Nothing better illustrates these different attitudes to the word than when modern readers encounter the biblical narrative of Isaac and his two sons, Jacob and Esau. When Jacob deceives his father into conferring his spoken blessing on him rather than Esau, the eldest son, a modern reader is likely to ask, well, why not just take it back, they’re just words. But when the word is an event rather than a thing, you can’t just take them back just as you can’t undo an event.

It is absolutely true that you can find all manner of vitriolic and combative speech in print, as is evidenced, for example, in the political pamphleteering of the early republic. But, experientially, it is one thing to encounter this content in written form at a temporal and spatial remove from the author, whose very significance becomes dubious, and it is another to encounter these words directly and immediately from the mouth of the speaker, whose personal significance is unavoidable. In other words, even the plausibility of the claim that you should challenge the ideas and not the person, for example, is sustained by the conditions of print.

Sticky rice mortar was invented in ancient China utilizing organic materials in inorganic mortar. Hydraulic mortar was not available in ancient China, possibly due to a lack of volcanic ash. Around 500 CE, sticky rice soup was mixed with slaked lime to make an inorganic−organic composite mortar that had more strength and water resistance than lime mortar.

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During the First Crusade, soldiers would have provided their own food stores, which they would have mortgaged their property or sold possessions to buy. Later, during crusades like those in the 14th century, called by Pope Innocent III, deals were made with the Venetian fleet and merchants to keep soldiers supplied. During battles, "if crusaders got to the Muslim camp they would stop fighting and start eating. And it would cost them the battle. It happened twice at the siege of Acre,” says John Hosler, associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, a medievalist military expert and author of The Siege of Acre, 1189-1191.

We can set the waveform, the volume, and the frequency! So let’s build a theremin! :>

I decided to try to make 50 programs for the open-source retro fantasy console TIC-80!

Surprisingly, they did not totally exclude male gourmets. Each member was allowed to invite a male companion once a year, as long it was not her husband.

Then, a new institution appeared at the turn of the 20th century: gastronomic clubs. These loose brotherhoods of food lovers consisted of artists, politicians, and businessmen who knew their camembert from brie. They went by fancy names, such as “The Academy of Psychologists of Taste,” and organized unforgettable feasts that were often covered by the press. Club members enjoyed not only delicious meals, but also the privilege of tasting foods that were inaccessible to the lower classes, bumpkins from the provinces, and, of course, women. “It was thought that men wouldn’t be able to focus on their food if there were women around,” says Julia Csergo, an academic specializing in the history of French gastronomy. “With their sexual appeal and chatter, women would distract them. And their perfumes and make-up would allegedly distort the smell and taste of food.”

Her personality is better showcased on TikTok, where she combines humor and sincerity in self-deprecating posts that poke fun at her cosmetic surgery, depression, and even the origins of her fame. “My Instagram is maybe 25% women,” she says, “but TikTok is in the mid-40s. That’s why it’s such a safe and fun platform for me.” Users ask about her hair, makeup, eyelashes, and clothing, and she often answers. “There are videos where my entire comments section is just women, and I can sit in there and go back and forth with them.“

“It’s empowering, because people borrow these notions from marketing,” says Thorne. ​“People realised that they could empower themselves, that there’s actually no barrier between a commercial exploitative brand and a personal identity brand – the things operate in very similar ways. And, even, you can exploit both of them to make money. [Breaking] that barrier between brand commodification, which used to be done by governments or companies, and the commodification of ideas and trends is something that anybody can do.”

Where once a handful of standout trends might define a decade – say, skinheads, disco and metalheads in the ​‘70s, for instance – we’re now seeing just as many, if not more, take over TikTok in a single week.

As I say, I’ve been thinking a lot about this transition, because I believe that we can’t understand where we are, culturally speaking, without understanding where we come from. And it’s not simply a matter of waving a hand and saying “The Sixties” — the transformation is more complex and gradual than that. Even a story like The Lord of the Rings seems to be ours in a way that nothing before the Thirties is. I’m trying to figure this out, and will continue to do so.

And even some progressives hate it because it is “elitist”, disqualifies low-skill workers, or is a “handout to big corporations.”

When a company works with subprime customers, there are two opposite tendencies you want to avoid. The first is to suspect that they're ruthlessly exploiting desperate people who have no other option but to borrow at high rates. The second reaction is contempt for those same customers, who are fixating on a) getting their stuff right now, and b) on monthly payments over APRs. There's a grain of truth to both, but one thing to keep in mind is that there are many people who are financially stressed not just because they don't have much money, but because they struggle to understand how bad some kinds of debt can be. Adult numeracy is probably worse than you think: "Over two in three (70 percent) U.S. adults have sufficient numeracy skills to make calculations with whole numbers and percentages, estimate numbers or quantity, and interpret simple statistics in text or tables." But understanding monthly payments is simpler; they pay rent or car loans, so it's a mandatory concept.

Silver Linings Playbook Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper were already stars by the time David O. Russell’s 2012 sleeper hit came out, but Silver Linings Playbook is what established them as capital-S Serious Actors.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before There may be no better endorsement for a rom-com than when the entire internet falls in love with your lead overnight.

Palm Springs Movie-watchers were lacking for good rom-coms in 2020, which is why it’s comforting that Palm Springs, at its core, uses a classic template: girl-meets-boy-who-has-some-growing-up-to-do.

10 Things I Hate About You It is so incredibly hard to make a movie about high school that’s actually cool, but 10 Things I Hate About You makes it seem easy.

Crazy, Stupid, Love When it comes to the scene-stealing chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, La La Land wants what Crazy, Stupid, Love has.

The Big Sick There are, in every genre, tentpole moments; times when a movie or a person or an idea lands with such measured gravity and brilliance that you know, from there going forward, everything is going to be different. With rom-coms, there have been five undeniable tentpole moments. There was Diane Keaton powering Annie Hall to four Oscar wins in 1977. There was Nora Ephron basically wholesale inventing the modern rom-com with When Harry Met Sally in 1989. There was Boomerang showing what it would look like if everyone but white people weren’t boxed out. There was Julia Roberts putting up untouchable numbers in the ’90s with Pretty Woman, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting Hill, and Runaway Bride. And then there was The Big Sick revitalizing and modernizing the rom-com again in 2017.

Boomerang You have Eddie Murphy, one of the funniest and most charming people to have ever walked across a Hollywood stage, playing an unstoppably suave bachelor intent on sexing his way toward finding what he deems to be a perfect woman.

High Fidelity

Hitch A film with prime Will Smith, Kevin James, and Eva Mendes; a fun and engaging story; and a baller soundtrack? Not only is Hitch one of the most underrated rom-coms of all time, I am a firm believer that it is Will Smith’s best performance as an actor, PERIOD.

While You Were Sleeping Lucy (Sandra Bullock) is a transit worker who counts tokens (not the non-fungible ones) for Chicago subway riders.

Something’s Gotta Give The only thing better than a Nancy Meyers kitchen is a Nancy Meyers kitchen in the Hamptons inhabited by Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson making pancakes, just on the brink of realizing they’re falling in love.

My Best Friend’s Weddin

Notting Hill

Pretty Woman

In public discourse now, if the term appears, it is met with fervent opposition, often on a personal level from medievalists (myself included) as a reactionary impulse to want to prove that the period is misunderstood and/or inaccurately or dangerously romanticized.

There is a consistent pandering to a white feminist audience in this book.

While it is true that Western religions have origins outside of Europe, descriptions like this try to de-Christianize Christianity, making it seem ‘hip,’ international and inclusive, while erasing its present role in western imperialism.

They never mark white skin. Why is this so?

Gabriele and Perry reveal their core audience through specific words and phrases that most likely would not raise the collective eyebrow of a predominantly white audience.

Gabriele and Perry exclaim that, although she meets an unhappy demise, “Theodelinda matters” (54). This, I hope, is not a play on Black Lives Matters, but this does show how I, as a Black reader and scholar, might read a particular phrase (especially now) that feels trivializing or appropriative.

