Defiant Sloth

Great reminder from Gruber on the differences between the Return and Enter keys.

➔ Ranjan Roy on investing in a scathing piece about robot-investment firm, Robinhood:

It's mainly because, over the years, I've learned that a general rule is anytime anyone tells you about an investment, you shouldn't listen. They're most likely telling you a quarter of the full story, or they're trying to sell you some investment newsletter, or maybe some newfangled financial product, or just getting in a good old-fashion dick-swinging competition, but in investing, more than probably any other area of life, assume everyone is at least partially lying.

He harkens back to his days trading in 2009, but the principles of profit-making motives still apply today. It’s astounding how much money Robinhood makes on every dollar in a consumer’s account. And, of course, astounding how yet again a start-up sought to disrupt an industry without considering the consequences (intentional or not) through hyper-growth aims.

I really hoped this guy would have survived more than a few days after he finally bloomed, but a dual-front of bees and birds stole the thunder right out of it.

➔ Matt Mullenwag (Automattic’s CEO), interviewed in this New York Times Corner Office piece, elaborates on his point about leveling the playing field of everyone at a company via remote work scenarios:

...there’s a world of possibility that opens up when you move from the finite space of a shared office, and all the politics of dividing up the scarce resource of desirable space, to the infinite game where people can define their own “office” as the place where they will be most productive, and do so however they like with no penalties or restraints.

If you had the best space in the legacy office, you probably liked it and may even have had motivated reasoning around ineffable things that happened in the office like “culture” that would be impossible without it, but the average experience of an entry-level worker was not as positive. Now there can be a much more even playing field. At Automattic we have a home office allowance people can use to buy equipment they need to make their home work area comfortable and productive, and it’s the same if you’re leading a team of hundreds or if it’s your first job.

Having been working remote (or, as Matt is trying to formalize as better terms, distributed or decentralized) these past two years after moving to St. Paul (from Chicago), and running a team — at first remotely with mostly centrally-located teammates, then fully remote due to the pandemic — I concur with his rationale. Jason Fried (Basecamp) has leaned in this direction as well, and they’re both right about workplace environments for most computer-oriented companies: this kind of “office” scenario can be better for almost all leveled individuals at an organization, and it evens out equality of workplace environment and time bandwidth on a number of levels. Furthermore in the piece, he also details Automattic’s intriguing way of hiring (hint: all chat-based).

Nicole Cardoza schools inquisitive minds regarding AAVE (aka Ebonics):

There is no historical or grammatical grounds for entirely discrediting any type of English, let alone AAVE. In fact, correct language is relative to its time and setting, and native speakers are the ones who decide what is acceptable (JSTOR). Take the idea of double negatives, something that AAVE is often criticized for with terms like “ain’t nobody.” Those fell out of favor in the eighteenth century, but were loved by Chaucer and Shakespeare, and are critical in expressing negativity in both French and Ancient Greek (JSTOR).

The BBC has an intriguing examination of an occupied radio frequency that may or may not be used for message encoding by the Russians. It also could be a plethora of other things, leading the reader into conspiracy theory territory.

A great, 10-minute weekend read.

More on the “why” of the Lincoln Project, explained by Vox. This point is apt:

Liberals who oppose the Lincoln Project object to its core conceit: Trump, and Trumpism, are a cancer on the Republican Party, and by removing him and his ideas, things can perhaps go back to normal. In the conservative group’s mindset, Republican presidential candidates like John McCain and presidents like George W. Bush exemplified the best of American conservatism, while Trump is an aberration: a former reality show host with divorces, affairs, and affronts to “traditional morality” aplenty.

But as historian Eric Foner argued in 2016, Trump can be seen as “the logical conclusion of a lot of things the Republican Party has been doing” for decades, with predecessors like Richard Nixon’s “law and order” presidential campaign, rife with racist implications, and populist appeal as a businessman railing against Washington corruption. To many liberals, Trump isn’t an aberration; he’s the culmination of a decades-long political project.

➔ Agreed with Dave Winer on this bit:

Project Lincoln so far has been great entertainment. Good for base-rallying. They can't really get into inspiring visions, given that they are Republicans and won't be in power if the ads work.

While Project Lincoln has been savvy and entertaining, it’s unknown what their longer-term vision is for the country aside from defending “democracy”. Are they moderate Republicans? Their line has been that “those who sign onto Trumpism are a clear and present danger to the Constitution and our Republic”. But if they’re only hoping to dethrone him with a Democrat and influence more experts in a new administration, let’s hope it’s in the spirit of returning America to its values (including whatever is even left of the Republican Party), and not stymieing progressive movements forward.

Tackling Kaufman’s tome for the remainder of the summer. 📚

➔ Read the New York Times Magazine interview with Charlie Kaufman, who published his first book last week (Antkind). If I were to distill the interview into one key piece, it’s this about his approach to writing:

This was one simplified understanding of who Charlie Kaufman was: He was someone who valued truth. When he detected the absence of it, it pained him. He would prefer, for example, if film critics prefaced their negative reviews by disclosing that they’d just had a fight with their spouse, or: ‘I don’t like this guy because I don’t like the way he looks.’ Because those things are true, he said. Our thoughts and feelings are true. They are facets of the world at whichever moment we attempt to describe it.

“You’d be called self-indulgent, which I am all the time,” Kaufman said. “But if it’s done in a way that’s expansive, to me it’s very interesting. Because that is what’s going on. Because it’s true.”

➔ Honest piece from RO Kwon on women choosing to be childfree (note the specific nomenclature there).

