Are we—the hesitant, the conflicted—all alone? Can that be? In a leveling climate of summations, crowded with public figures who speak exclusively from positions of final authority, issuing an endless stream of conclusions, I get a wary sense in my gut of a world that’s making its appeal to my indolence and emptiness, asking only for surrender.
Society at Large
How to Delete Facebook – Developer Edition
In which I explain the dark pattern keeping Facebook users from deleting their accounts if they have apps in the developer console
The time for reacting is over. It’s time to act.
The system is burning. We must stop clinging to what’s already on fire and start planning for what can be built from the ashes. It’s up to us to imagine the government we want, and to take action, over and over again, to make it a reality.
Lady Báthory was Right
Okay, maybe not right, right, but…it may turn out that, while all the torture and stuff isn’t exactly science, she was less wrong than it may have seemed. Don’t know who she is? Here it is, in a nutshell, straight from Wikipedia: Báthory and four of her servants were accused of torturing and killing hundreds … Read more
Sick Wagner Burn, Courtesy of Hercule Poirot
Poirot: Makes pies? Hastings: Yes, pies. Hastings: Miss Lemon says he (Benedict Farley, British Meat Pie Tycoon) makes pies. Poirot: Hastings, to say that Benedict Farley makes pies is like saying that Wagner wrote semiquavers. Hastings: They’re good pies, are they? Poirot: No, horrible. But there are a great many of them. Not sure if … Read more
How to RSS Your Way to…Actually Reading the Internet Again
I’ve been chatting with quite a few people recently who have had it up to here with the content marketing popup bullshit that is today’s internet. Even when there’s a decent article out there to read, actually reading it is nearly impossible, what with the chat-video-javascript terror. I’m not alone in having solved this problem … Read more
Quote from “Double Birthday” by Willa Cather
Even in American cities, which seem so much alike, where people seem all to be living the same lives, striving for the same things, thinking the same thoughts, there are still individuals a little out of tune with the times — there are still survivals of a past more loosely woven, there are disconcerting beginnings … Read more
Norman Mailer on Politics and Cigarettes
Politics has its virtues, all too many of them—it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things—but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, … Read more
I work, therefore I meditate, therefore I work harder.
As workplaces demand that their employees hustle harder in a more precarious world, mindfulness has emerged as a means to manage stress and increase productivity. Since its import to America, it has been oddly well-suited at making the individual citizen responsible for mitigating the suffering and loss that our necrotic social structures have induced. So … Read more