Always funny to see emails from software products seep back into the inbox after years, and I mean years, of silence. Been getting a steady drip from Maintain the last few months, who have had a Mac OS maintenance app out since 2004 called Cocktail. Used to have it to customize the dock, I think?
Fascinating interview with Helen DeWitt on the highly improbable methods and circumstances leading to her latest, 25-years-in-the-making novel, Your Name Here. Looking forward to cracking this open after The Rose Field.
Told by agents that the book was hard to follow, DeWitt’s response was to make it even more disorienting. She added a series of second-person narrators. She wove in a novel-within-a-novel by her fictional doppelgänger Rachel Zozanian, titled “Lotteryland,” which used chapters from one of DeWitt’s unfinished works, a satire about a country where everything is distributed by lottery. She made difficulties that she and Gridneff had writing the book, and their arguments about where it was going, part of the story.
Though Dan Brooks’s take down of the “new, lonely vices” reads as more of an opinion piece, it certainly feels like a practical way to assess:
I hope some readers will agree that although the old vices had net negative effects on some people’s lives, their benefits—for those who pursued vice in moderation—went beyond instant gratification to something more valuable. To spend Saturday night at the bar is, in many cases, to spend time with friends and meet new people. To give in to one’s carnal urges is to experience increased oxytocin levels in the short term and, in certain cases, to find lasting companionship. And gambling at a casino, while it is almost never a smart investment, is at least an excuse to get out of the house, chat, and experience the particular type of empathy that comes from losing alongside strangers. Vice can bring people out of themselves to be with others, even if that means coming together to do what they probably should not.
That the new vices are so uniformly solitary suggests that the national character might become more solitary, too. This trend is unsettling, but perhaps more alarming is that large numbers of people could become so oblivious to the upside of vice as to decide that it is better pursued alone. I would hate to think that, in our collective understanding of sex and gambling and getting wasted, so many Americans would conclude that the endorphins are the only point.
As the autumn winds churn through the outside world, I’m increasingly excited to settle into warm evenings by a fire, voraciously reading through my stack of recently published books:
- Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field
- Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here
- Adam Johnson’s The Wayfinder
And herein lays the true goal of OpenAI with ChatGPT Atlas:
…by acting as ChatGPT’s agent, you can hold open the door so that the AI can now see and access all kinds of data it could never get to on its own. As publishers and content owners start to put up more effective ways of blocking the AI platforms from exploiting their content without consent, having users act as agents on behalf of ChatGPT lets them get around these systems, because site owners are never going to block their actual audience.
More lamenting of the malaise of the Internet, but a thoughtful one from Kyle Chayka:
Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago. In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems.
What a time to release something so terrifyingly dystopian: decor to dress up your surveillance cameras.
Unexpectedly found Kirstie Kimball’s Beyond Beurre Blanc blog, and it’s tremendous. Exactly the kind of thing I’d love to write if I ever pivot out of the marketing industry… Her piece on New Scenic Cafe is perfect.
A warm voice greeted me when I called, asking me how I was. I could hear kitchen noise and guest chatter in the background. I knew exactly where the host was standing, smack in front of the door, 10 feet from the kitchen, in a waiting room likely full to the brim.
I live on the planet Earth in 2025. I see the storms are getting worse. I see the natural world is becoming really uncontrollable and that we’re leaping before we look in terms of AI and technology creation, and how that impacts society. So, the world of Alien doesn’t seem that alien to me.
Noah Hawley on his Alien: Earth series
I do appreciate Tonx’s forthright reckoning with himself/the industry on how to operate an independent, honest DTC business without pre-established celebrity clout (I mean, outside of the coffee space, I suppose, but he is still roasting and selling coffee).
Halfway through Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe is Buried. If you want near-future existential dread, this is the book for you. Masterclass in pulling in a reader through approachable but slightly foreign world building with an intriguing, politically relevant story.
What’s happening to news media and free speech right now in the US is going to echo across generations.