Throughout history, people without children – women, especially – have often been persecuted, mistreated, pitied, and killed for their perceived lack. In ancient Rome, a woman who hadn’t borne children could legally be divorced, and her infertility was grounds for letting a priest hit her with a piece of goat skin. (The blows were thought to help women bear children.) In Tang Dynasty China, not having a child was once again grounds for divorce. In the Middle Ages, infertility was believed to be caused by witches or Satan; worse yet, an infertile woman could be accused of being, herself, a witch. In Puritan America, it wasn’t just having no children that was suspect. Giving birth to too many children could be perilous, too, and grounds, yet again, for being condemned for a witch.

Also in the US, enslaved women were expected to have babies, and were routinely raped, their potential future children considered a slaveholder’s property. Some of the only times women without offspring have garnered respect might be when they have formally devoted their lives to a god, and to celibacy: nuns, vestal virgins.

Which brings us to a word I haven’t yet used, but which often is levied against childfree women like me: selfish. Despite everything, it’s still common to view parenting as a moral imperative, to such an extent that voluntarily childfree people can be viewed with such outsize emotions as anger and disgust. Pope Francis, a lifelong celibate, has said: “The choice not to have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: it is enriched, not impoverished.” Such judgments might be even more available now, at a time when so much, especially including parenting, has become more difficult for so many people.

July 14, 2020

➔ Read the New York Times Magazine interview with Charlie Kaufman, who published his first book last week (Antkind). If I were to distill the interview into one key piece, it’s this about his approach to writing:

This was one simplified understanding of who Charlie Kaufman was: He was someone who valued truth. When he detected the absence of it, it pained him. He would prefer, for example, if film critics prefaced their negative reviews by disclosing that they’d just had a fight with their spouse, or: ‘I don’t like this guy because I don’t like the way he looks.’ Because those things are true, he said. Our thoughts and feelings are true. They are facets of the world at whichever moment we attempt to describe it.

“You’d be called self-indulgent, which I am all the time,” Kaufman said. “But if it’s done in a way that’s expansive, to me it’s very interesting. Because that is what’s going on. Because it’s true.”

➔ Honest piece from RO Kwon on women choosing to be childfree (note the specific nomenclature there).

Throughout history, people without children – women, especially – have often been persecuted, mistreated, pitied, and killed for their perceived lack. In ancient Rome, a woman who hadn’t borne children could legally be divorced, and her infertility was grounds for letting a priest hit her with a piece of goat skin. (The blows were thought to help women bear children.) In Tang Dynasty China, not having a child was once again grounds for divorce. In the Middle Ages, infertility was believed to be caused by witches or Satan; worse yet, an infertile woman could be accused of being, herself, a witch. In Puritan America, it wasn’t just having no children that was suspect. Giving birth to too many children could be perilous, too, and grounds, yet again, for being condemned for a witch.

Also in the US, enslaved women were expected to have babies, and were routinely raped, their potential future children considered a slaveholder’s property. Some of the only times women without offspring have garnered respect might be when they have formally devoted their lives to a god, and to celibacy: nuns, vestal virgins.

Which brings us to a word I haven’t yet used, but which often is levied against childfree women like me: selfish. Despite everything, it’s still common to view parenting as a moral imperative, to such an extent that voluntarily childfree people can be viewed with such outsize emotions as anger and disgust. Pope Francis, a lifelong celibate, has said: “The choice not to have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: it is enriched, not impoverished.” Such judgments might be even more available now, at a time when so much, especially including parenting, has become more difficult for so many people.

I had an RSS crisis a few months back, if you can call such a thing something so dire. I'd been using Fiery Feeds for a few years, particularly after they released a premium version for only $5/year that leveraged iCloud for synching feeds across iOS platforms. But I had noticed amidst all its thorough levers and themes for customization, I was using the app less and less. I still enjoyed checking my favorite authors, but something about the app just wasn’t doing it for me. Perhaps the bloated design. All the options. I don’t know, but it made me miss enjoying opening an RSS app and digging in.

Without fully going down memory lane, I’ve been using RSS feed readers since I owned my first Mac and RSS became a thing — Another one of those “design playgrounds” for developers. The first RSS client I used was NewsFire — shockingly still around for download, even though it hasn't been updated since 2009 (look at that thing, just drenched in old-school Mac OS X polish). I moved through using Google Reader as a backbone until that died in 2013. It was then onto the paid synching service Feed Wrangler, then Newsblur, then Feedbin, then Fiery Feeds, then Feedly, marauding through excellently-design apps like Unread, Reeder, and Readkit.

It wasn’t until a few months back, though, that one of the great original RSS feed readers, NetNewsWire, was back under control of Brent Simmons (its initial creator) that I dove back to using that, and recently to plunge back into paying for Feedbin. This combo just hits the right notes. NetNewsWire is built to a tee with iOS guidelines, and doesn’t veer too aggressively in experimental directions (aside from some classy full-screen reader views that use anywhere-on-the-screen long-presses for actions, which I don’t see often). Same goes for its iteration on the Mac, though as of this writing, it’s still catching up on a few features with its iOS twin.

Using Feedbin as the backbone for synching is also, still, an exceptional experience. It’s been updated since I last used it, and still exudes a level of class that few other back-end synching solutions have (or even bother to explore). It has its own apps which function just fine, too, including a Notifier app that gives you a heads up on custom-selected feeds that drop, particularly useful if you want to be alerted to infrequent writers. But one of the best features of Feedbin is its newsletter subscription ability. It provides you a randomized email address that you can use to sign up for various newsletters, and pulls them in like RSS feeds (and it works just great with RSS newsreaders that work with Feedbin). This mitigates clutter in your inbox while providing a secure, private method of subscribing to newsletters. It’s brilliant.

