Fraser’s perspectival dualism, one of the main questions raised by contemporary politics is how and why many people who are both economically privileged and culturally included can end up feeling like they are neither of those things.

Arguments about censorship and ‘no-platforming’ of speakers are often driven by the quest for reputational advantage—on the part of institutions, individuals and social movements—and a need to avoid reputational damage.

the task should be to provide a more accurate diagnosis of the decline of liberal norms, not to deny that anything has changed.

Emotion, which behaviourists traditionally studied in wholly observable terms, becomes exclusively observable, a type of public performance that splits off from the part of the self which, for Honneth, needs to be recognized to be fulfilled as personhood.

the most powerful man in the world, also a celebrity with 73 million Twitter followers, fixating constantly on how unfairly he was being treated, and how he deserved greater recognition—then extinguished

Network effects famously produce power-law distributions, in which a few nodes receive an abundance of connectivity and engagement, while the vast majority receive very little.

processes of representation are replaced by those of curation: a piece of ‘content’ is extracted from the vast archive of data and shared, as a type of investment—or divestment—in a reputation.

Value becomes established not in exchange, but as a speculation on the future, calculated on the basis of data from the past—that is, in terms of reputation.

eventually, ‘public opinion’ became a disembodied, autonomous phenomenon.footnote12

The routinization and industrialization is all at the back-end, where data analytics takes place away from the user’s gaze.

In order that the data they collect can be as rich and extensive as possible, platforms—especially social media—need to be spaces where people engage in something like a struggle for recognition.

the teleology of the platform is to take everything into account.

A novelty of the platform business model is that it allows for market and non-market forms of valuation to be conducted via a single infrastructure.

Third, they are cross-subsidized, offering ‘free’ services on the basis of revenue earned elsewhere. Finally, they take advantage of their data to constantly tweak their interfaces and rules to attract and retain as many users as possible.footnote9

Outside of the market—in education, the arts, the media, healthcare and civil society—metrics, league tables, financial accounting and neo-classical economics are pushed as the lingua franca of public justification. This serves to impose a market-like discipline on spheres of social and cultural exchange, establishing fixed indices of how inequalities of merit and achievement are to be judged. As the public sphere becomes increasingly organized around numerical standards of judgement and justification—surveys, ratings, scoring systems—so the potential reach of the market grows. The struggle for recognition is channelled into the terrain of the calculable.

The pessimistic reading of this was that modern critique was now finished, but the optimistic one was equally unsettling for the left: perhaps the quest for inclusion and respect in the market was just as authentic a struggle as any other.

not adequately recognized by the labour market.

Everybody received equal recognition for having cultural potential, but not for the use they make of it.

There was a precarious dimension to modern subjectivity, in that truth must emerge from within, yet its validation must be granted socially. ‘What has come about with the modern age’, Taylor argued, ‘is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail’.footnote5

communitarian Catholics

In the meantime, remember, depression is real. It's among the worst things that can happen to you. But it is beatable.

Turn it into a story of personal triumph, and repeat that story to yourself.

But this is a very difficult thing to do, because a coherent, believable narrative is a rare thing, and you never quite know what will stick and what will be rejected.

Also, you should realize that just because your depressed friend or family member is unresponsive, that doesn't mean that you aren't doing him or her a lot of good.

Coming out of depression, I've found, is like having your emotional system turned back on. But when it's turning back on, it sputters and backfires. You feel incredibly raw.

Even for many Jews passionately opposed to Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, supporting Palestinian refugee return remains taboo. But, morally, this distinction makes little sense. If it is wrong to hold Palestinians as non-citizens under military law, and wrong to impose a blockade that denies them the necessities of life, it is surely also wrong to expel them and prevent them from returning home. For decades, liberal Jews have parried this moral argument with a pragmatic one: Palestinian refugees should return only to the West Bank and Gaza, regardless of whether that is where they are from, as part of a two-state solution that gives both Palestinians and Jews a country of their own. But with every passing year, as Israel further entrenches its control over all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterannean Sea, this supposedly realistic alternative grows more detached from reality. There will be no viable, sovereign, Palestinian state to which refugees can go. What remains of the case against Palestinian refugee return is a series of historical and legal arguments, peddled by Israeli and American Jewish leaders, about why Palestinians deserved their expulsion and have no right to remedy it now. These arguments are not only unconvincing but deeply ironic, since they ask Palestinians to repudiate the very principles of intergenerational memory and historical restitution that Jews hold sacred. If Palestinians have no right to return to their homeland, neither do we.