While I haven’t read it since it was released (back in 2013?), Brian K. Vaughan’s The Private Eye was particularly prescient. We’ve been heading towards its worldview for years and… have arrived, I’d say — even if every private detail about our lives hasn’t leaked, anonymity is impossible.
Beautiful night at the Arboretum on Saturday. They hosted a walking event under the full Harvest Moon, and just a week into our newfound discovery of this place, we’ve been twice. We’re anticpating several more visits as the temps cool and leaves change.
An astute equivalency of loneliness amidst other addictive vices, but with the thesis that it’s actually more dire, and to mitigate, an indulgence in a little old fashioned vice in the spirit of sociability is, maybe, just perfectly fine.
In Britain, pubs are closing at a rate of one per day […] Today’s owners blame taxes and costs, but young people increasingly choose online gaming, porn, drugs, Netflix, and OnlyFans over nightlife. […] the risks of alcohol to a 25-year-old liver are dwarfed by those of social isolation. When I go out to bars/clubs, I don’t see drunkenness … but togetherness.
Combo articles that spell out the major problem all generations are running into: the decline of critical thinking.
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The Atlantic: I’m a High Schooler, AI is Demolishing My Education
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The Economist: Is the Decline of Reading Making Politics Dumber?
I get it, books have lots of text, and reading is a process. But there are no dark pattern designs in books to optimize your time and drive attention engagement — and for good reason. It is a meditative experience, tapping our brainwaves and requiring us to think: understanding, interpreting, philosophizing, imagining, and yes, some books and study material encourage reflection and critical thinking.
We all know what happened here. The train has left the station and mass consumption patterns aren’t going to go backwards. I don’t have any suggestion for a fix. But I really feel for teachers and ex-critical thinkers everywhere.
In Monocle’s Briefing newsletter today, they highlighted the modernist/brutalist architecture of Japan’s Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium from 1964 and its risk of being torn down. At a glance, it shares a design philosophy with Death Stranding’s entrances for its Knot Cities. Love the overlap.
We may never get another season of Scavengers Reign, but the showrunner did get a chance to release Common Side Effects (Adult Swim/streaming on HBO Max), and it’s very good. Conspiracies, miraculous fungi, detectives, on the run, big political/economic philosophies – it’s all here in fine form.
No idea how Kottke found this essay, but great companion to my previous link:
And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.
Digital experiences continue to strive for the relentless pursuit of maximizing engaged user time, especially so with AI conversations:
Chatbot products […] are thus indeed a logical next step in the trajectory of Silicon Valley striving to create more addictive commercial software services for increasingly lonely consumers
So now we’re getting to the stage where drone warfare, once thought to be an electronic replacement to soldiers on the ground, is being eroded by the drone-frying Leonidas electromagnetic weapon. This also seems like a terrifying tool against any other avionics in the sky.
🕗 Updated my Slimmest Wallet Pursuit recommendations page. New entry for the year, probably my end-game wallet unless something, somehow, comes out that’s significantly better, or we stop using cards altogether in the future. Save you the click: it’s the Tom Bihn Minimalist Wallet #1.
Excellent piece by Heavy Table on the Midway Men’s Club at the Minnesota State Fair. My favorite stop (often multi-stop) when I go.
But while it may be as old-school as it gets, the place is anything but dusty. It hums with life. Fairgoers swarm every side of the nondescript building, lured by what’s rumored (loudly, and often) to be the cheapest beer at the fair — maybe the worst-kept secret in St. Paul. Inside, workers sling burgers and beer out of every side of the building, moving as fast as the flat-top and the taps will allow.
Friendly reminder how excellent the MX Master 3S mouse is from Logitech. Sure, they may be working on this new version (4), which rumors point to having haptics and software enhancements like the Action Ring, but if you have a 3S, nothing beats it — silent clicks are golden.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime-first-experience read: I Who Have Bever Known Men. Phenomenal novel by the late Jacqueline Hartman. It weaves a harrowing exploration of selfhood to the backdrop of a retracted, minimally expositioned nightmare. I suppose you could call it my poolside summer read.
