Hi, friends…

Happy Friday. The US is up 2-0 over Australia as I write this, and the announcers are worried that a “vibe shift” could happen at any moment. This whole year feels like just neverending vibe shifts; it’s hard to keep track. (Midjourney expanding into spa-delivered health services? Sure, why not.)

I keep blogging for me (to remember it now, and maybe remember it later?) because as always it’s this instinct to just record the things that are interesting. Links for this week are below. And while I”m not blogging, I’ve got a big project I’ve been working on for a while that I’m close to being able to share with a wider crew. (This is me committing in public to actually doing that…soon.) Here’s a screenshot:

One feature at a time, one little detail at a time, made in flow state / fugue state. For now, I’m digging the colors. They’re pretty.

Reply and say hi if you’re inclined! Hope you are well; be good to one another.

-m

links for jun 19 2026

J. D. Vance’s Contemptuous Conversion Memoir

Jessica Winter eviscerates our Vice President's new book (HOW DOES HE HAVE TIME TO WRITE A BOOK? ISN'T HE SUPPOSED TO BE NEGOTIATING THE IRAN DEAL? Oh, right...I see.) in The New Yorker.

One suspects that Vance would have a better grasp of Catholic customs and vibes if he spent more time around rank-and-file parishioners in “fraternal sharing and in ecclesial communion,” to borrow Pope Leo’s words. But Vance admits that, about “half the time these days, we attend Mass at home.” (Your book is called "Communion," my brother!) A surpassingly strange thing about Vance’s book, in fact, is how often he sounds not much like a Christian at all, Catholic or otherwise. “Religious beliefs are less like certainties such as the boiling point of water—which can be verified through testing—and more like claims about complex systems,” Vance writes. “Take, for example, the following: An increase in the minimum wage would raise the standard of living for low-income people.” Raising wages might sound nice, Vance goes on, but it might also “reduce the number of jobs available to low-income people. . . . The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

Now, there is some off-the-charts breezy impertinence! Religious beliefs are actually very much like certainties to those who hold them, for one thing. And a policy proposal is not a religious belief, for another. The passage is incoherent, yet, in conflating progressive reform with arrogant blind faith, it is perfectly suited to Vance’s cynical conservatism.

If you contend that a belief is less like a certainty and more like a claim, and if a claim—that workers deserve a fair wage, that immigrants are human beings with God-given rights—can be debunked, then perhaps you hold no true beliefs at all. I’ve written in the past, as have others, about “Vance’s essential mutability—his willingness to change his positions and convictions according to the prevailing winds of the political moment.” (It took Vance just five years to complete his transition from “Hillbilly Elegy”-era Never Trumper to MAGA-aligned Senate candidate.) “Communion,” far more than “Hillbilly Elegy,” is the work of an inveterate opportunist, one who appears torn between the urge to camouflage his careerism—Vance’s true religion—and an equally strong desire to be admired for how well and how profitably he plays the game.

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links for jun 18 2026

Midjourney Medical

2026 just keeps delivering bangers:

It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body.

The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.

You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you're done.

When the woman in the weird promotional video stepped on the thing and it was clear they were going to lower her into the tank like Han Solo, inside my head I shouted "You're insane!" And she replied, calmly, "I know."

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The Israeli Ultra-Hawks Who Feel Betrayed by Trump’s Iran Deal

This Isaac Chotiner interview in The New Yorker with Shimon Riklin, a television anchor and Benjamin Netanyahu ally, is wild.

Putting aside the merits of this war, do you think people such as yourself and the Prime Minister misjudged Donald Trump? I know you said a joyful prayer on the air when he was elected in 2024. You must have had some sense of who this guy is—that he isn’t loyal to anyone, that he had no real core values—

Listen, I was really happy when he was elected. I admit it. I think it was good for Israel. And, in the beginning, it was. But today I don’t know what to think. I am really in shock.

It’s hard to fathom.

I don’t have a lot of moments like this. I don’t remember someone in modern history who would go with you and do wonderful things, and then suddenly disappear and go against you. So now I am the bad guy? I supported you! I was the good guy! How did I become the bad guy, and the Ayatollah is the good guy?

This is why I was wondering whether you had ever observed Donald Trump.

I don’t know what motivated him. You know he is a Gemini? Geminis are not really ones to say the same things a lot. They change their minds. You know Geminis?

Yeah, I’m a Gemini, so don’t be too mean.

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The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

Andy Baio:

It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (“No copyright intended!”) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in your portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.

And I had completely forgotten that John Koenig, the creator of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, coined the word sonder:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

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Lettera

From the folks behind Bear:

Lettera is a native, refined Markdown editor for macOS. Built for writers, researchers, developers, and anyone who works with documents, from a quick blog draft to a complete technical documentation system. Lettera works around your setup. Open a single file to read and edit it, or open a folder as your writing workspace.

I dig it. See also: Vergecast interview with Chairman Gruber on the epic history of Markdown.

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Let them eat cake

Brian Elliot:

There’s a fork in the road right now, and Big Tech is waving everyone down the wrong path. The story they’ve been selling is simple: AI makes you productive by letting you cut people. Fewer humans, same output, fatter margins.

...

We hollowed out the middle of this country once and told ourselves the market would sort it out. It didn’t—many of us were wrong. We can’t afford to do it to ourselves again, faster, and pretend we didn’t see it coming.

Will we find and put in place leaders willing to make the sizable changes to policies, tax code, investments and infrastructure to avoid a train wreck? And if we do, will we stand behind them when times get tough?

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