Anyway, RSS is a pleasure again. Like it should be. And here are some recently added feeds I've been enjoying:

• Nicole Cardoza's Anti-Racist Newsletter: Daily mailer with plenty of insights and guidance on fighting systemic racism

• Alex Kwa: Reviewer based in Japan, focuses solely on technical apparel typically in black

• Minnesota Reformer: Subscribe through the newsletter, highlights extensive policy news across the state

• Molly Young at New York Mag's Vulture: Subscribe through her newsletter; infrequent (monthly?) book recommendations that are actually good

• NextDraft: No idea why it took me so long to get around to this, but Dave Pell's daily curation is a perfect evening skim.

It’s been an unusual couple of years for my computing. My primary directive from work is use to a Lenovo ThinkPad, which, admittedly, is fairly trustworthy and has been updated to Windows 10 without issue. While personally I’ve always been most comfortable with Apple products, I can get things down fairly well in Windows, albeit the company restrictions limiting by ability to customize software to my preferences.

As such, since moving up to St. Paul and being somewhat unmoored from in-office interactions (aside from near-monthly visits, which due to the COVID-19 era, have all but disappeared), I’ve moved back to using a split between my personal MacBook Pro (a late 2013 model that still runs very well), my iPhone, and my iPad Pro (first model, sans FaceID).

This system has been working well. Luckily, I am able to connect to all my enterprise accounts via the Microsoft suite of apps (Outlook, Office, et al). This did, however, require me to purchase a personal Microsoft subscription (Microsoft 365 or whatever they’re calling it now). A minor inconvenience, but it has since permitted me unrestricted usage of all their core apps across the entire Mac ecosystem. And they’re quite good.

Aside from a few finicky adjustments with the Mac version of Outlook (no docked calendar view, funky search filters), it’s a much more pleasant experience to use than the Windows 10 counterpart. Skype works just fine, Teams even better. And synchronicity between all platforms works for the most part. Skype for Business is the worst offender (inconsistent conversation threads if I’m hopping between one platform and another is annoying — Teams is way more consistent). But Microsoft’s adherence to the MacOS doctrine of user interface design is just so much more intuitive for me, and it’s native adherence to the Mac services and my preferred productivity apps is indispensable. The biggest issue I’ve run into are the restrictive policies on using my company’s instance of Box. And that’s about it.

Since my Mac is heading into 7-8 year territory, I’ve been thinking about an upgrade, and where I want to continue to invest in the future of the Apple ecosystem. Work connectivity is important, but not a dealbreaker. And up until recently, I’ve been very interested in dumping the Mac and going all-in on iOS with a fully loaded iPad Pro 2020/2021 with the new Magic Keyboard + trackpad integration. I do think iPadOS has started moving in the right direction to, down the road, ostensibly replace the Mac. But not yet.

To freshen things up a few months ago, I bought a Magic Trackpad as a mouse replacement. And for some curious reason, this minor change in Mac interaction, along with a renewed interest in RSS via the rebooted NetNewsWire + Feedbin, something clicked, and I have become ever more invested in the Mac again.

• Re-installed Launchbar (oh, I’ve missed it), hooking up several handy actions and re-memorizing those I’d forgotten.
• Finally started using Spaces correctly (e.g., directing apps to open in either a designated Work space or Personal space).
• Doubled-down on using Things as both my personal and work todo app (dropping Todoist — which I had only been using due to its inter-operability between Mac/iOS/Windows).
• Seeking a new scratchpad, I instantly bought into IconFactory’s brilliant Tot for the Mac + iOS, and have been using it exhaustively since its launch for everything from non-analogue notetaking to dropping phrases, quotes, or minor meetings note as into to later deposit into my work cache (Microsoft OneNote).
• Began writing a text adventure in Twinery, an endeavor that seems inconvenient or much more difficult on anything but a proper computer.
• Saw a great tweet by Paulo that prompted me to superpower my shortcuts in the keywords pane to initiate a ton of symbols I’ve come to rely on for use in my note-taking (yes, admittedly, something that pairs with iOS).
• Just something about multiple windows for apps instead of the full-screen malarkey. I like the idea of full screen, and sometimes shift into it, but it’s still not as productive as the original interface formula.
• And, of course, bridged a number of RSS feeds I used to follow into my Apple folder to get back into the modus operandi of Apple news and culture.

This may not seem like a dramatic change, but it has reinvigorated my interest in Mac as a comprehensive, fully-loaded platform currently to its likely long-term successor, iPadOS. My confidence in navigating its interface by keyboard or the variety of customizable gestures with the Magic Trackpad, plus the better (as of now) asset manipulation/folder/sharing infrastructure/scriptable automation, has me convinced the Mac isn’t going anywhere soon, even if Apple released Xcode and Final Cut Pro to it this year (few of the last remaining stalwarts of “Mac-only”). As it stands, the Mac is still king. And I’m glad I’ve returned to it fully.

We did a pleasant jaunt up to Grand Marais for a few days, taking in the quiet small town before it braces for winter. Couple stand-out places:

• Wunderbar: An earnest bar/restaurant whose campus is home to a glamp-ground with rentable tents/RVs as well. Great lighting and vibes.

• Grandma Rays: Roomy dive bar. Only realized the clever play on the town’s name itself on our drive home.

  

• Angry Trout: A worthy lunch spot; the prepared fish over salads were great, and the soups (chowder and chili) warmed us up. Everything about the place is curated or designed with sustainably in mind.