Chipotle’s slogan might be “food with integrity,” but its business model is about dishonesty, disrespect, and downright endangerment of workers.

settlers should first look not to the science fiction that influenced the men trying to bring us to those worlds, but to our own world’s polar regions, and ask themselves if they should try that first, instead.

Robinson spoke at a conference a decade ago where he noted that the exploration of Antarctica is a more relevant analog for trying to accurately anticipate extraterrestrial exploration. A trip into the American west was something relatively easy for someone to take on: they could count on being able to find food and supplies on the way, and some sort of economic reward at the end. Expeditions to the South Pole are a far more costly endeavor, one that requires considerable planning, logistics, and supplies to survive in the harsh environment. The South Pole is the only place on Earth without an indigenous population, and is only home to people (anywhere from fifty to two hundred) in research facilities.

In his 2010 paper for the Journal of Cosmology, The Problem of Human Missions to Mars, Dr. Michael F. Robinson highlighted that historical analogies brought to the field of exploration, noting that “when we peel away the ancillary arguments for human spaceflight (e.g. benefits to spinoff technology, employment, or national soft power) we find that core arguments rely heavily upon the use of historical analogies,” and that those associations rely on certain assumptions—that humans have always been explorers, citing examples of how our ancestors have migrated across the world throughout history. But there’s little evidence to support that line of argument, Robinson argues. “The lesson from history appears to show the reverse: that humans have sought out an increasingly settled lifestyle based upon agriculture and industry, foregoing the risks of nomadic travel.” Furthermore, the explorations out of Europe and Asia throughout the global age of exploration weren’t undertaken in the name of romantic discovery: they were for the purpose of commerce, either by discovering new riches to exploit, or by marking out more efficient paths upon which trade could flow. Indeed, even our expeditions into orbit and to the Moon weren’t initially shouldered out of the goal of scientific knowledge: they were demonstrations of American (and Soviet) technological prowess in the midst of a long-term, global arms race.

Feeling isolated, virtual study partners create a sense of fellowship. On Study Web, while stressed, students have accepted their lot—they’re not investigating the rightness or wrongness of the pressurized environment of the Gen Z student or asking whether college is worth it at all. 12-hour Study With Me videos are seen as something to aspire to rather than rebel from. Students accept the premise that school and studying are non-negotiables. Where they come from, where they live, their beliefs and value systems are not barriers to community-building; they suffer in common. 

there’s an inescapable undercurrent of materialism on #StudyTok, suggesting that if you buy the right notebook (Hamelin), pens (MUJI), or keyboard (Moffi), your study problems will be solved.

Whether or not lo-fi music truly helps you study better is debatable, but the science is largely irrelevant to the tens of thousands of listeners who join live streams each day to hear hours-long mixes of different artists evoking a similar sound: a blend of bland, chill, premium mediocre. 

A key feature of these videos is aesthetics—from the right ruler to the perfect pen. Lighting is an important part of a study creator’s vibe: candles, string lights, salt lamps, and neon lights are all common fare.

And—again, this might be the main reason I’m writing this email?—the whole thing is astonishingly televisual. To the film and TV lurkers: GET ON IT.

It’s dark fantasy AND it’s sci-fi AND it’s puzzle fiction AND it’s an Adult Swim cartoon AND it’s wry and sarcastic, a profane Daria in space…! In short, it’s an offering from someone who knows what she likes and was not afraid to put ALL OF IT into a novel. It’s possible a friend or editor at some point cautioned her: Tamsyn, this might be a bit much. (If they didn’t, they probably should have.) And, honestly, if she had loaded the book with a hair less energy, spun the story with a touch less charisma, it WOULD have been too much. But these pages sizzle with energy and charisma; the alchemy succeeds; and what might have been a huge mess becomes a wild hybrid genre. Somber rituals, snarky interjections—it WORKS.

Lately I’ve under­stood the word “ambivalent” in a different way. I think its popular defin­i­tion shifted at some point toward “I don’t have an opinion” or “it really doesn’t matter to me”; a kind of cool, low-energy state. But that’s not what the word means at all. To feel ambiva­lent is to have many thoughts at once, some of them contradictory; to hold them, unresolved, in your head. I find this useful because I feel ambiva­lent about a lot of things!