In pools set into the floor, at least five breeds of Japanese koi fish swim around customers sitting at tables sunk within large ponds. As people sip on typical Vietnamese beverages such as cà phê sữa đá, hundreds of koi flock tableside in hopes of getting a snack.

When it comes to parenting, the data tells us, moms and dads should put more thought into the neighbors they surround their children with—and lighten up about everything else.

The ultimate irony here is that the best evidence that ‘accumulation via innovation’ is—like capitalism itself—still very much alive, can be found in the same technology sector that Durand writes off as feudalist and rentierist. We can see as much when we abandon the overdetermined macro-narratives of these analytical frameworks—be it Harvey’s ‘neoliberalism’ as a political project or Vercellone’s ‘cognitive capitalism’. Thinking of technology firms the way Marx would have likely thought about them—that is, as capitalist producers—surely yields better results.

There were certainly good reasons to point out that the advance of democracy stopped at the factory gates; that rights granted in the political arena did not necessarily eliminate despotism in the economic sphere. Of course, much in this presumed separation was fictitious: as Ellen Meiksins Wood argued in her seminal article on the issue, it was bourgeois economic theory that had abstracted ‘the economy’ from its social and political content, and capitalism itself that had driven the wedge separating essentially political issues, such as the power ‘to control production and appropriation, or the allocation of social labour’, from the political arena, displacing them to the sphere of the economic. True socialist emancipation would require a full awareness that the separation between the two was artificial.

It is impossible to grasp the ascendancy of the American tech industry if one brackets out the Cold War and the War on Terror—with their military spending and surveillance technologies, as well as the global network of American military bases—as extraneous, non-capitalist factors, of little importance to understanding what ‘capital’ wants and what it does.

If one accepts that Google is in the business of producing search-result commodities

The difficulty of fitting Marx and Veblen into a single analytical framework here—something Durand also attempts in a recent essayfootnote49—is that Marx saw predation and sabotage as part and parcel of feudalism, not capitalism. For Veblen, these are instincts present in all capitalists, even if those with control over intangible assets may be better positioned to act upon them. Marx, however, ultimately saw capitalists as productive; if one could speak of sabotage, this would only be possible at the systemic level of capitalism as a whole and not at the level of individual capitalists.

What gives the digital economy its peculiar neo- and techno-feudal flavour is that, while workers are still being exploited in all the old capitalist ways, it is the new digital giants, armed with sophisticated means of predation, who benefit most. Analogously to the feudal lords, they manage to appropriate huge chunks of the global mass of surplus value without ever being directly involved in labour exploitation or the productive process.

Globalization and digitization allowed top firms in the Global North—think Walmart—to leverage their positions at the apex of global commodity chains in order to extract lower prices for final or intermediate goods from the actors lower down the chain. On the other hand, when capitalists from the Global North were making investments, these increasingly went to the Global South. Thus, looking at profit-investment dynamics through the lens of individual countries of the Global North—the us, for example—doesn’t tell us much. One needed a global view to see how exactly profits map onto investments.

On Durand’s telling, the bailout measures following the 2008 financial crisis turbocharged the dynamics of dispossession and parasitism, suppressing those of innovation. ‘Is this still capitalism?’, he wondered, in the closing pages of Fictitious Capital. ‘This system’s death-agony has been heralded a thousand times. But now it may well have begun—almost as if by accident.’ This would not be the first ‘almost accidental’ transition to a new economic regime; Brenner once described the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England as ‘the unintended consequence of feudal actors pursuing feudal goals in feudal ways.’footnote39 So the idea that financiers, by taking the easy way out—dedicating themselves solely to politically organized upward redistribution and rent-supported parasitism—could accelerate the transition to a post-capitalist regime was not only highly intriguing but also theoretically plausible.

In pathologizing the ongoing extractivist side of contemporary digital capitalism, Zuboff’s critique completely normalizes its non-extractivist dimension. Her utopian horizon doesn’t stretch much beyond demanding a world in which Google, having abandoned advertising and the associated data-extraction, would simply start charging for its search services; an option that Facebook has been reportedly considering. That this would inadvertently normalize all the ‘digital dispossession’ that occurs at the indexing stage, cementing Google’s power and its hold on society’s institutional imagination, is of little concern to Zuboff. After all, for user-ism, the problem with ‘surveillance capitalism’ is the surveillance of user-consumers, not capitalism as such.

One could argue, with the cognitive-capitalism theorists, that users are actually workers, with technology platforms living off our ‘free digital labour’; without our interaction with all these digital objects, there wouldn’t be much digital advertising to sell and the making of artificial-intelligence products would become more expensive.footnote33 Another view, of which Shoshana Zuboff is the leading exponent, compares users’ lives to the pristine lands of a faraway, non-capitalist country, threatened by the extractivist operations of the digital giants. Condemned to ‘digital dispossession’, as she puts it in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018), ‘we are the native peoples whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.

In line with Marx’s own writings on the equalization of profits across differently automated firms and industries, the car wash is simply absorbing the surplus value generated elsewhere in the economy. To present these automated firms as ‘rentiers’ rather than as proper capitalists is to strip Marx’s account of capitalist competition of its substance; it is precisely the constant drive to automate—to cut costs and boost profitability—which accounts for the constant flow of capital towards more productive firms.

In some Marxian accounts, including that of Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘primitive accumulation’ refers to the use of extra-economic, political means to capture and transfer surplus, under the label of ‘unequal exchange’, from the poorer to the richer lands—or, as Wallerstein put it, from the periphery to the core.footnote18 The origins of capitalism could not be understood without taking into account this ability of the core to appropriate the surplus of the whole global economy. This is what explains why capitalism emerged and flourished where it did. The exploitation of (never fully proletarianized) wage-labour certainly boosted the fortunes of capitalists in the core, but this was only part of the story. Thus, to focus exclusively on exploitation and ignore the fact that the core-periphery dynamics of ‘unequal exchange’ and ‘primitive accumulation’ are still present today is to misunderstand the nature of capitalism.

Key to Supiot’s legal philosophy is the distinction between government by men—typical of the feudal period, with its personal allegiances and ties of dependence—and government by law—the achievement of the bourgeois state, which establishes itself as the objective third-party guarantor of rights and enforcer of rules. Because the state declared certain areas off-limits for private contracting—leaving them impervious to calculations of utility—a modicum of dignity could be enjoyed by all citizens, in the workplace and beyond it, regardless of their power and wealth differentials. In subjecting the state to utility- and efficiency-maximizing imperatives, neoliberalism once again opens it up to private contracting.

As a result, many Marxists—we can skip the internal disputes at this stage—held that, under feudalism, the means of surplus extraction are extra-economic, being largely political in nature; goods are expropriated under the threat of violence. Under capitalism, in contrast, the means of surplus extraction are entirely economic: nominally free agents are obliged to sell their labour power in order to survive in a cash economy, in which they no longer possess the means of subsistence—yet the highly exploitative nature of this ‘voluntary’ labour contract remains largely invisible. Thus, as we move from feudalism to capitalism, politically enabled expropriation gives way to economically enabled exploitation. The distinction between the extra-economic and the economic—one of many such dichotomies—suggests that, as a category in Marxist thought, ‘feudalism’ is intelligible only when examined through the prism of capitalism, commonly imagined as its more progressive, rational and innovation-friendly successor.

Yet for all these disclaimers, many on the left have found that calling Silicon Valley or Wall Street ‘feudal’ is simply irresistible, just as many pundits cannot resist calling Trump or Orbán ‘fascist’. The actual connection to historical fascism or feudalism might be tenuous, but the wager is that there is enough shock value in the proclamation to rouse the soporific public from its complacency.

There are universal principles of visual design that matter across time and in every cultural context. But also, there are certain processes and materials that are seen as premium. This is context-dependent; it changes over time based on technology and economics. When a design uses a premium material like an illustration or an intricate 3D rendering, it is seen as an honest “costly signal” that the company behind it has lots of resources to spare. This, more than grid alignment or proper typographic hierarchy, is the thing that sends a tingle down your spine and makes you think “I should sign up.”The weird thing is, what gives you goosebumps today might feel lame in 20 years. Just look at the “pre vibe shift” websites above—at the time I can promise you they made nerds like me drool. Today… not so much.