• Tre Søstre: A beautiful set of vacation rentals that directly channel Scandinavian architecture. Warm, inclusive interiors, ample views of Grand Marais via windows and balconies, and a great gas fireplace won us over.

Been a while since I’ve tried a new wallet. After using the Trove wallet for years, a new cardholder release from Aer (a San Francisco outpost focused on sleek bags and accessories) caught my attention.

Wrought of 1680D Cordura ballistic nylon and lined with a microfiber interior, the smartphone-sized wallet is a handsome execution to both hold and look at, and functions well for day-to-day use. Several features set this apart from my default Trove:

• The wallet is larger dimensionally than the Trove (it measures 5.1” x 3” x 0.2”) vs the Trove’s lean card-sized profile
• Materials are completely different. Cordura ballistic nylon in this grade is tough and stiffer than the less-heavy duty elastic and leather combo from Trove (and many other slim/minimal wallets)
• There are three stacked card holders for easy access/common usage on on side of the wallet, which is a 'whatever' for me since I’m typically grabbing only my credit card in nearly every circumstance
• There is a YKK-zippered pocket that fits damn near everything else, including additional cards, bi-folded US cash, and keys
  • This pocket is also RFID-lined, protecting against skimmers while also permitting cards in the exterior 3-slot pockets to be tappable (e.g., transit cards)

The zippered pocket, while not new to wallets (Bellroy has plenty of options with it), is phenomenally well executed here. It's small and rests almost unnoticeably against the zipline, minimizing its footprint. I’ve been so used to triple/quadruple folding US cash that it’s a great convenience not to have to anymore. And the reduction of a keychain in the summer months (sans winter coat pockets) has been terrific. My only extra daily carry aside from this wallet and my phone is the occasional car dongle when I need to drive. That’s it.

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Overall, the card’s quality build looks like it’ll hold up. The card slots are fine, though it’s much easier to pull out the top card than the others due to the thick-stitched rims (and I do miss the Trove Swift’s pull tab, which at first seemed unnecessary but has grown into a pleasant, tactile luxury). And the zippered pocket is a welcome change — while not elegant, it stores cash, keys, and a few extra cards while keeping the entire wallet profile fairly slim. For the reduction in additional EDC needs alone (especially with limited pockets in the summer), the Aer Cardholder is recommended, and could very well replace any ultra-slim wallet you have if you’re looking for the specific benefits it brings.

Over the last seven years, a small New York studio’s films crept into the film distribution scene. I only started recognizing the studio’s logo lede after about the third time. Its intertwining lines shaping ‘A24’ was an entirely different, stylistically clean animation from the excessively ornate nonsense of its peers. It probably helped that each film I saw attached to it was exceptionally memorable. The time it finally clicked was watching the 2016 film, The Witch (inside the then-new Arclight theater in one of Chicago’s most yuppie neighbhorhood). Since then, I’ve been following A24’s activities and fervently anticipating just about every one of their imminent titles. Only two other film studios come to mind that equal such enthusiasm, and both have far longer stretches between film releases: Lucasfilm and Pixar.

Thinking back, Harmony Korine’s absurdist, anti-summer vacation flick Spring Breakers was probably my first A24 film. I recall going into that one thinking one thing, and a quarter of the way through thinking the exact opposite — undermining your expectations so astutely way was a wonderful thing.

Every year now, A24 has a few films that hit a fervor of mainstream discussion. This year it’s French director Claire Denis’s High Life, which I have unfortunately not seen yet, but have read the NYT interview and listened to A24’s podcast between her and Rian Johnson — it sounds fabulous. Three years ago it was the Academy Award-winning Moonlight, a freshman effort by the young Barry Jenkins. I was disappointed that in 2017 The Florida Project didn’t receive the award accolades it deserved, but what a phenomenally-acted film that was. A24 cranks out consistently good fare, ruminating and thoroughly exploring scripts and completed films to distribute. And since Moonlight, they have begun funding and distributing some their own films (albeit most disappointingly with the recent David Robert Mitchel film, Under the Silver Lake, which was just recently distributed straight to streaming instead of a more formal theatrical release).

In addition to the consistency in quality, A24 successfully accomplishes unique contributions to its work to bolstering marketing efforts, notably standing out to a new generation of audiences, and addressing the changing technological formats of distribution.

1. A24 does a stellar job with film posters. They are oftentimes off kilter, using colors and typefaces in direct opposition to adjective thumbnail images of films when scrolling through lists in whatever app you’re using to pick a film. They usually don’t follow traditional patterns, compositions, or styles, oftentimes reminding me of enthusiastic graphic designers’ riffs on classic film poster designs as fanfare.
2. The trailers are wholly untraditional, operating more as teaser previews for the films whilst avoiding detailing out the entire narrative like so many other distributors. A24 is getting (or have already gotten?) to the point of relying entirely on brand. What a millennial convenience.

Founded by Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges back in August of 2012, A24 has had and continues to pave an independent legacy of great film production and distribution. As the technology/streaming services become more complicated, and production of film and prestige television become more competitive, it’s good to see a company carve out a sort of niche in storytelling and film aesthetic, which they dial directly into their desired audiences. Like so many of the “millennial” direct-to-consumer brands such as Quip, Flamingo, Harry’s, Burrow, YES PLZ Coffee, Casper, Parachute, and Away, A24 is synonymous with consistent expectations (or the thrill of undermining expectations in traditional film structure). I wouldn’t be surprised if they charged a subscription fee to help fund their more experimental films in the future, uplifting the film production paradigm further. They’ve become such a prized product that recently they’ve partnered with HBO (for the show Euphoria), Hulu (for the show Ramy), and a partnership with Apple for their upcoming Apple TV+ service.

