Kickoff for September 2, 2024
In my youth in Canada, I never looked forward to the coming of September. The transition from the eighth to the ninth month of the year meant that summer was over. It spawned a few regrets about what I didn't get to do over the previous couple of months. September also meant the dreaded return to school and that winter was on the way. Funny how now, living at the bottom of the world, I look forward to September as a step closer to summer. How times change.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s — Wherein we discover how the past has been ignored when it comes to climate change, and how it was a concern for not just the United States Congress but wider swaths of society decades ago.
From the article:
Why has so much of this history been overlooked? Oreskes pointed to the “general historical amnesia of Americans.” As the politician Adlai Stevenson once put it, “The trouble with Americans is that they haven’t read the minutes of the previous meeting.”
What Is Analog Computing? — Wherein we learn about another kind of computing device that's been around for hundreds of years or more, and about modern ones that can do a lot of what their digital counterparts can do while using less energy.
From the article:
The advantages of digital computing are real, but so are the drawbacks. Perhaps, by reaching back to computing’s past, researchers will be able to steer a sustainable path toward our computational future.
A New Cosmist Moment Wherein we're introduced to a philosophy spawned in Russia called Cosmism, learn about its origins, about how it influenced aspects of Bolshevism and Soviet scientific research, and how we seem to be repeating the negative aspects of that influence all over again.
The technologies of the future do not always pan out the way we would like or imagine them to. The cultural momentum and even material possibility they generate are reappropriated by those with both vision and power.
Everybody Gets a Star — Wherein we learn about the effects, not all of them good, that review site Yelp has had on the hospitality industry and how the site created a cadre of self-important reviewers, and how it helped usher in a culture in which we're asked to rate everything and every experience.
From the article:
Yes, you can go to Yelp and see which restaurants have been rated well and which seem broadly unpopular. But look closer and you’ll often find a slew of petty tyrants, untrustworthy influencers, straight-up review bombs, or just people with bad taste. People were removing stars because they couldn’t find parking, because the Thai food was spicy, because gratuity was included and they didn’t realize it until after they’d tipped on top of it. And while choosing to trust Yelp is up to you, search for any restaurant and its star rating is likely one of the first things you see.
The Clever Trick for Living in 350 Square Feet — Wherein the authors explain how they not only live but thrive in a small apartment, and how that was the result in shifts in their thinking around and relationship with the urban spaces outside of their doors.
From the article:
[I]n the hands-on model-building workshops we lead with people of a range of backgrounds and ages, when we have people build models of their ideal housing, they never build private amenities; no rooftop barbeque facilities, no high-end gyms, no kitchen islands with dual sinks. Instead, participants focus almost solely on the public realm: streets that are comfortable to walk down and places to walk to, connection to neighbors and community, trees, water.
The Private Life: On James Baldwin — Wherein Colm Tóibín explores the life of the American author, specifically the events of a pivotal year which marked a turning point in his public and writing lives.
From the article:
Baldwin’s reputation as a novelist and essayist rests mainly on the work he did in the decade before 1963, a decade in which he was passionately industrious. The year 1963 seems to have been a watershed for him. He wrote hardly any fiction in that year. It was a time in which “the condition of truth” could not be achieved by solitude or by silence or by slow work on a novel.