How could Fantasy Family B take revenge on Fantasy Family C for a slight without killing them?Lots of ways:-Refusal to vote on or otherwise support causes that Fantasy Family C comes to them about supporting.-Demanding an apology. If the slight was accidental, this would make much more sense than just assuming that Fantasy Family C would never apologize. The “Sorry” could, of course, take the form of money or information or political support for one of Fantasy Family B’s own schemes.-Tracking C’s interests and subtly getting in the way of them.-Blackmail.-Getting C in trouble completely legally, such as being able to prove or “prove” that they’re traitors to the king.-Spreading damaging gossip about C.-Watching for a weakness and taking advantage of one the moment it appears. Perhaps C’s family head makes a stupid remark, and while it would ordinarily cause little harm, it does an enormous amount because of the way that B’s family head spins it.-Moving into a high position, perhaps by doing an enormous service to the country, and using that to lever other factions or families into hurting C.-Hurting people attached to C. C’s family head and children might be sacrosanct, but burning down a business that C’s family head has promised to protect? That’s a pretty strong “Fuck you.”

Interruptions are great, but sometimes when they happen, authors just quash them with the Not-So-Witty Comeback. It is harder to quash someone leaping over the table at the hero in a towering rage. It's also hard to quash flying arrows; a personal, ugly shouting match; two members attacking each other when the majority's attention is turned elsewhere; someone having a seizure from the poison in their wine and dying; a character who keeps on giving your hero this really odd smile despite apparently losing; or the common people choosing that moment to try to enter the building and declare who they want for mayor.Council scenes can be as good as battles or riots. Mix them with battles or riots, and they can get even more interesting.

Read published fantasy council scenes (one of the best is in Kay's Sailing to Sarantium, but many of Terry Pratchett's scenes between Patrician Vetinari of Ankh-Morpork and his political opponents are also good). Note the way that the author doesn't give the victory to just one side automatically; the reader may suspect who's going to win, but it's not a case where the character can just lean back and be assured of his foes gaping at him foolishly.

Instead of applying enemies or people who hate your hero to the story, apply Murphy’s Law. This can function in numerous ways, but some of the most useful in the typical fantasy story would be:-weather (even snow and rain can slow travel, stop travel, ruin crops, kill people and animals, and cause secondary disasters, like mudslides).-pre-existing political factions and rivalries (thus the hero can be stepping into a hornet’s nest that has nothing to do with him).-waterskins (springing leaks, getting filled with dirty water and having to be thrown out, having an unnoticed rip or tear so that the leak is slow).-food (it can spoil, it can attract insects, it can already be full of insects, it can run out, it can poison someone accidentally, it can cause an allergic reaction).-animals (messenger birds that never appear, dogs that run off at the wrong moment, cats who are lurking about and making the hero trip over them, wandering animals like skunks or bears who get into the food. And do you know how fragile horses are?)-time (this may make bridges unstable, cause houses to fall down, make paths through the wilderness unrecognizable, or block certain passages with things like spring floods from the snowmelt).-money (it runs out, it gets lost, it provides a tempting target for thieves).

Who knows what can spin you a complicated plot in no time. And not by means of stupid, contrived things like infodumps or “intuition” or characters who keep silent when they have every reason to tell the truth. Simple, ordinary human error and simple, ordinary human greed will work quite nicely.

If your nobles can assassinate someone, and it isn't the kind of murder where they would feel guilt, why not have them do it? Or if it's a case of embarrassing someone publicly so that that person gets exiled, why not do that, instead of tangling themselves in labyrinthine intrigues?Always look for the simplest solution, and if there aren't legitimate reasons why your nobles can't follow it, then take it. Or think of some legitimate reasons.

Even the more "boring" parts of politics can provide good storylines. These include building roads, tax and tariff practices, relief for peasants with flooded fields or damaged crops, building cities or cathedrals or other grand projects, hosting councils, and so on. If nothing else, most of these can provide good motives for war. It's amazing how many Earth wars were caused by trade disagreements, or disagreements over tariffs.

Person A tries to introduce poison into Person B’s food, because Person B was indirectly responsible for the death of Person A’s youngest sister. Person A fails, instead causing Person B to have a minor choking spasm. Person C notes the choking spasm and a touch of blue around Person B’s lips, a well-known sign of the poison chyrdis, and goes researching to try and figure out if that’s what it is, and who would put it in Person B’s food, or if Person B, a well-known attention whore, did it to herself. Meanwhile, Person D, who is watching Person C for Person E, notes Person C’s burst of activity and snooping about and thinks it may mean that she’s been discovered. She hurries to Person E to give a full report, and is spotted on the way by Person F, who thinks it’s awfully weird that she’s hurrying up to Person E’s tower when Person E doesn’t give a shit about anyone…You see how it goes. People’s plans should affect each other, especially if they’re all in a fairly confined area, like a royal court or a single family. They don’t have to all tie back to each other, there doesn’t have to be a single villainous mastermind—perhaps in the case above, Person E and Person A don’t have a clue about each other—and they don’t all have to be equally threatening. But do show the interaction of webs and tangles and plans and schemes, hmmm? That’s what makes Byzantine plots fun.

The Holy Roman Empire was a highly decentralized state for most of its history, composed of hundreds of smaller states, most of which operated with some degree of independent sovereignty. Although in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, under the Salian and Hohenstaufen emperors, it was relatively centralized, as time went on the Emperor lost more and more power to the Princes.

It is generally recommended to provide the full content of your posts in the feed. This is what most readers prefer. Atom has both <summary> element for readers that prefer it. For RSS and the Atom <content> element the full article should be included.

Tea bags replace loose leaf tea. Allows for lower quality tea to be sold, diminishes the re-use of tea leaves. Also ludicrous product differentiation along the lines of 'we have a special shaped tea bag'.

Cooking equipment: essentially indestructible Cast Iron skillets transition into teflon pans. The newer pans perform worse, and must be replaced on a shockingly regular basis.

Rewriting articles somehow seems wrong. It feels dishonest. My writing will never be perfect, and trying to present it as a perfect finished product would be a futile lie.

Many who use RSS feed readers do not use them correctly. For this reason, I am forced to block them from accessing my website to preserve its tiny bandwidth for those who are actually reading articles. Some users are not aware that by downloading RSS feeds literally every two minutes, they are hogging Internet bandwidth and wasting resources. Just because this practice costs them nothing does not mean it costs nothing. By some estimates, 10% of the electricity produced on the planet is used to power the Internet, and a very large percentage of that is wasted. Blocking those who are knowingly or unknowingly wasting Internet resources saddens me, but I block them anyway.

As someone running a personal website, you are like the neighborhood cobbler competing against the national chain stores. You know your product is superior, but you still have no hope of prevailing. Your best possible outcome is merely surviving to continue the struggle.

The average established personal blog currently receives something like 2000 to 3000 unique visitors a month. This is for a blog that has been around for a number of years and puts out fairly regular content.

To those that fall more on the OCD side of the OCD-ADHD Smart People spectrum, which I assume most OTPGs do, it might be a relief, a soothing companion, to have a place where all one’s throwaway ideas and uncategorizable sparks of genius can be arranged neatly.

Scrolling months, years, back into my Keep archive brings up the bile: at any moment I might come across definitive proof that I was smarter years ago, that I have since then sundered my intellect with the twin weapons of idleness and vanity. Better to be inconstant in one’s archiving (or forgo it completely) than to constantly be faced with the dirty dishes, the nauseating, living “matter” of one’s past interests, pasts opinions, past genius lying guilelessly buried under strata of increasing idiocy.

The fact is, I fundamentally dislike being confronted with my own archive. It’s like that scene in Withnail & I, where they’re dealing with the horrible state of their kitchen sink. I think there may be something living in there. I think there may be something alive, Marwood says.