It’s great to see a scrappy, well-directed company succeed on so many fronts while staying true to its nature in the modern era of convoluted entertainment production and distribution. Fingers crossed they keep it up.

Trucking through modern television series is usually an exercise in exuberance or exhaustion, no matter how good or demanding a show turns out. Of all the substantial dramas, quick-witted comedies, and metaphysical laments, one show — a network show, of all things — captured my attention in a way that many shows haven’t: it was a joy to watch.

I’m talking about Michael Schur’s NBC show, The Good Place, a drama-comedy that came seemingly out of the blue, and since its first episode has been one of the easiest and most delightful shows on television. The writing is quick-witted enough, the material substantial enough, and the concept entirely metaphysical. How does a show capture so many things at once without being burdened by its own complexity?

Looking at Shur’s backlog of work is telling, I suppose. He wrote, produced, and directed a number of previously successful shows, contributing to many cultural milestones such as The Office (US version), Park & Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-nine, Master of None, and Saturday Night Live. He also dabbled in the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” as its writer, one of the more ludicrous but pitch-dark comedy episodes of the future-shock Netflix series. But for The Good Place, a certain kind of nonchalance permeates its very soul. No one character dominates (though I would argue Kristen Bell’s Eleanor and Ted Danson’s Michael steal the spotlight), and the story is smoothly unwound over a sprint of 25 minutes per episode, each one ending in a credits sequence cliffhanger. The entire format begs you to binge watch without feeling bogged down in a mountain of episodes (each season squares off at just ten episodes a piece).

The Good Place is at its core a show about relationships among four key characters, and whose narrative tackles karma in a constructive and deconstructive way — all in an afterlife setting. The premise is keen on exploring absurdist situational humor, and is at its strongest with character interactions that take full advantage of the quickly-developed dispositions of each of the show’s stars. Michael operates as a kind of foil for everyone’s delights (and toils), sound-boarding off everyone's reality check of the afterlife's meandering eternity.

What perhaps helps set this show apart from many others competing for your attention is the colorful sets and nearly cartoonish narrative brokered through bubbly music, jovial cinematography, and dialogue bantering that exudes a PG-style appropriateness while nodding gracefully to a cleverer audience’s intellectualism. The Good Place sits in stark contrast to HBO’s dreary, somber The Leftovers, but intriguingly both share similar stretches of exploratory existentialism. Of the two, I certainly feel better after finishing an episode of the former.

In a cluttered world of show choices — many of which are exceedingly excellent — The Good Place stands out for its unusual territory and easy format, and has something almost everyone can find delight in.

Thorough overview by The Wall Street Journal on "how pizza night can cost more in data than dollars". Though I do wonder who actually reads these kinds of articles and cares. The additional data collected by Facebook is astounding. Apple, of course, looks like the good guy here.

I'm sure people are going to fall into two camps with Google's Duplex: you're for it, or you're against it. Ethan Marcotte has a nice write-up about the latter, specifically with regards to how Duplex was designed to deceive.

...the demos above are impressive because Duplex specifically withholds the fact that it’s not human. The net effect is, for better and for worse, a form of deception. Duplex was elegantly, intentionally designed to deceive.

Exploring Iceland’s Snack Directly (But Indirectly)

My wife recently jetted over to Iceland for a quick few days with her sister and a friend. When she arrived back, she left a few goodies for me, one of which was a curious, “handmade” concoction called Smoked Lava Cheese. Though I won’t claim I’m a connoisseur of cheese by any stretch, I would consider myself an enthusiast for the age-old custom of melting a pile of cheese into a merged form and eating with a fork. This may sound strange, or maybe you’ve done it (either way, I recommend doing it, now?), these little circular cheese bites remind me exactly of this practice. Except in portable, snack form. And that’s a good thing.

An Icelandic snack made from “pure” cheese, Lava Cheese is a brand that began in Iceland back in December of 2016, engineered by the founders Guðmundur Páll Líndal and Jósep Birgir Þórhallsson. As they state in their origin story:

The idea of a snack made from pure cheese came to us when we realized the best part of a grilled cheese sandwich is the melted cheese which hits the grill.

So right you are. I’ve always loves the crunchiness of the slightly hardened cheese bits from microwaving or oven-heating nachos (the shredded pieces that missed the tortilla chips and get a heat-flash during the warm-up), which gave me the idea of doing this when I was a kid. Skip the chips and just toss a pile of shredded cheese on a plate, microwave for 1:30, and there you go. Pure cheese. I’ve since migrated to using a small egg-sized pan to do the heating work, and at this age, it’s only once and a while. But… Lava Cheese. These Icelandic guys came up with a few variations, and I’m very thankful Ashley brought me home a box.

Since the cheese has been “smoked”, there is a slightly different flavor than when I’d do it. You can feel the hardened cheese texture with your tongue, which nails the first part of the idea of crispier cheese. I suppose, according to the company’s naming convention, this texture reflects the Icelandic lava fields. I’m terrible at describing tastes, so from here, you’ll likely experience a harsher aroma of cheddar, and a sharper association with the cheese you’re likely most familiar with, just restructured in harder, less dairy-like form. It delivers, though, and I have to imagine it’s a better snack than some faux bullshit cheese flavorings from Cheetohs or whatever other hell-spawn snack food from PepsiCo/Nabisco/Mars.