Regarding Gideon the Ninth, James adds: It’s complex but the plot is tightly constructed and it’s FUNNY in a very sarcastic way. But the world? There’s so much to the world and I’m intimidated by how we’re only really given the edge of everything throughout most of the book.

But the drinking that increased was, almost definitionally, of the stuck-at-home, sad, too-anxious-to-sleep, can’t-bear-another-day-like-all-the-other-days variety—the kind that has a higher likelihood of setting us up for drinking problems down the line. The drinking that decreased was mostly the good, socially connecting kind.

(perhaps the loneliest-sounding drinks of all) premixed, single-serve cocktails

Even drinking in bars has become less social in recent years, or at least this was a common perception among about three dozen bartenders I surveyed while reporting this article. “I have a few regulars who play games on their phone,” one in San Francisco said, “and I have a standing order to just refill their beer when it’s empty. No eye contact or talking until they are ready to leave.” Striking up conversations with strangers has become almost taboo, many bartenders observed, especially among younger patrons. So why not just drink at home? Spending money to sit in a bar alone and not talk to anyone was, a bartender in Columbus, Ohio, said, an interesting case of “trying to avoid loneliness without actual togetherness.”

Almost all of the heavy-drinking women Glaser interviewed drank alone—the bottle of wine while cooking, the Baileys in the morning coffee, the Poland Spring bottle secretly filled with vodka. They did so not to feel good, but to take the edge off feeling bad.

Having combed through decades’ worth of literature, Creswell reports that in the rare experiments that have compared social and solitary alcohol use, drinking with others tends to spark joy and even euphoria, while drinking alone elicits neither—if anything, solo drinkers get more depressed as they drink.

At a talk he later gave on wu-wei at Google, Slingerland made much the same point about intoxication. During the Q&A, someone in the audience told him about the Ballmer Peak—the notion, named after the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that alcohol can affect programming ability. Drink a certain amount, and it gets better. Drink too much, and it goes to hell. Some programmers have been rumored to hook themselves up to alcohol-filled IV drips in hopes of hovering at the curve’s apex for an extended time.

The damage done by alcohol is profound: impaired cognition and motor skills, belligerence, injury, and vulnerability to all sorts of predation in the short run; damaged livers and brains, dysfunction, addiction, and early death as years of heavy drinking pile up. As the importance of alcohol as a caloric stopgap diminished, why didn’t evolution eventually lead us away from drinking—say, by favoring genotypes associated with hating alcohol’s taste? That it didn’t suggests that alcohol’s harms were, over the long haul, outweighed by some serious advantages.

“There is not a safe level of benzene that can exist in sunscreen products,” stated Dr. Christopher Bunick, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Dermatology at Yale University. “Even benzene at 0.1 ppm in a sunscreen could expose people to excessively high nanogram amounts of benzene.”

A December Bank of America Research report called "OK Zoomer" found that the pandemic will impact Gen Z's financial and professional future in the same way that the Great Recession did for millennials. 

Surveys in many countries show that young people would like to be having more children, but face too many obstacles.

Marshall McLuhan once pointed out that the myth of Narcissus is frequently misinterpreted. It is not love that causes the youth to stare at his image, but profound alienation. The point of the myth is that “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.” Stare too long at the objectivized self and you will become the dead matter you behold. The alienation will eventually subside, and you will begin to identify so fully with the daimon that the interior self disappears.

But what do they have to say about us? So little of it is revelatory. This product, the algorithms claim, was purchased by “people like you.” “Since you like dark indie comedies … ”

Writing is no longer considered a technology, but in its early days, it, too, was criticized for distorting a person’s image. The problem, Socrates complains in Plato’s Phaedrus, is that consciousness dies the moment it hits the page. Ask the written words a question, and they will not answer. “They go on telling just the same thing forever.”

For the Greeks, character was fate. The command of the Delphic oracle—“Know thyself”—was not a mandate to plumb the soul but rather to accept the role that nature had assigned you, like an actor accepting a role in the theater. It’s not the kind of advice you hear very often in modern America, but fatalism, as my friend noted, has comforts of its own.

Once you accepted that your character was immediately transparent, there was no pressure to keep up appearances. If I felt nervous about how I was coming off throughout the semester, she advised, I should remember that the students’ minds were already made up. They’d had me figured out before I’d placed my supplies on the desk the first day, and nothing I could do would change it.