Hello, email friends. It’s been a while. Also, it’s been a hell of a week. I can’t stand looking at the news, and so I’m deliberately pointing my attention elsewhere. Here’s a Friday dump, a way to get things out of my head (and maybe into yours).

reading

Making my way through Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which I can’t believe I haven’t read before. // Also, Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch: “all the rhythms and repetitions and seashell whorls of meaning to be extracted from the dull casings of everyday life” (NYT). And because lately truth is more depressing than fiction, Rabbit Hutch is mirrored in the sex abuse scandal at Miss Hall’s. // Rosencrans Baldwin, Cinematic. “In the dark, for ninety minutes, we let go of our inhibitions, and that’s a powerful experience—though within that give and take, if someone cries, if people run from instinct, don’t they deserve respect?” // Alex Nevala-Lee, Chimes at Midnight, about visiting the Clock of the Long Now. “Arriving at the primary chamber, you see the brass and quartz enclosure that protects the calculation system, the escapement, and a pendulum that completes one swing every seven seconds. The clock face itself is eight feet across. At the center is the black globe of a star field, encircled by movable rings that indicate sunrise, sunset, and the phases of the moon.” Mindblowing. // Zach Vasquez on the Startling Empathy of David Lynch. “The films of David Lynch are strange creatures, not unlike the strange creatures that often appear within them, and to focus only on the most ungainly of their appendages is to willfully ignore their equally beautiful qualities. Even in the darkest and most terrifying of Lynch’s films, there are moments of profound beauty and warmth.” // Matt Webb dowsing the collective unconscious.

watching / seeing

Hey, friends. Happy Sunday night; hope you’ve had a restful weekend, one full of words and songs and food and friends. I spent some of this week in New York, so the blog was a bit more art-forward than usual — a good thing, imho.

Consuming this week: Still reading Demon Copperhead; listening to Novo Amor’s Collapse (sad indie rock) and Floating Points’ Promises (collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra); watching the 49ers collapse in the fourth quarter; eating the best burger of my life at Red Hook Tavern.

Here’s what happened on the site this week. As always, thanks for subscribing. Hit reply and say hi, why don’t you?

Hi, friends.

It’s been an interesting week. I kicked off a new cohort of of Reforge teaching, I had cortisol injected into my spine (fun!), and I got on a plane to spend a few days in New York (actual fun!). I’m currently…

• Reading: Demon Copperhead. I picked up a paperback copy of this, but then promptly left it on the plane. Kindling it next.

• Listening: ten days, new release from Fred again..

• Watching: Beckham, on Netflix, directed by Fisher Stevens. I’m halfway through and hooked, even though I wasn’t a fan of his before. Neck tattoos, anyone?

Hit reply, say hi, tell me things. Or just keep reading — below the line is what happened on the blog this week.

The pace of publishing quickened this week. I’ve done some things to the site to make it easier for me to post; at some point I’ll write that all up in a really boring meta way that only a few people will care about. In the meantime here’s what I'm currently...

• Reading: How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology, by Philip Ball (I hated biology as a kid, but this book is really well done and super interesting)

• Listening: Pearl Jam by Pearl Jam (I may be regressing?), and Two Star & The Dream Police by Mk.gee (recommended by munchkin #1, who is definitely no longer a munchkin).

• Watching: The U.S. Open. (Jessica Pegula!!!)

...and below is what happened on the blog this week. Words! Links! Stuff! I hope you enjoy.

Oh hey, it's been a minute.

Experimenting with something different, just pulling everything from the blog for the week and sending it to you in one convenient package, along with three quick recommendations.

1. The Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey. Currently reading, completely engrossed.
2. Max Read's conversation with John August about Halogencore on the Scriptnotes podcast. Turning Michael Clayton and Margin Call into a proper genre.
3. The early rounds of the U.S. Open where sleeveless black t-shirts don't guarantee wins.

filtered for no context

Ten links, no context.