While I was able to enjoy the Smoked Cheddar version, I found that after researching the company’s other products, they also have a Crunchy Cheese series that includes Licorice Root and With Chili. The largest hurdle here is that line of snacks is only available at retail in Iceland, though they hint that new locations are coming soon. I certainly hope so, as I can attest to the magic of this stuff, and think it would do well in any other country on the planet. In the meantime, fry some cheese on your own, toss bacon in there, whatever it takes — it’s an easy, decadent, go-to late-night snack.

A Foray into the Future of Audio Platforms

While the unveiling of Apple’s AirPods at last year’s September iPhone 7 event was met with both awe and meh, it’s one of those products that you have to use to appreciate. Ignore the aesthetics and your assumptions regarding their audio output quality, and instead fixate on:

• Wires into your ears, around your body, and connecting to your phone cause friction and annoyance in movement, can get snagged on things (especially when commuting on public transportation
• Storing wired headphones is scattershot, and wires typically tangle more often that not, requiring extra time to detangle
• Wireless headphones have historically not always retained a stable Bluetooth connection to your source device
• Switching wireless headphones between devices for audio connectivity is not always intuitive or easily accessible
• Dancing (or other energetic activity with full-body motions) with any kind of headphone is fairly unworkable

While all these points of contention are not deal breakers for any traditional (or even wireless) headphones or earphones, they do illuminate the possibilities of completely wire-free ear buds and new kinds of audio platforms.

Since it’s been over a year since Apple and other companies like Bragi have released this new kind of earphone (“truly wireless” seems to be the current moniker for them), a lot has been said, written, and discussed about their usefulness and application. I’ve only had the AirPods for the latter half of 2017, but I’m ready to provide a perspective on them.

AirPods’ Functionality is Fluid

Some perceptive technology writers have indicated Apple’s master strategy with personal devices is shrinking and handing-off capabilities from one device to another in its ecosystem. Whether that will come to its full realization, the AirPods function exceptionally well today as truly wireless earbuds, and their bridge to Siri expands their convenient usefulness exponentially. Here’s what I like about them:

• Settings. Customization of both earbuds’ physical tap actions (e.g., you can customize a double-tap on the physical exterior of either bud to pause music, initiate Siri,skip a song, etc.) is great.
  • Gestures like this could expand in the future, as Apple did update the ability to tap both earbuds separately for separate actions
• Comfort. The AirPods fit is fairly similar to the original EarPods, though they are ever so slightly larger in the ear. I don’t have a problem with the fit, and contrary to what you may assume, they do not fall out of your ears.
• Lightweight. Hardly any heft to them. You forget they’re in your ear.
• Ear detection. Truly an Apple move — you pluck one out of your ear while listening to audio and the audio pauses automatically. Place the bud back in your ear and it picks up right where it left off.
• Pairing with multiple devices. Sure, the W1 chip Apple incorporated into AirPods makes it very easy to pair with with your iPhone or other Apple device right away (you simply open the AirPods case next to the device and it pairs within seconds), but the behind-the-scenes cleverness of using iCloud to then also pair them with all your other devices from which you’re signed into the same iCloud account is brilliant.
• Speed. These are fast to use. Open the case, pop them in your ears, hear the “bing” noise, and you’re good to go. Pluck them out, slide them into the case (magnetic attraction pulls them right into their slots), and slip the case in your pocket. No wires. No tangle.
• Lightning charge. While a proprietary cable, they use the ubiquitous Apple Lightning connection to charge. If you have an iOS device, you have this cable (or several) laying around. It also charges exceptionally fast.
• 24 hours charge in case. The AirPods case acts as both a battery charger for the AirPods and their housing unit. Once charged, the case has 24 hours of life to give, plus the 5 hours of life the AirPods hold themselves.
• One-bud Use. That’s right. You can use one bud at a time, with mono audio, to make calls or listen to music while you give your other ear some breathing room.

The Current Limitations to AirPods

The AirPods aren’t without issue, though I must say for a first generation Apple product, it’s about as good as it gets. The last time they nailed an accessory so well the first time was probably the original AirPort WiFi router. Here’s a list of things I’ve noticed after using them for several months that derail them from perfection, but could be iterated via improvements in future versions.

• Sound isolation. EarPods weren’t great at this, and neither are AirPods. You can easily hear noise outside these earbuds quite easily, and commuting on a train nearly defeats the audio output in your ear lest you crank the volume up to unreasonable levels.
• Lack of physical volume controls. This is by the far the most annoying part of the AirPods. I loved having a remote for volume, pause/playing, and Siri on previous EarPods models and some other earphones/headphones I used in the past. This is a first world problem, though. Volume controls on your device control them just fine. You can use Siri to control the volume, but this is impractical and slow more often than not. But if you have an Apple Watch, the auto-face change on it usually provides volume controls if you’re listening to something, and this is the easiest way to remote control them.
• 5-hour battery life. I’ve never run them dead before, as I usually am not listening to them for longer than a few hours, but five hours is a limitation for longer flights or extended activities using them. Of all the truly wireless earbuds, though, the AirPods have the longest battery life (as of Dec 2017).
• Sharing audio. While you can share an AirPod “bud” with someone else to listen or watch the same device’s media, you can’t pair two AirPods to the same device and output the audio simultaneously (which is, granted, an annoying technological limitation for any wireless headphones — dual audio output to two headphones listening to the same iPad on an airplane, for instance, is a drag).

