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.
Sylvan Esso remixed The District Sleeps Alone Tonight.
Greil Marcus has a new book coming about why he writes, adapted from a lecture he was invited to give at Yale.
Each speaker writes a book on why they write and then draws a lecture from it, he said. When? I said. September, he said. I can’t, I said. I’m still learning how to walk again. No, next year, he said. The idea that in a year, in the best circumstances, I’d be able to travel across the country and speak in public was so absurd—I’d been having speech therapy twice a day for months, having lost the ability to speak with any emotion, feeling, emphasis, flair, or really meaning—I said, sure, figuring why not, there’s no chance it will happen. At that point I didn’t know if I’d ever write again and did care if I did or not.
Via Futility Closet, Danny Jansen became the first MLB player to play for both teams in a single game. (Rain delay, suspended game, trade.)
Quanta has a great primer on the vagus nerve:
The vagus nerve is critical to generating mind by integrating the brain and body. Choking is terrifying because death could be mere minutes away. That heightened mental state is dependent on signals coming from the body — the inability to breathe or swallow — and the vagus nerve both senses and controls the choking response. If your heart suddenly starts racing, you might experience a panic attack; controlling heart rate is a prime function of the vagus nerve.
And at Nautilus, Steve Paulson goes deep on hallucinogens.
This question about a transpersonal reality hangs in the air, lurking behind this psychedelic moment. It shapes how we interpret the mystical experiences so common in psychedelic therapy. It informs metaphysics—the philosophical tradition that wrestles with fundamental questions about reality, like the relationship between mind and matter and the space-time continuum, which are precisely the kinds of questions that tend to surface in psychedelic experiences.
I had planned on being in Portland for XOXO last weekend, but life intervened. Jason Kottke didn't help my RAHMO (regret at having missed out):
And most of all, thanks to the Andys (Baio, McMillan) for putting on XOXO for all these years. It is a singularly impactful gathering that’s touched/changed/bettered too many lives to even count. XOXO is perhaps the most thoughtful thing I’ve ever experienced — I can’t imagine how difficult it’s been for them to sustain that level of kindness and attention to detail across this many festivals and years.
In lieu of being in Portland, I finished a rewatch of Damon Lindelhof’s HBO show The Leftovers. Season one hews close to the Perrotta book, and beats you about the head and neck with grief. But seasons two and three go somewhere beautiful, especially in the relationship between Kevin and Nora. If you haven’t watched it and are looking for something worthwhile on HBO Max, give it a spin. And then, once you’re through it, read Emily St. James’ and Caroline Framke’s review of the final episode, “The Book of Nora.” (Don’t worry, no real spoilers in the quote below.)
Why shouldn’t the series finale of The Leftovers send a goat to wander the desert, weighed down by figurative sin, until Nora found him tangled up in necklaces and metaphors? The Leftovers can be an incredibly subtle show, but it loves itself an obvious symbol, too, and the goat is a great one. Is it on the nose? Absolutely. But it also represents something The Leftovers does really well. Sometimes, life is incredibly on the nose; if you look for them, there are obvious symbols for whatever you’re going through lurking around every corner.
Emphasis mine.
File under “texting in public,” I love the trailer for Netflix’s Starting 5. For…reasons.
File under “trust and safety is hard,” Finn Voorhees had Apple repair his iPhone screen but then found himself suddenly banned from Snapchat.
I began to suspect that Apple had given me a refurbished iPhone as a replacement, and the previous owner had been banned for violating Snapchat’s guidelines. … DeviceCheck allows developers to set and query two bits of data per device, which persist across app deletions, reinstalls, factory resets, and even device transfers between users. Apple’s documentation suggests using this for limiting free trials to once per user or banning devices with known fraudulent activity. They even mention that developers are responsible for resetting these bits when a device changes ownership, but it’s unclear how developers could verify that this has occurred.
File under “defining a security is hard,” Ben Weiss’ at The Verge on what’s been happening at OpenSea is worth reading. Two quick thoughts. First, given today’s news that the SEC sent them a Wells notice, maybe killing creator royalties (to better compete with Blur?) wasn’t really the move? Second, this quote is just brutal:
“They hired these fucking animals, these reptiles from like Amazon, Facebook, Google,” said another former employee. “The white walkers came in through the fucking door like in Game of Thrones.”
File under “real estate is hard,” David Wertheimer on the news that New York’s Flatiron building is going condo:
For most of the first century of its life, the Flatiron was a thriving space, with thousands of people walking into its lobby and filling its 22 stories with an ever changing population, each generating their own experiences, their own memories. The building was lively inside and out. That is likely never to return.
And finally, file under “someday, maybe, I hope to stay there” Colin Nagy at WITI on the renovation happening at the Park Hyatt Tokyo:
This is one of the most high wire acts that can happen in hotels: evolving a beloved icon, while retaining its magic elements. Park Hyatt Tokyo is a place where you either get it, or you don’t. But it is a place with integrity, timelessness, and a design intention that has been executed with remarkable consistency over time.
If you made it this far, thanks for scrolling. I pushed a bit this week on a slow burn project to migrate all of the archives from Stating the Obvious (and eventually Medium) onto sippey.com so I have everything in one place. 1995 and 1996 have been moved; only like another eight more years of posts to go. Here's a wild one, from March of 1996, California, Land of Hyperreality.
After a while the constant noise of the machines blends into itself. The neon lights overwhelm. And I realize that the casino shares the same hyperreality with the beauty of the lake and its surrounding mountains. And the grace of a talented snowboarder. And the pyramid that juts out of the financial district in San Francisco. And the traffic that clogs the bridges at 6:45 in the morning. They all induce sensory overload; they all overwhelm.
Still here,
-m