1. An illegal one-person boycott .

2. Tim Walz can teach you how to drive stick .

3. He said his running mate would be Phyllis Diller .

4. Dragons are pretty big, I guess .

5. This season clearly should have been 10 episodes .

6. Medieval beat machine .

7. I promise it’s all a lot cooler than anything out of the Forgotten Realms .

8. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but write .

9. Anything a friend once did, apps do “better.”

10. How are pink fairy armadillos real ?

Hey ChatGPT, write a sonnet based on these:

filtered for being unburdened

Barack Obama, Our Endorsement :

But Kamala has more than a resume. She has the vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands. There is no doubt in our mind that Kamala Harris has exactly what it takes to win this election and deliver for the American people. At a time when the stakes have never been higher, she gives us all reason to hope.

Rebecca Traister, The Case for Being Unburdened by What Has Been :

filtered for the empathy distortion field

M.G. Siegler at Spyglass (my favorite tech blog right now, bar none), writing about the newly released video of Steve Jobs speaking at the Aspen Design Conference in 1983:

Everyone knows the famous/infamous “reality distortion field”, but it really undersells Jobs’ ability to command a room by speaking in a way that’s intensely human.

Too many of our current crop of entrepreneurs and CEOs just cannot do this for whatever reason. So many over the years have tried to emulated such abilities for obvious reasons, but they may mimic the look and feel of such a talk, but can’t copy the underlying empathy that seems to exist within Jobs in these settings . You can say it’s an act, but it works. Over every talk. Over years and years. Time and time again. It’s both a command of what he’s talking about and an ability to convey true belief in what he’s talking about. Mixed with a way to make it all relatable to seemingly every person in the room.

Emphasis mine. The talk itself is absolutely worth watching, and it’s wild trying to imagine a time when most of the audience present didn’t yet own personal computer, Apple or otherwise. I love this bit (especially because I’m currently reading the early chapters of Chris Miller’s Chip War):

filtered for things that come alive

Linus Lee implores us to create things that come alive .

Within my little corner of the world, I think we’re often victim to an even more myopic pathology of this kind: we think that technology involves a computer, or spacecraft, or a microscope, or some other fragile thing cursed to be beholden to software. But writing is technology. Oral tradition is technology. Farming is technology. Roads are technology.

Technology exists woven into the physics and politics and romance of the world, and to disentangle it is to suck the life out of it, to sterilize it to the point of exterminating its reason for existence. to condemn it to another piece of junk.

If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag everything they touch into the realm of the living. And once in a while, if you are so lucky, may you create not just technology, but art — not only giving us life, but elevating us beyond.

Emphasis mine.

filtered for words

Steven Johnson on the capabilities of NotebookLM , and some of the interesting skills requried to get the most out of LLMs:

The core skills are not just about straight prompt engineering; they’re not just about figuring out the most efficient wording to get the model to do what you want. They also draw on deeper, more nuanced questions. What is the most responsible behavior to cultivate in the model, and how do we best deploy this technology in the real world to maximize its positive impact? What new forms of intelligence or creativity can we detect in these strange entities? How do we endow them with a moral compass, or steer them away from bias and inaccurate stereotypes? Can language alone generate a robust theory of how the world works, or do you need more explicit rules or additional sensory information?

Related, Maggie Appleton’s (gorgeous) presentation at the Local-first Conference in Berlin, Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers :

filtered for ultra-processed everything

Cal Newport compares ultra-processed food to ultra-processed content :

This analogy between food and media is useful because it helps us better understand responses to the latter. In the context of nutrition, we’re comfortable deciding to largely avoid ultra-processed food for health reasons.

…

This is how we should think about the ultra-processed content delivered so relentlessly through our screens. To bypass these media for less processed alternatives should no longer be seen as bold, or radical, or somehow reactionary. It’s just a move toward a self-evidently more healthy relationship with information.

National treasure Matt Levine on Safe Superintelligence :

filtered for pattern recognition

Poet Diana Garza Islas, in the Paris Review, Rorschach :

Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen.