Overall

AirPods are my favorite Apple product of the last few years, and have already become my second-most used device next to my iPhone. They are great for music while quietly getting ready in the morning, the perfect companion for my morning commutes listening to The Daily and The Intercept, and a pleasure to pop in for the evening jaunt home listening to whatever’s left in my podcast queue. I’ll even slip them in a few times during the day at the office to catch a quick track or two while cranking through emails. While I prefer using my Bose QuietComfort 35s when flying (since they cancel out the miscellaneous noises in-flight), I have used the AirPods a few times with the wife while traveling and watching a movie together, and they work just fine as long as the volume is cranked.

Highly recommended.

You can pick them up at [Amazon for $160][4].

[4]: Apple">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MQWUXZS/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B01MQWUXZS&linkCode=as2&tag=defiantsloth-20&linkId=76af9f38be545719752102cb8b5a61bc">Apple

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While I've been around the clock a number of times with some of the most astute and compelling pieces of journalism across publishers this week, I wanted to shine a light on a few notable opinion editorials for the weekend. These aren't overly long, and they're stitched together thematically around the challenges of U.S. leadership and its commitment to democratic policy in the world today.

The Atlantic

While drenched in superlatives, Yoni Appelbaum's piece titled Is the American Idea Over?, one of the headliners in the latest Atlantic issue, covers a range of survey points and perspective on the U.S.'s role in the world today, and how its population is reckoning with it.

It is no surprise that younger Americans have lost faith in a system that no longer seems to deliver on its promise—and yet, the degree of their disillusionment is stunning. Nearly three-quarters of Americans born before the Second World War assign the highest value—10 out of 10—to living in a democracy; less than a third of those born since 1980 do the same. A quarter of the latter group say it’s unimportant to choose leaders in free elections; just shy of a third think civil rights are needed to protect people’s liberties. Americans are not alone; much of western Europe is similarly disillusioned.

But most notable (and agreeable) is the reality that true democracy is fragile, an ever-escalating balancing act of security, freedom, opportunity, and tolerance of differences:

The greatest danger facing American democracy is complacence. The democratic experiment is fragile, and its continued survival improbable. Salvaging it will require enlarging opportunity, restoring rights, and pursuing equality, and thereby renewing faith in the system that delivers them. This, really, is the American idea: that prosperity and justice do not exist in tension, but flow from each other. Achieving that ideal will require fighting as if the fate of democracy itself rests upon the struggle—because it does.

The Economist

America’s global influence has dwindled under Donald Trump

On trade, [Donald Trump] remains wedded to a zero-sum view of the world, in which exporters “win” and importers “lose”. (Are the buyers of Ivanka Trump-branded clothes and handbags, which are made in Asia, losers?) Mr Trump has made clear that he favours bilateral deals over multilateral ones, because that way a big country like America can bully small ones into making concessions. The trouble with this approach is twofold. First, it is deeply unappealing to small countries, which by the way also have protectionist lobbies to overcome. Second, it would reproduce the insanely complicated mishmash of rules that the multilateral trade system was created to simplify and trim. The Trump team probably will not make a big push to disrupt global trade until tax reform has passed through Congress. But when and if that happens, all bets are off—NAFTA is still in grave peril.

The New York Times

If you haven't first read anything about the Paradise Papers, it's essential reading for the weekend. In a follow-up op-ed, Gabriel Zucman noodles on how we can enact policy to stop corporations and the wealthy from avoiding taxes in havens around the world:

The United States loses, according to my estimates, close to $70 billion a year in tax revenue due to the shifting of corporate profits to tax havens. That’s close to 20 percent of the corporate tax revenue that is collected each year. This is legal.

Meanwhile, an estimated $8.7 trillion, 11.5 percent of the entire world’s G.D.P., is held offshore by ultrawealthy households in a handful of tax shelters, and most of it isn’t being reported to the relevant tax authorities. This is… not so legal.

These figures represent a huge loss of resources that, if collected, could be used to cut taxes on the rest of us, or spent on social programs to help people in our societies.

Iterating on a Good Thing

The team behind what I've called (and remain firm on) the best slim wallet available have taken to Kickstarter to rev up funds for the next phase of its wallet, which they call Trove Swift.

The fundamentals of the original wallet remain intact:

• It's virtually the same physical size as its predecessor
• It retains the same two layers of bonded, full grain Italian vegetable-tanned leather
• The same (from what I can tell) tight, high-quality elastic
• Same composition of three separated slots for cards, cash, Instax photos, business cards, and so forth
• A reversible design that permits versatile options for storing different kinds of slim materials

What’s New

What's different, however, is one of the available slots access to stored cards. As the creators state on their Kickstarter page:

Our backers and customers over the last three years have given a lot of feedback on the TROVE Wallet, they love the versatility of having 3 separate compartments, the quality of materials and workmanship and the compact and minimalist aesthetics. The TROVE Swift retains all of the qualities our customers love about the original wallet and adds a quick access pull-tab. We know everyone has that one card that they use everyday more than others, and we wanted to improve the speed and accessibility by adding the Swift pull-tab.

To confirm, the single, obvious differentiation between this version of the Trove wallet is the pull-tab. I was actually surprised by this when they graciously sent me a review unit. So let's get this out of the way: this is an impressive pull-tab. They summarize having tested several different materials for the ribbon and the pull-tab itself, finally landing on a union of polyester ribbon and coated metal tab. The ribbon feels like a micro-sized version of a belt buckle of the smoothest variety, and the feeling it provides when you glide it out of its resting place is a tactile pleasure. At 0.3mm thick, it's indecipherable as part of the wallet's in-pocket feel, and the tab itself only juts out slightly once a card or set of cards are placed in the one slot it functions in.

