Thanks to the many excellent submitters this week, with special thanks to MVP submitter Wesley.

In a universe in equilibrium we would simply not exist as thinking and feeling beings.

Submitted by yuva with the comment “This sentence [struck] me as Carlo speaks [to] how entropy disequilibrium results in the concept of “past and future” and direction of time. Even it feels brutal that we can not return to past and only decide on future we are very much the result of this disequilibrium. It somewhat soothes me in the midst of disequilibrium of everything we live in now.”

I’ll tell you, when you get to be 80 years old the pixels start to fall off the rolodex cards.

Someone I did an oral history interview with while in California

Not attributing here since the transcript has not been fully approved for release, but I enjoyed the metaphor-mixing.

The etymological root of "compassion", I learned, was co-suffering.

Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India, Yamini Narayanan

Submitted by sonia.

Few political operatives have it easier than opposition researchers in New York City this year.

“A cast of scandal-plagued candidates tests the limits of what New York City voters will forgive”, Alex Tabet for NBC News

Submitted by Wesley.

What the Bond movies never show are the actual logistics of operating an inaccessible lair.

“Jared Does Albania”, Mitchell Prothero for Air Mail

Submitted by Ed, with this runner-up:

Whether a difficult-to-access island covered in landmines and Cold War bunkers is remotely viable for a luxury resort remains to be seen.

I found myself face-to-face with the dreadful visage of Peter Singer, and in his off-hand he brandished a bloodstained copy of Practical Ethics 2ed at me, noting that money can be used to purchase mosquito nets and I had just murdered 0.25 children in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI”, Nikhil Suresh on his blog Lucidity

Submitted by Wesley a few days before the NBC News sentence submission.

For an extremely large percentage of the history of the world, there was no California.

Assembling California, John McPhee

I picked this up from Walden Pond Books while in Oakland because I am still trying to write this art book essay about Silicon Valley pollution legacies and thought maybe it would help to think through the place on a geological time scale. The Santa Clara Valley region generally considered “Silicon Valley” is a graben between two fault lines, a valley that emerged out of the formation of mountain ranges (the Santa Cruz Mountains and Mt. Diablo). Something something out of “disruption”, rich soil for agriculture and innovation, something.

As someone who grew up in this region, much of my career writing about computer stuff has involved the distinction between “Silicon Valley” as idea and its landscapes. This trip got me thinking that one way to explain it is that “Silicon Valley” is more microclimate than landscape proper. It’s an atmospheric phenomena that intermittently converges with the geography, a vapor(ware?) plume that floats above and around the region, sort of like Karl the Fog but with more trichlorethylene and maybe it smells like a melange of vape pen flavors.

if it bleeds you can kill it

Bo Bolander on Bluesky

Submitted by Alex.

Towns like Winter Haven and Orlando are polka-dot Venices.

Oranges, John McPhee

I also bought a used copy of Oranges at Walden Pond Books because it had a really great cover and because I’ve only really read McPhee’s geology writing and wanted to try his other stuff. I envy the Magazine Men of the 1960s/1970s who had both the latitude to follow topics to their depths and also didn’t have the burden of having do a sales pitch for their subject matter. There’s no subtitle about “the curious life and extraordinary impact of citrus” or statements to the effect of “oranges may seem mundane, but they’re in fact extraordinary.” If you picked up the Oranges book, it stands to reason you want to know about them and don’t need to be persuaded that they’re worthy of curiosity and attention!

Do we envy the rats for their enjoyment of a life unburdened by having to know what Grok AI is?

“Rat’s Amore”, Aaron Timms for the New York Review of Architecture

Submitted by Natalie.

You cannot evoke the best filmmakers of all time when you're making a movie this mid.

Angelica Jade Bastién in an interview for New York magazine’s newsletter The Critics

Though essentially correct, the statement is in need of amplification and closer philological scrutiny.

“Philological Notes on Chapter One of The Lao Tzu”, Peter A. Boodberg in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies

Submitted by Wesley, later in the week.

His rubric reads like a naive parroting of American ideology because the point of his service is to provide a computationally-legible account of cultural hegemony masquerading as neutrality.

“Dave and the Spectacle of Computation”, The Luddite