I was discussing with Sam the “genre,” so to speak, of the Online Techno-Polymath Guy. You know this guy. He (and it’s usually a he) has his own website, probably hand-crafted in Kirby, Github, or Wordpress, as well as a well-regarded, personable Twitter presence. He keeps track of everything he reads, writes pithy blog posts on esoteric subjects. His personal philosophy is progressive with a futurist bent.  He has worked in a variety of fields, though you are unsure what he actually currently does for a living. He is knowledgeable, authoritative, but eccentric, which you can tell by the fun colors he’s used to design his fun little homepage. You can have fun clicking around his carefully maintained archive, witnessing the dynamic interplay of his disparate areas of interest. You can ooh and ahh at his reading lists, his quirky, inventive stances on issues like quantum computing and social media moderation. It’s all very inspirational. 

datasette]] https://datasette.io/

You can use well-established, thoroughly-tested existing technologies and build a modern, high-performance, healthy and responsible large-scale community online. Many have done so, for years.

By shifting to clearer methods of monetization, and de-emphasizing coercive or extractive models like surveillance-based advertising, an innovative platform can align the needs of the business with what's best for users and for the internet at large.

It is crazy we allow TikTok in this country. It is an easily replicable service, it is not complex technology

Most of the light and heat in the debate is over Musk’s content moderation choices. But that problem can be addressed by removing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and restoring the traditional role of courts as regulators of illegal speech.

Over the last ten years, a firm called Diamond Select Toys has sought to monopolize collectibles, specifically, American vinyl toys. Diamond took over shelf space and then excluded competitors, eventually overrunning the landscape with plastic crap.

Dogs who fall into the pit-bull category are a famous, and particularly controversial, example of this: Bred to fight other animals, they’ve acquired a reputation for violence and unpredictability, a stigma worsened, scholars have argued, by racism against America’s urban Black and Latino communities, to which the dogs were culturally linked in the mid-20th century. Some experts argue that caution around pit bulls is warranted, given their history; people who look at pictures of the dogs tend to rate them unfavorably. And yet, studies done by Alvarez, Zapata, and others have found that pit bulls don’t seem to be more aggressive or volatile than other dogs.

In the UMass-Broad study, purebred golden and Labrador retrievers “tended to score exceptionally,” Karlsson told me, on people-friendly metrics—exactly as the AKC website says they should. But those effects evaporated when her team turned their lens to mutts with retriever ancestry, who are harder to typecast by appearance alone. (Most people, by the way, aren’t actually that good at correctly guessing a dog’s lineage.) Even after the researchers accounted for the mutts’ mixed heritage, they found that the part-retrievers weren’t any more eager to mingle than the average pooch.

According to Morrill’s team, breed explains just a small fraction of the mind-boggling variation in behavior seen in the species that is dog—less than 10 percent. Which is to say, most of the mishmash can be attributed to something else.

If a baby pigeon is found within 50 cubits of a coop, it is presumed to belong to the owner of that coop. If it is found further away than 50 cubits, it belongs to the finder. Ever keen to push the limits of rabbinic law, Rabbi Yirmiyah asked “if one foot of the pigeon is within the fifty cubits and one foot is outside, to whom does it belong?” This apparently was one question too many. The rabbis (rather unfairly in my opinion) expelled Rabbi Yirmiyah from the Yeshivah for asking it.

First, a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic.

“I was not treated with respect,” Scott told me. “At every single workplace I’ve been in, there've been several situations where people commented on my height to discredit me entirely as a person.” One disagreement at work led to a colleague snapping at him and rebutting, “Don’t be so sure of yourself, short man!” Over the years, the insults began to take their toll. “I was waking up two hours before my alarm every day just to walk around the neighborhood and cry,” he said.

These uncertainties have been expressed through the ‘ding dong chicken’ (叮咚鸡, ding dong ji) meme, which puns the expression ‘wait for [further] notification’ because every official post remains provisional. Although notices include official data and the city’s response to the situation at the time of posting, they also include an open-ended statement that there will be further notification when and if the situation changes. Many communications from institutions, groups, and individuals now humorously include a chicken or the expression ‘ding dong ji’ precisely because it is difficult to plan beyond the day, let alone the following week or month.

The connection between keeping one’s place and moral geography is as commonsensical in Chinese as it is in English. However, in Chinese, saying someone ‘knows their place’ (很本分) is a compliment, while in English the phrase is often used to insult a person’s lack of independence.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously based her analysis of purity and danger on quotidian hygiene; dirt, she argued, is simply matter out of place. Human ideas of pollution and taboo, she continued, may be imaginative elaborations of spiritual worlds, but in practice, ‘separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience’ (Douglas 1984: 4); ordering space and spatial order are fundamental to the construction and maintenance of a recognisable (and often taken for granted) world system. As a system, moral geography is one in which people know their place, correctly reading and responding to the normative expectations that are coded through the built environment and its use. In practice, these expectations become apparent through actions that are recognised as transgressive. In other words, transgressions reveal what was previously invisible or taken for granted, requiring ongoing physical and ideological work to contain transgressive effects and maintain and/or restore the expected order. In this sense, a moral geography can only be reconstructed through public debates about which actions are transgressive and the status of those transgressions. Were they intentional or not? Is this action acceptable for some and not for others? In turn, how those transgressions are punished (or not) may reinforce the moral geography, but may also undermine it, shifting expectations both about how space is to be properly used and about how stable those expectations are (Cresswell 1996).

Harm-reduction activists make sure residents always have access to free needles, pipes, and foil, but never promote free recovery assistance such as Narcotics Anonymous.

It is not true, after all, that the crisis of postmodernity has left us without any functioning system of shared values. What currently fills the space left by the waning or absence of traditional authority, for the most part, is the ideology and logic of the market. Market reasoning is deeply, essentially smarmy. We live, it insists, in a world that is optimized by the invisible hand. The conditions under which we live have been created by rational needs and preferences, producing an economicist Panglossianism: What thrives deserves to thrive, be it Nike or sprawl or the finance industry or Upworthy; what fails deserves to have failed.

One of the silliest or most misguided notions that David Denby frets about, in denouncing snark, is that "the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side threatens to win national political campaigns." This is more or less the opposite of the case. What carries contemporary American political campaigns along is a thick flow of opaque smarm.

Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and postmodernity. It's not enough anymore to point to God or the Western tradition or the civilized consensus for a definitive value judgment. Yet a person can still gesture in the direction of things that resemble those values, vaguely.

That is, detecting a change off of a 1% baseline ends up requiring about a hundred times as many observations as detecting the same relative change off of a 50% baseline.

There might be a next life, there might be a remade world in which none of this matters

We plant trees and have children and write books and paint and sculpt and compose and we hope for all of these things a life that is more than fleeting.

Something strange but true is that for all their similarities, the worlds of academic and public writing mostly have contempt for each other. Trying to win at both games is quite possible, but it means, also, feeling judged.

If you plan to write across decades, you simply must own the interfaces to your content.

For folks who invest a great deal of time into creating content online, I think this ultimately means that you need to own your content, own your DNS records that connect readers to your content, and own your mailing list.

In theory you can simply replatform every five or six years, but cool URIs don’t change and replatforming significantly harms content discovery and distribution.

To believe in the innocence of Mark Zuckerberg, while fretting about how Americans have lost the trust in institutions necessary to hold a democratic society together, is far more consequentially stupid than any stupid tendency Haidt may have lamented in anyone else. 

this sort of shift was a conscious, top-down business decision by Facebook, when it unilaterally reversed the basic terms of its user experience from being private by default to being public by default, as it transformed itself from a user-driven social network to a data-mining and advertising company selling its users as commodities. 

life's work is to reduce the contested values and dynamic politics of a demographically, geographically, and culturally diverse nation into a set of lowest-common-denominator talking points that reassure a powerful and non-representative faction that it and its interests are politically neutral and objectively correct

Miscellaneous: joke less, laugh less,

Here are some simple ways to be less divisive in the workplace: If you agree with an idea X that Bob said, say “I agree with the idea X”, don’t say “I agree with Bob”. The former states your advocacy; the latter is dividing the group into teams.