As a functional pull-tab, it far out-performs and out-feels the pull-tabs in Bellroy wallets, and a week in, feels entirely up to the task of long-term viability.

But is a pull-tab what the Trove needed?

Honestly, it brings nominal value to the wallet's design and functionality. It's not unwanted or unwarranted -- the feature is squarely about improving accessibility of a favorite set of cards. But of the two core slots with easiest accessibility of cards, neither caused any problems pulling the cards out in the original version of Trove (those front-facing cards in a stack prodded out just enough to easily grab with a finger). The more difficult-to-access single-slot (I'll call it the slot on the "bottom"), is actually where I think a pull-tab would have been more useful. This slot is typically where I dump my RFID office access card and another one or two rarely used items. But because of the tightness of the wallet, that tends to be where it's a little more difficult to stick a finger in and extract a card.

Where the pull tab does benefit the user is when you need to extract cash. While I usually don't carry any currency, if I do, I always fold it three or four ways to fit into one of the two easier "top" slots, and jam it into the crevice. With the cash resting against a card in the pull-tab slot, the feature works great -- the cash pulls out swimmingly.

Other Miscellany to Note:

• This version of the Trove seems to be, at least initially, limited to a set of monochromatic colors (all of good taste). Perhaps a "build your own" option will be coming later on.
• It's only available on Kickstarter, but as of this writing, they've exceeded their goal and aim to ship by the end of the year.
  • Based on this review unit, though, it's in perfect working condition, and I have to imagine it's just a matter of scaling up production and materials to ship to customer demand, but I wouldn't worry about there being any quality assurance issues whatsoever.

In Summary

Overall, the Trove Swift is an excellent iteration on what I continue to deem the best slim/minimal wallet you can buy. Whether you care for the pull-tab or not, Trove still is the right choice.

The evolution and success of Apple products in the future will likely hinge on how deep their commitment to privacy is, and whether they’ll have the ability to meet features and levels of personalization their competition is slinging. As such, two recent articles from The Wall Street Journal highlight both these challenges.

First up is Robert McMillan’s piece on Apple’s expansion of “cutting edge” privacy methodologies. We first heard about this shift at last year’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), the annual development get-together Apple hosts on the west coast. Essentially, Apple is investing serious resources into, and anchoring product integrity around what the industry calls differential privacy.

Two years ago, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered shoppers could be identified by linking social-media accounts to anonymous credit-card records and bits of secondary information, such as the location or timing of purchases.

”I don’t think people are aware of how easy it is getting to de-anonymize data,” said Ishaan Nerurkar, whose startup LeapYear Technologies Inc. sells software for leveraging machine learning while using differential privacy to keep user data anonymous.

Differentially private algorithms blur the data being analyzed by adding a measurable amount of statistical noise. This could be done, for example, by swapping out one question (have you ever committed a violent crime?) with a question that has a statistically known response rate (were you born in February?). Someone trying to find links in the data would never be sure which question a particular person was asked. That lets researchers analyze sensitive data such as medical records without being able to tie the data back to specific people.

Whether the expansion of this methodology will be successful, or prove a hindrance for Apple, is yet to be seen. The establishment media is casting it as a do-or-die juncture in Apple’s commitment to artificial intelligence and machine-learning initiatives. And while other companies are starting to pursue differential privacy, it is a hindrance to core products many of them have, so it’s really only being applied to photo applications and not advertising platforms, for instance.

But no matter how much Apple invests in ways to further its hardware and software services while ringing the privacy bell, it still is beholden to governments. And so: enter China.

Apple has been pressing hard into China over the last several years. As of 2017, it is Apple’s third largest market behind the US and Europe, but has started to slide due (likely) to the increasing competition in the country. According to The Wall Street Journal (again!), Apple has recently buckled under governmental pressure, and will be complying with China to store all cloud data for Chinese customers with a government-owned company.

Apple said it made the latest change to comply with China’s new rules on data storage and cloud-services operation that went into effect June 1 as part of sweeping new regulations aimed at improving cybersecurity. It also said the new data center would improve speed and reliability for customers in China.

The Silicon Valley company has been one of the technology industry’s strongest advocates for fending off government incursions into user data. In a statement, Apple said it has “strong data privacy and security protections in place and no backdoors will be created into any of our systems.”

The latest move comes as Apple has been facing increasing regulatory headwinds in China. Last year, for example, its online book and movie services was shut down by authorities, who didn’t give specific reasons for the closing.

These kinds of things are bound to happen. Apple has also had to recently navigate opening retail stores in India, as the government there had restricted companies with “cutting edge technology” to perform sales without first sourcing some percentage of components locally. This Indian law has apparently pushed sales in that country further back still.

As we see Apple continue to press forward on its hardware, software, and integration fronts, the challenge of maintaining privacy will be tested. They are one of the few, if only, major technology companies left with such goals — time will tell if they can pull it off, or if customer interest cares at all.

Update: Aug 13, 2017.

Thoughtful piece by economist Tyler Cowen on this ordeal over at Bloomberg: Don't Be Too Hard on Apple for Bending to China.

Apple is still doing plenty to help Chinese citizens counter their censors. It sells chat and messenging apps in China that allow for encryption. Apple iPhones and iPads, bought in the U.S., bypass Chinese censorship altogether when they use the 4G network (not Wi-Fi); presumably some Chinese citizens have bought these products and use them. Perhaps most important, VPN apps are still available in China through other means, or overseas, and Chinese citizens can download them and combine them with Apple products to help bypass censorship. Apple has hardly backed away from its mission of tying the world together.