SCALES #54: fixed point
Hello!
Well, hi. It’s been a while. There has been… a lot that’s happened. The feeling of having journeyed through some passageway, emerging out the other end, and finding yourself not quite the same.
Maybe more on that later.
I did make a website, if I haven’t already pestered you about it! It generates walking tours of historic plaques in DC and I’m hosting it at pastpath.tours.
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Rainy downpour this morning to start off the strange city-specific holiday of Patriots'/Marathon Day*. Marathon Day qua Marathon Day doesn’t have all that much meaning to me, but it does do what all holidays do, no matter how arbitrary, of serving as a fixed point in the year. A telescope looking back to all the previous occurrences. The Time It Was Really Hot And I Was Able To Host My Cousin. The Time It Was Really Cold And A Student In The Class I TAed Ran. The Time That Was The First Time Since I Moved To Town And I Didn’t Realize The Day Was A Thing.
(*Patriot's Day, if you're a Mainer.)
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So I was listening to…
…an instant classic Reply All, feat. Roman Mars. With a little squinting there’s some subtext of, “Don’t worry, we’re still a friendly, scrappy part of the broader podcast ecosystem despite having become part of the Spotify Empire.” And also? Sign me up for a full series of a Samin Nosrat-hosted <~>.
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Newsletters continue to newsletter
chomp chomp on birthday cakes:
all of this is to say that I felt like I worked the past year to get out from under the burden of self, and I wanted to make a cake that felt really heavy this year. something big and dense and structured. I wanted to feel the weight of it. I was eating mousse last night—a brag, I know—and someone told me to keep in mind that mousse is half-air. this is true! and I wanted the opposite of that! I wanted to sit down for breakfast on my birthday and take in the weight of myself—what I made, what I am.
Robin Sloan’s Year of the Meteor project has been such a gift, particularly its microfiction-in-the-mail print offering.
Speaking of absolute gifts: the essay in the “Small cat” dispatch of 6.
griefbacon’s “an anthem for a trash generation” lays bare what’s going on behind nascent aughts nostalgia.
Excited (and inspired) by the resurfacing of Metafoundry.
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Further Reading
An introduction to how the histories of natural history collections and the slave trade were intertwined:
Overall, [science historian Kathleen Murphy] says, “Modern science and the transatlantic slave trade were two of the most important factors in the shaping of the modern world.” Historians are finally recognizing that they shaped each other as well. As [historian James] Delbourgo says, “We've been so negligent in bringing these histories [of slavery and science] together. We've missed that they are in fact the same history.”
Excellent GIF use in this web essay on Buster Keaton and architectural space (h/t Kottke).
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Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.
—Adam