Long-time Macintosh users likely remember HyperCard, Apple's strange hypermedia system that was sorta like a cross between index cards, web pages, and 90s interactive edutainment software. HyperCard left a pretty big legacy for the Web to come, influencing everything from JavaScript to wikis to the pointing finger thing for links on pages to fuckin' Myst. Apple packaged in some sample HyperCard stacks to get people up to speed with the software, including one called "Art Bits", which included a ton of sample clip art for use in your own stacks. This stack is fantastic for showing off just how much Apple could do with two colors.

Anatoly Liberman, a linguist at the University of Minnesota, told me about how child started off as a gender-neutral word in Old English, remained so for several centuries, took on a male meaning in Northern England and Scotland, took on a female meaning in other English dialects, and then mostly converged on a neutral meaning again.

If your company worked really hard and spent a lot of money acquiring particular pieces of talent, they notice when those pieces of talent leave the company. Scenarios like a nightmare manager who drives off good people are less likely to be allowed to be permanent problems.

They will become obsessed with *~innovation~* and effective altruism and long-termism and X-risk and all of this other shit that is just catnip for nerds. 

If you want to produce popular things, and you can easily tell from the internet what’s already popular, you’re simply more likely to produce more of that thing. This mimetic pressure is part of human nature. But perhaps the internet supercharges this trait and, in the process, makes people more hesitant about sharing ideas that aren’t already demonstrably pre-approved, which reduces novelty across many domains.

This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way. Einstein wasn’t reading fucking blog posts about geniuses and he definitely wasn’t writing them. He was thinking. 

I also refuse to believe that Bezos gives a shit about any of this—it’s just virtue signaling for nerds. If he actually cared he would put his money where his mouth is and start a program that sponsors countless would-be miracle years, but instead his cheapskate ass has only donated 1% of his wealth while his ex-wife has donated 18%.

Progress Studies (and effective altruism and AI safety for that matter) have become so popular because they fill the religion-shaped hole in the hearts of frustrated nerds who are desperately searching for something to make their lives feel meaningful.”

It’s why I’m writing in this excessively combative tone that doesn’t totally reflect how I feel. It’s why I, too, write articles about how we can cultivate more creativity in science. I want motherfucking Jeff Bezos to follow me. Jealousy is the ugliest emotion and it’s coursing through my veins. I feel it corrupting my mind like a zombie virus. 

Analysis of Nobel Prize winners supports the notion that it is getting harder and harder to innovate in your 20s. 

Liberties, a Journal of Culture and Politics

rebranding important body parts with gender neutral language (“front hole” for vagina), not to mention poisoning innocent children with cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.

Laura Kipnis

We’re happy to take cholesterol blockers, mood elevators, and erection enhancers as needed without worrying whether it’s what nature intended.

But if we’re getting empirical, let’s acknowledge that childbirth has killed far more women than murderous trans women ever did, though I suppose the sentimental premise is that all those dead mothers died fulfilling their gender destiny, not defying it.

Obviously women are subject to violence by men, frequently their husbands, boyfriends, and exes, but men are vulnerable to violence by men, too. (As are trans women, especially sex workers, assaulted by straight men who can’t own up to attractions that might make them, in their minds, “gay.”) Somehow we prefer telling stories about endangered cis women.

Nothing is less stable (or empirical) than social stereotypes about gender, as anyone who reads a work of history or anthropology knows. The traits associated with one or another gender bounce around and reverse over the centuries and between cultures: sometimes men are the more sentimental ones, elsewhere women; men are the lustier ones, no actually it’s women (amoral and multi-orgasmic); and so on.

Gilder obviously wasn’t wrong that paychecks and the sexual revolution gave women more access to what had traditionally been male prerogatives. (As to whether these were or are “freedoms” is a more complicated discussion.)

In other words: if endocrinology makes bodies malleable, and families instill (slightly) less repression this century than in previous ones, why not explore those possibilities instead of bemoaning the situation?

Maybe the rising reports of gender dysphoria and plummeting birth rates aren’t separate stories either. There have always been people who did not fit easily into normative categories but were herded in by threat and force, and who are increasingly breaking loose.

The majority of those recently surveyed in the United States cite childcare costs as the foremost reason not to procreate, along with climate change, another of free market capitalism’s great accomplishments. (France, the EU country with the highest birthrate, also funds eighty percent of childcare.) Obviously blaming women, homosexuals, and pornographers for macroeconomic shifts is a better yarn.

if both envision nature-defying creatures (feminists, hermaphrodites) snapping at them from the abyss, then we’re in the realm of what the fairy tale expert Marina Warner calls the monstrous imagination. Aroused by scenes of chaos and emergence, it mirrors our lack of understanding back to us in the form of menacing hybrids, typically depicted as scary inhabitants of dark underworlds. Among the chaotic emergent things no one much understands (especially these days) is gender, despite everyone supposedly having one. Yet what is it, where does it come from?

How vulnerable the “primacy of the biological realm” would turn out to be, how tenuous its hold on the species if each of us had to pledge fealty to the gender binary to keep civilization afloat. How confident can nature’s defenders really be in the selling power of this story?

This allows Puck to operate independently as they do today, but also build out the greater collective, that creates some economies of scale, building their own little media collective/conglomerate where the writers are the owners a la Defector.

when I mention that I am reporting on “cryptocurrencies,” his demeanor changes. “Don’t say that word,” he says. Knowing I will regret it, I ask him why, and find myself in yet another half-hour-long conversation about how Bitcoin is superior and how all other tokens aren’t really cryptocurrencies at all.

At one point, the DJ tries to hype up the crowd by yelling, “Ladies of crypto, make some noise!” The resulting cheer is barely audible. “Well, there are like five of you,” the DJ concedes, then adds: “Be careful.”

What’s happening on social media is rather a simulation of discussion and debate. Or, as I like to put it, Twitter is a debate-themed video game, in the same way that, say, Grand Theft Auto is a stolen-car-chase-themed video game. So in brief, there are some things you can actually do on the internet: you can observe galaxies, you can presumably get married, you can submit a prayer to God, any number of things are just as real on the internet as doing them in flesh and blood. But the great exception to that, I would argue, is social media, where it’s more like a false suffocation or a perversion of the thing it pretends to be.

The language of heterosexuality more and more emotionally cauterizes masculine desire in the way that all emotions are meant to be reduced into the key of anger.

Neoliberalism does not make room for the concept of human dignity. And that is an enormous problem especially among centrists and traditional American liberals. One of the reasons that they found it so hard to understand Trump is that what Trump offered a certain kind of person who voted for him was pride and a reason to feel that their dignity mattered.

But within heterosexuality, we’ve mistaken sexual license for sexual liberation, in exactly the same way that we’ve mistaken the free market for actual freedom. Actual sexual liberation is not something that most people can afford, even if it’s allowed.

I am not at all convinced that Twitter is a “public town square.” For starters, I don’t know that it’s “public” in the way an ideal “town square” should be; relatively few people use Twitter at all and even fewer of them actually tweet. If my back-of-the-envelope math is right, about five percent of Americans produce 97 percent of (American) tweets, and I don’t think it’d be going out on a limb if I said that that five percent is probably not broadly representative of Americans. Indeed, what makes Twitter influential, important, and powerful isn’t that it’s a “public” space but that it’s an incredibly elite space: nowhere else are you going to find quite so heavy a concentration of people working in tech, media, entertainment, and politics. And that’s all setting aside the question of whether or not “town square” is actually the right kind of metaphor for a technology whose main political quality is not that it provides an open forum for political debate or discussion but its usefulness as a tool for mobilization. None of which is to say that “free speech” is not an “issue” on the platform, I just think we want to start thinking pretty hard about “public sphere”-type arguments about social media.

Musk, like Donald Trump and Logan Paul and a handful of other black holes of energy and attention, grasps in an instinctive way the logic of social media: power and money are a product of attention, attention is accumulated by being annoying, being annoying is enabled by speech protections. In the hands of a particularly cynical poster, “free speech” is nothing more than the right to shitpost, which itself is merely a species of self-promotion. To protect free speech is to protect shitposting is to protect self-promotion.

A source who was at Berghain on Saturday night tells Read Max that “word had spread” inside that Musk had been bounced, and that, consequently, “the party had a very good energy.”

