shiny things 28/
this time everything has a block quote
TIL John McPhee, who has had a profound impact on my writing & understanding of narrative, is also the catalyst for one of my favorite writer’s first book
[…]I got back in contact with John McPhee, my teacher from college. We were corresponding with email and at one point he sent a long message suggesting that I write a book about Fuling. I had not considered doing that, but after he wrote, I realized that it made sense. And soon I started working on “River Town.”
“Shopping at CVS” is a terrible sequel to “Crying in an H-Mart”:
The basic experience of shopping at CVS is one of doing something desperate at worst and banally unpleasant at best while swimming in a warm bath of muted musical intensity. No other retail chain is so committed to the power ballad as a musical form. A Spotify playlist of “CVS BANGERS,” apparently sourced from hard-won knowledge, features a stacked lineup: Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”; Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight”; the Cars’ “Drive”; Toto’s still-inescapable “Africa.” One song on that playlist that I absolutely have heard in my local store is Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”—the nineties adult-alternative equivalent of a power ballad, a spoken/sung tale of a marriage crumbling under the weight of too much gender.
Via metafilter
A touch dramatic, but still an important illustration of how every little decision has downstream impact.
“I start with a single HTML tag and end with the downfall of civilization.
Not joking.“
via metafilter
Myco-remediation doesn’t (yet) work at scale. But the characters in this piece are searching for hope and continue to bet on the mythic power of Mycorrhizae.
Everyone who takes part in industrial modernity employs some degree of disavowal when it comes to waste. One might even say it is required to navigate our late industrial lives. If we spent every minute thinking about the environmental catastrophe of our society, it would be hard to function. But, of course, it is easier for some than others. The effects of waste and pollution might be everywhere now, but their effects are still unevenly distributed.
P ≠ NP except no one is sure and this is a profoundly interesting longread about the people obsessed with this question
“The encryption methods most widely used today are all based on seemingly hard NP problems — to decrypt the message, an attacker would need an as-yet-undiscovered fast algorithm for solving the problem. To establish that these methods are truly secure, one thing you’d need to do is prove that P ≠ NP. Without a proof, Sipser said, all you can do is “hope that whoever you’re trying to keep the secret from is not a better mathematician than you are.”