Janna Levin talking with Natalie Priebe Frank in Quanta, What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us? :

filtered for power

I’m a couple of weeks behind on this one, but this letter from Donald Sutherland to Hunger Games director Gary Ross about the character of President Coriolanus Snow is pitch perfect.

Power. That’s what this is about? Yes? Power and the forces that are manipulated by the powerful men and bureaucracies trying to maintain control and possession of that power? Power perpetrates war and oppression to maintain itself until it finally topples over with the bureaucratic weight of itself and sinks into the pages of history (except in Texas), leaving lessons that need to be learned unlearned.

Heather Cox Richardson, July 1, 2024 :

filtered for resilience

Anne Helen Petersen interviews Soraya Chemaly , author of The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma , about the importance of nurturing relationships in getting through hard times:

I think my idea of resilience was a pretty common one in that I thought of resilience in almost entirely personal terms, as an individual characteristic or trait. Over years I had really absorbed the idea that resilience was 9/10th the ability to persevere, be gritty, try to stay optimistic, etc. and 1/10th having a supportive social circle. When my family was thrown into the deep end of a crisis, it became clear that nothing I could do as an individual could compare to what we all needed, which was a combination of love, friendship, compassionate listeners, and actual material resources, such as access to good health care and medicine.

What I concluded, after that experience and through writing this book, is that that our individual/collective resilience ratios should really be reversed or, a better formulation, that the more accurate and helpful way to think of “supportive social circles” is broadly: as the connections, material resources, and political entitlements that serve as the foundation for our individual strengths and capacities.

handicapped

Golf Distillery’s guide to handicaps :

The handicap index is a one-decimal number used to compare golfers regardless of where they play golf or which sets of tees they use. A golfer with a low handicap index will be better than a golfer with a high one. Very good golfers whose handicap index is better than 0 are assigned a + sign in front of their index number. For example, a golfer with a handicap of +2.0 should score better than one with a handicap index of 2.0, and much better than one with 10.0.

Richard Haass, Handicap :

filtered for a glass of water

Conor Niland, who used to be the number one tennis player in Ireland, on being “at the bottom of the top” of professional tennis. I loved this bit about seeing Andre Agassi at an ATP event in San Jose…

“Can we get you anything, Andre?” the gaggle circling him asked earnestly. “Uh, sure, I’ll have some water,” he replied half-heartedly, even though he was standing a few paces from a fridge full of bottled water. He wanted to give them something to do. One of them was dispatched and quickly came back with a plastic glass full of chilled water. Andre took a small sip and put it down on the table beside him, the one I was sitting at. He didn’t pick it back up. After a few moments, Andre and his entourage moved on.

If you like Niland’s piece, and you’re even mildly into tennis, then you should absolutely read Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. The opening chapter (“The End”), has this brilliant bit:

three book recommendations

It’s officially hot book summer; here are three things I’ve read recently and absolutely loved, because it turns out that every book is a beach book.

Moonbound, by Robin Sloan. Robin was kind enough to gift me an advance reader copy of his new novel, so I finished it a bit ahead of some friends of mine (#humblebrag). Set 10,000 years in the future, after the decline of human civilization (“the Anth”), it’s a delightfully weird take on the Arthurian legend, a hero’s journey through a strangely evolved planet that features talking beavers, multi-dimensional math, and a battle with AI “dragons” with a very unlikely narrator.

X and Y and Z, along with time, are sufficient for billiard balls and booster rockets-simple things. But real life, the complexity of it, demands more. This was our discovery: the world, like a sponge, will soak up as many dimensions as you provide.

two by two

Long time readers know I love a good 2x2. After all, two of my most read blog posts feature them; one here on sippey.com, and one that’s been unceremoniously deleted from blog.twitter.com. LOL.

Which is why I absolutely LOVED Noah Brier’s deep dive into the history of the 2x2 at Why is this Interesting. From Igor Ansoff at RAND, to Boston Consulting Group to Clayton Christensen’s passionate defense of the form in 1997, Brier lays it all out.