Olaf couldn't have been spending more than an hour a month on his hand count of conversion transitions. So the cost-benefit break-even point was at least several months out, possibility many years depending on how much Olaf's time was worth. But the moral calculus was in everyone's favor. What is money, after all, compared with good and evil? If ZipRecruiter could stop trampling on Olaf's soul every month, and the only cost was a few hours of my time, that was time and money well-spent making the world a better place.

There’s this hackneyed question: “to be or not to be.” I always tried to ask myself that from time to time. I feel like if a person doesn’t ask themselves that question on a regular basis, then the continuation of their life cannot be a conscious choice.

Technology babies us all the time. “Never talk to a wage worker again!” the embarrassing Seamless ads promise in so many words. “Everything you could dream of without leaving your apartment! Community without communing with a single soul!” Putting aside the marginal good these apps do for people who rely on them, their ads are clearly focused on a capable, upper-middle class that’s learned to take its neuroticism a little too seriously. They exploit what probably started as compassion-driven conversation about burnout into a recursive push for comfort at all costs. When we stretch that ethic to its limits, we make simple things like taking a phone call or being honest with a friend into something much scarier than they actually are.

I’ve spent years in therapy trying to rewire my brain to remember that the hard choice doesn’t necessarily equal the good choice, and sometimes I’m still not sure that’s true (sorry Lina). A lot of popular wisdom favors tidy aphorisms about giving yourself a break or giving yourself a push, when people moreso need a framework for when both sound kind of right. I’m starting to think avoidance is the key. As a litmus test, “Am I being avoidant?” tends to cut through a lot of ambiguity, leading me to an answer that sometimes is and sometimes isn’t what I want to hear.

When we read the Steven Hotdog tweet, we see the two points defining a line between the writer’s experience (hot dog memories) and factual research (hot dog history). But we also, consciously or not, see the infinity of possible planes including that line, and the way that a third point would collapse all those possibilities into one relationship, one interdependent structure. In that moment before the third nail goes in, we know that these two strands relate, but we don’t know what they mean. Meaning is defined by at least three points: the personal, the factual, and the resonance between them.

I dont mean to exonerate tech journalism for its many crimes against taste, judgment, good writing, the people, etc. But I'm also increasingly less convinced that a "better" tech journalism, by any definition of the word, would have made a particular difference in how the internet of the 21st century has unfolded so far. What strikes me looking back at tech journalism of the 2000s is how fast Facebook (to take the most prominent example) was growing: zero to 500 million users in just five years. I'm not sure any analysis or criticism, no matter how damning, could have slowed that kind of planetary momentum — and there was plenty of good analysis and criticism of Facebook at the time. What was missing was a coherent, organized, well-resourced political movement that could have matched Facebook's size, speed, and capital. I agree with Roose that we should take crypto "seriously from the start" so that we might steer it "in a better direction" in the event it takes off. But looking at the kind of people and money invested in crypto it seems to me the real question is: us and what army? 

split infinitives, and every sort of thing that makes an Oxford gorge rise

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world—depression, autism, hypertension, obesity—will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?

Fourth, how small a foundation of evidence was necessary to build a soaring edifice of theory. Lind’s famous experiment, for example, had two sailors eating oranges for six days. Lind went on to propound a completely ineffective method of preserving lemon juice (by boiling it down), which he never thought to test.

There are several aspects of this 'second coming’ of scurvy in the late 19th century that I find particularly striking: First, the fact that from the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease. The sickness could be fitted to so many theories of disease—imbalance in vital humors, bad air, acidification of the blood, bacterial infection—that despite the existence of an unambigous cure, there was always a raft of alternative, ineffective treatments. At no point did physicians express doubt about their theories, however ineffective. Second, how difficult it was to correctly interpret the evidence without the concept of ‘vitamin’. Now that we understand scurvy as a deficiency disease, we can explain away the anomalous results that seem to contradict that theory (the failure of lime juice on polar expeditions, for example). But the evidence on its own did not point clearly at any solution. It was not clear which results were the anomalous ones that needed explaining away. The ptomaine theory made correct predictions (fresh meat will prevent scurvy) even though it was completely wrong. Third, how technological progress in one area can lead to surprising regressions. I mentioned how the advent of steam travel made it possible to accidentally replace an effective antiscorbutic with an ineffective one. An even starker example was the rash of cases of infantile scurvy that afflicted upper class families in the late 19th century. This outbreak was the direct result of another technological development, the pasteurization of cow's milk. The procedure made milk vastly safer for infants to drink, but also destroyed vitamin C.

They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

This pattern of fresh meat preventing scurvy would be a consistent one in Arctic exploration. It defied the common understanding of scurvy as a deficiency in vegetable matter. Somehow men could live for years on a meat-only diet and remain healthy, provided that the meat was fresh. This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems. But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.

Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all. By the 1870s, therefore, most British ships were sailing without protection against scurvy. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.

A lot of people use the chat platform Discord to organize with their friends, and they jump from one platform to another if there’s a specific event or party or something worth doing.

One of my favorites is a mathematician who built a house that exists beyond three dimensions—a home shaped like a tesseract, a four-dimensional hypercube. If you walked through their house it would keep just regenerating in interesting ways and you’d walk through it eternally. It’s mind melting. No game company would ever come up with that. And that was early on in the game.

Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media. Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.  If exaggerated perceptions of minority groups’ share of the American population are due to fear, we would expect estimates of those groups’ share that are made by the groups’ members to be more accurate than those made by others. We tested this theory on minority groups that were represented by at least 100 respondents within our sample and found that they were no better (and often worse) than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belong to. 

Curios will go on holiday for a week, as my girlfriend is (barring mishaps) coming to visit for a few days tomorrow and as such I will hopefully have marginally better things to do with my time than stare unblinkingly at a screen while tears course down my cheeks.

How differently the Church’s acknowledged mystics approached the theme of heaven and hell. According to Denys Turner and Bernard McGinn, ­Julian of Norwich has been often, but wrongly, read as a universalist. Interpreted in the context of her other statements, Julian’s famous phrase that “all shall be well” did not mean that “all shall be saved,” but instead it was her affirmation of the ultimate rightness of God’s ways. It was a statement made in faith, shot through with epistemic and eschatological tension, since she did not presume to be able to state exactly how it is that finally “all shall be well.”

Often, you’ll have a choice between spending time on optimizing one sample or drawing a second sample—for instance, editing a blog post you’ve already written vs. writing a second post, or polishing a message on a dating app vs. messaging a second person. Some amount of optimization is worth it, but in my experience, most people are way over-indexed on optimization and under-indexed on drawing more samples.

Light-tailed distributions most often occur because the outcome is the result of many independent contributions, while heavy-tailed distributions often arise from the result of processes that are multiplicative or self-reinforcing.§§ More formally: the central limit theorem means that the sum of independent contributions will be approximately normally distributed, and normal distributions are extremely light-tailed. An easy extension of the theorem says that the product of independent variables will be log-normally distributed, which is much more heavy-tailed. The type of self-reinforcing process I’m referring to is a preferential attachment process which usually generates a power law distribution, which is even heavier-tailed than the log-normal. For example, the richer you are, the easier it is to earn more money.

After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was ­Origen who taught the Church how to read Scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative ­spirituality, and who—simply said—laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought.

everything else in Orthodox tradition, be it ever so venerable, beautiful, or spiritually nourishing, can possess at most the authority of accepted custom, licit conjecture, or fruitful practice

While most branches of Western Christianity hold to some conception of original sin as formulated by Augustine, Calvinists emphasize to an extreme degree how humanity is marked indelibly by Total depravity, the Unconditional election of a small segment of people who will be saved, the Limited atonement whereby Christ’s sacrifice was only for some people (and a small group at that), the Irresistible grace whereby God’s saving power can’t be denied by those who are elect, and the Perseverance of the saints, so that once someone is elect nothing they do can challenge that salvation.

Leftists on the internet often claim this is false and America only looks rich because of inequality or billionaires

If activists sincerely can’t get themselves excited about a broad political push against poverty per se and see the moral force in that, then I think that just reflects poorly on them.

White Americans experience poverty at a much lower rate than Black Americans, a legacy of racism over the course of American history. It’s also true that white Americans of all income levels enjoy certain racial privileges. But if you are yourself white and poor, it doesn’t really do you, personally, any good to know that a different set of white people has a lot of money or that white people on average are unlikely to be poor.

It’s an admittedly different approach from my generation’s inclination toward full-frontal accountability. Daily diary apps and self-improvement podcasts and confessional Instagram stories evince a belief that to grow as a person you have to be entirely, unflinchingly forthcoming. But I couldn’t catalog my flaws without flinching. And I don’t think I need to. That’s part of the point of reading, I think: When I find myself too earnest, too impatient, too much, I can be in conversation with other minds instead. Keeping a commonplace book feels like a kinder way to grow, by wrestling with the articulations of others in the open as I hopefully adjust myself within.

But in 2020 the Russian government made it absolutely illegal to report on Russian security services. And because I wanted to keep going, because I think it’s an important topic, I thought I needed to leave the country. Then the Russian government sent me some signals that it would be better for me to leave the country. I have a Web site, which my partner and I established back in 2000. It’s a Web site that monitors the activity of the Russian security services. And it used to have a media license, because in Russia you need to have a license to be in media. So, in the beginning of 2020, our Web site was stripped of its license. But the reason provided by the Russian censorship agency, which is in charge of these media licenses, was the death of [Agentura.ru’s] editor. And, because I’m the editor, I took it as a kind of perverse humor by the Russian censors. I got several signals of the same sort, enough that, in September of 2020, we decided to leave the country.

Despite the limited achievements of feminist struggles, the structure of straight coupledom still represents an appropriation of the physical and psychic energy of women to benefit men. And insofar as gay people recreate the straight couple, this structure of violence, domination and emotional paucity is what they are recreating.

Overall, the couple seems to endure mainly negatively: break-ups are painful, being alone means you’ve failed, good sex is hard to come by, the world is a scary place, etc. Those couples whose love survives on the gentle basis of shared affection and interests might be inspiring examples of emotional health, but on the other hand their advantages over people with, say, a close circle of friends, are mainly legislative.

As Germaine Greer famously notes in The Female Eunuch, “Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.”

Monogamous romantic commitment, like infallible lifelong attraction to only men or only women, is surely a minority tendency expediently elevated to a general social principle.

Aesthetic analysis is about nothing deeper than consumption habits; but consumer habits reveal public appetites and the interests of capital and the state and that..can run deep. 

“Geriatric” millennials misidentifying any of this as something that has to do with them are so desperate and arrogant. It’s like…millennials, , stop flattering yourselves. No one wants to recreate your college era looks. You looked bad. We don’t need to look to Gen Z to represent nostalgia for our youth; we already embody it.

The e-girl and the Christian girl autumn aesthetics aren’t in competition with each other. People know each has its lane. For Millennials, aesthetic categories felt fraught and were strictly pursued and guarded because we were embattled. And we were the last generation for whom that was true.

In short, I dislike mumblecore, because it mistakes self-centeredness with self-reflection, and it’s wrong to recommend (through romanticizing) the former in lieu of the latter. 

These were people who came of age during the Obama years, and genuinely felt like things were fine, even as everything about the Bush era accelerated.

But one critique people make of Rooney’s books is that they’re main character lit, which speaks to the kind of glamorization you pointed to. Vs analyzing it as a structural force that affects everyone. But maybe that’s also just because this is a novel and like historically that’s a bourgeois individualist genre. Thank you CIA lol.

The last decade of fiction starring single late 20s-early 30s white women recycles different iterations of the same boring, selfish, reckless, cynical and unmoored depressive figure with a dissatisfying sex life that they organize the rest of their lives around. The self-sabotaging white woman is to the 20teens what the flailing dad was to 90s family comedies, an era defining trope. These women are always unhappy in the same ways, always vying for love in places they are guaranteed not to receive it. The list includes: Hannah Horvath, Fleabag, the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist of The Worst Person In the World, and a litany of less-acclaimed versions of the same. They’re about as relatable to me as aliens, but it makes me sad how many white women seem to feel seen by them. Which is strange, because these protagonists are all relatively privileged people who could easily avoid the choices that are making their lives miserable, and usually hurting many others in the process. These aren’t stories of women burdened by circumstance. 

I think there was a moment where certain people felt threatened, because she’s like them (she herself insists) but they’re not celebrated young authors, even though they were in the gifted and talented program too. That’s the vibe I get from her detractors, who engage primarily with their idea of her than the books themselves. She’s an introverted bookish intellectual, and introverted bookish intellectuals are struggling with the concept of her being massively popular. She didn’t have to write Twilight to be a phenomenon that led to screenrights. It must be hard for them to process. Maybe it makes them feel they have fewer excuses for themselves. 

Though these messages primarily target women, appeals to men’s confidence are also evident across dating websites and advertising campaigns for products such as Viagra. But, for men, the “wins” of confidence are typically framed as ways of achieving greater status and top performance. For example, one popular male life coach claimed that he’d teach men to “operate on the highest, most optimized level of performance,” “become a remarkable leader,” and “reach social mastery.” By contrast, those who promote self-confidence in women tend to focus on overcoming internal problems—even in realms where this wouldn’t seem to make sense, such as financial advice. An accountant and writer who aims to financially empower women, for example, promised “five ways to make managing your money an act of self-love.”

Inside the rooms, many of which go around the clock for weeks at a time and use paid accounts, it’s common for at least 50 to 150 people to be on video using meth at the same time. For Paul, the Zoom rooms are a way “of staying connected without having to face the reality of the fact that it's Sunday at 4 a.m.”

There is no such thing as “western culture”. To pretend that, say, German culture has any less in common with Russia than it does Spain is silly and ultimately politically motivated — not to mention the profound influences that India and the Islamic world have had on “western” arts and sciences.

It’s not just in your head: buildings really have gotten uglier. Can we have ornament back, please? I’m not asking for the Sage to be covered in gargoyles or anything. Just a little decoration? Please?

Capitalism is like the steam engine. Left without maintenance, it’ll grind to a halt, overheat, and do more harm than good — but anyone who thinks we’d be better off without it is deluded as to what life was like before its invention.

SystemSix display showing weather, calendar and moon. To be clear, this is not an interactive application. It looks like a computer display you could click on or touch the screen of, but it is quite static — only displaying your calendar events and the weather forecast in a retro, computer-like interface.

Today, huesos de santo are mostly associated with the Catholic holidays, including Holy Week in Andalucía, where they are sometimes served along huesos de San Expedito, another saintly, bone-shaped sweet. But they are also tied to some harvest traditions. In Ceuta, for example, huesos are linked to Día de la Mochila, a celebration in which families fill backpacks with nuts from the fall harvest, and head to the woods for a feast that features huesos as a dessert.

According to Sura Ascaso—the business development manager of Pastelería Ascaso, a pastry shop in Zaragoza famous for its huesos—a popular legend contends that a Benedictine monk created huesos de santos as part of this effort to blend pagan and Christian traditions. While unproven, the legend would link huesos to other monastery-made sweets that resemble body parts and saintly relics.

Visit Spain in late October or early November, and you’ll find bakeries and sweets shops stocked with these little figures, known as huesos de santo (saint’s bones). In their most classic form, these marzipan-based sweets come stuffed with a candied egg yolk paste, similar to the traditional Spanish yemas.

In bakeries and sweets shops across Spain, huesos now come in diverse flavors and varieties, such as covered with chocolate, stuffed with praliné, or even colored pink by a raspberry marzipan base. Yet both Juan Manuel Albelda and Sura Ascaso agree that the most popular variety is the original version.

He concludes that the age of kitsch has eliminated the original function of the ‘court artist’ who in a certain sense was a ‘servant’ of the court; consumers now occupy the same social stratum as the artists themselves. As a result, around the artists there forms a group of specialists, collectors, connoisseurs, snobs, etc, who make the existence of art possible; behind them stand the masses, who hear various things about art, but do not experience anything personally in it. Elias then concludes: ‘The term “kitsch” is nothing other than an expression of this tension between the highly formed taste of the specialists and the undeveloped, unsure taste of mass society.’ The word kitsch originated, according to Elias, in the artistic circles in Munich, where it was derived from the American word ‘sketch’; to verkitsch something was thus selling something to an American who had no taste but paid well. But although the word expresses the scorn of a small social group, the concept is also applicable to the group using the word disparagingly; because the lack of certainty about form among the masses, who remain the primary consumer, obliges artists in the age of kitsch to create products which they themselves consider inferior and only produce in order to support themselves. It is the great merit of Elias’s essay that he does not allow himself to be misled by the initial tone of the word; and it would not surprise me, if in a hundred years distinguished art historians speak as easily about the kitsch style as they do today about rococo or Louis XIV.

Elias begins by showing that the distinction between, for example, ‘baroque’ and ‘rococo’ or between Louis XIV and the Régence style, is wholly insignificant compared to the distinction between the styles of the eighteenth century on the one hand and the nineteenth century on the other. This is because, according to Elias, the former differences in style were only differences within the same social milieu, while the differences between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were determined by the rise of a new social order, the capitalist-industrial order, the decline of the old, still more or less feudal, order. ‘Court style and taste were replaced by those of the capitalist bourgeoisie’. Court style is for some the last style there ever was, because the nineteenth century heralded a period of formative chaos. Elias concedes this; and precisely because of this he suggests calling the style of the ‘capitalist’ or ‘liberal’ period the kitsch style. Not (and one must understand this properly!) because he wants to lump all the expressions of that period together, but because the rise and development of the bourgeoisie took culture into a completely different arena than before, when the court and the surrounding aristocracy were the ‘cultural consumers’. ‘Kitsch’ sounds very negative, but Elias says quite correctly that the words ‘baroque’ and ‘gothic’, which have since become generally accepted, did not have a much more positive ring to them than ‘kitsch’. In the first place, the word ‘kitsch’, as a characterisation of the style of the age, expresses the great uncertainty of artistic production which accompanies industrial, mechanised society. The descent into formlessness in this period is a constant threat even for the greatest minds, because the eighteenth century aristocratic formal tradition had disappeared.

Religion practiced without a proper historical background becomes the sort of synthetic mysticism that is vaguely directed into the future. It is the mysticism that sects are often making use of. Myths are probably, as has stated Gillo Dorfles, the vastest containers of kitsch that humanity has ever produced as they relish in sentimentality, coarseness, and vulgarity. Any separation of mythology from history (easily effectuated by turning the myth into a utopian tale) produces almost automatically the most kitsch-like gibberish possible. Mori plays with this sort of spiritual kitsch that embraces the irrational, pre-conscious, “cosmic,” or fantastic, by reediting the spirituality of romanticism with the help of high-tech, occasionally integrating manga characters. Her Dream Temple is clearly an example of utopian architecture, but in spite of the enthusiasm for the future that Mori’s work vibrate in general, this work is different from the eighteenth century utopian architecture of Boullée and Ledoux. On all levels Mori refuses to represent the utopia in the form of an articulated wish (a Freudian Wunschtraum) but prefers to let the utopian concept empty itself into ethereality and undefined dreamscapes.

The decision marks an end to a long debate within the field of mental health, steering researchers and clinicians to view intense grief as a target for medical treatment, at a moment when many Americans are overwhelmed by loss.The new diagnosis, prolonged grief disorder, was designed to apply to a narrow slice of the population who are incapacitated, pining and ruminating a year after a loss, and unable to return to previous activities.Its inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders means that clinicians can now bill insurance companies for treating people for the condition.It will most likely open a stream of funding for research into treatments — naltrexone, a drug used to help treat addiction, is currently in clinical trials as a form of grief therapy — and set off a competition for approval of medicines by the Food and Drug Administration.

The web runs on newness, but the massive quantity and disagreeable structure we place on that newness (*cough* streams) means it’s very easy to have your stance online become, as my friend Jason likes to say, “Fuck you, impress me.” Your coping mechanism for the glut becomes passing judgment, a weird and public version of sour grapes to deal with missing out, thanks to limited time and attention. You form an opinion about something in five seconds, because maybe if you kick it like a puppy, it’ll go away. We’ve all done this, but good god: asshole move. Good people don’t want to be like that. Especially if that grumpiness and ill-will seeps into the stuff you truly love, because you can’t pull it out from the bullshit.

There is a particular hazard that comes with being a genuine dissident or whistleblower or an otherwise deeply committed critic of things: to really do it involves demolishing your standard frame of reference. The things that other people go around believing, the assumptions that are supposed to constitute your shared reality—some fundamental part of that structure, you come to understand, is just purely false. The government will lie to you about something as plain as how many people died in an earthquake, and where; what seemed to be your available zone of free expression and disputation was secretly a box that could close on you at any time. And so you have to fall back on your own judgment about everything. You can't trust what you're told. Every condition in the world is up for debate; every apparent fact could be the front for another conspiracy. If Seymour Hersh could catch the government lying about a thing as terrible as My Lai, in front of the whole world, why should he trust the official story about Seth Rich, or about Syria's use of chemical weapons? 

The 5th century in Ireland was a time of great change, where the traditional Celtic religion, language, and culture was being swept out and replaced by Christianity from the mounting pressure coming from England and Scotland. Brigid played a unique role in this change, because her father was Celtic and her mother was Christian. Brigid was born the daughter of an enslaved person in 453 AD. Her father wanted her to marry a wealthy man, and he had promised her hand in marriage to someone she had no interest in. Brigid refused and left home, building one of the first convents in Ireland for the sole purpose of educating young girls. There continues to be debate over whether or not Brigid identified as Catholic or Pagan. Some even say she was baptized by Saint Patrick himself. She has since become one of the three patron saints of Ireland, along with St. Patrick and St. Columcille. Her feast day, occurring on the same day as Imbolc, suggests that she was likely a Celtic fertility goddess before being canonized a saint.It’s an excellent idea to honor Brigid on Saint Patrick’s Day, a day reserved for recognizing the Irish diaspora around the world. 

I am an ecosystem, serving through the interplay of water, air, sun, earth, and AWS.

So if you’re at a meeting of conservatives, virtue-signaling might mean aligning yourself with the Founders, the original meaning of the Constitution, and time-honored views of the meaning of marriage; as well as dismissing newfangled ideas about transgender rights. If you’re at a meeting of progressives, virtue-signaling might mean the embrace of bold new views toward transgender rights, put-downs of those who oppose same-sex marriage, and maybe even mockery of those who would lionize the Founders, many of whom were slaveholders.

Even before the pandemic hit, Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them. Maybe we’re too anxious about the Apocalypse; maybe we’re too broke to go out; maybe having to live with roommates or our parents makes it a little awkward to bring a partner home; maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones; maybe we don’t know how to navigate human sexuality outside of rape culture; maybe being raised on the message that our bodies are a nation-ending menace has dampened our enthusiasm for physical pleasure. 

Rivers become contaminated by human and industrial waste. Fog is different. It's caused by the water cycle and mostly purified by the Sun's UV radiation.

John’s sermon on the rich man and Lazarus is in the first place an attempt to get the rich to recognize ourselves as enemies of the poor. The rich and the poor are always already enemies; the luxurious life of the rich man depends implicitly and inextricably on the denial of the humanity of Lazarus. But it is ultimately the rich man who has become less than human, stripped by his own oblivious merrymaking of his ability to recognize the suffering of another. John’s meditation on the suffering of the poor is not just a rhetorical tactic meant to guilt the rich into giving a few more alms. The sermon is an attack on the segregation of rich and poor, a segregation already etched in their souls, and an attempt to create an environment, right there in his church, in which the rich might learn to see the poor afresh.

The Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, for example, puts the point sharply: the early Christians advocated earnestly for the rich to share their wealth with the poor, she says, but “the Christian communists took good care not to enquire into the origin of these riches.” The early Christians cared about sharing their goods, but not about the structural mechanisms by which those goods were produced; theirs was a communism of consumption and not production. For that reason, their communism “proved incapable of reforming society, of putting an end to the inequality between men and throwing down the barrier between rich and poor.”