Winter 2025 Tiny Letter: All the news that's fit to email
Hello Friends,
I have a nice mix of good news, irreverence, and some concerning items in this later winter round up.
Lloyd Center is a giant Portland mall with a skating rink in the center that was all but abandoned by big retailers. It’s it great shape, but it’s scheduled for demolition.
Lloyd Center, in years past
In the meantime, it’s been colonized by small, independent businesses selling everything from manga to lightsabers…
Image courtesy of Legion Sabers. Can’t help it…Nerrrrrdddds!
…and often hosts pop up sales. Wandering through, I stopped for a photo opp on a child’s toy, best described as an animal with wheels. A woman approached and said, “I’m praying for people today, is there a prayer I can say for you?” I replied, “Yes, may all people have their basic needs met.” And that is one of my wishes for this holiday season.
I just love this sort of thing
The digital artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, is causing a stir at Art Basel Miami Beach with his work Regular Animals (2025). The installation, on show in the new Zero 10 digital art section, features robotic canines fitted with hyper-realistic heads resembling tech moguls such as the Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Making fun of these would-be kings is not going to stop the worst of their efforts, but it’s still vital.
Man, I love vaccines so much I should have been a medical researcher, but sadly, I never had the chops.
Bewildermentis a clever, sci-fi-adjacent story of a single dad, his brilliant and challenging son, and the end of the world. It’s a good introduction to Powers’ work, and much shorter than Overstory. It’s very well written, and quite poetic in spots.
A Charlie Brown Christmas, Live
Great playing here! I imagine that for some kids, the excellent tunes of the Vince Guaraldi Trio were their first, or at least an early exposure to jazz.
Faking visuals is easier than ever
If you have a few moments to spare, watch a few of these videos. Placing elements in a photo or video that were never there, or slicing elements out completely, has become much easier to do, and than ever to detect. This is very convenient for graphic designers, but bad for social trust overall. Cue conspiracy theories: “…but I saw that video where Chuck Schumer punched a veteran’s service dog! It was right there…”
By comparison, here’s what an obvious cut/paste job looks like, courtesy of The Onion. How do you know it’s fake? In this case, you can just tell. The figure in the foreground just looks like he was pasted in, which he was. Blurry legs, missing shadows, inconsistent lighting are all clues.
America’s Dumbest Billionaires Fail to Stop Zohran Mamdani
I’m hopeful that Mamdani’s election as Mayor of New York will bring good things. He has a very difficult job, and I want him to succeed. Mamdani is an excellent public speaker, and ran a clever campaign relying heavily on social media, video, as well as armies of canvassers.
According to Forbes, no fewer than 28 billionaires donated at least $100,000 to stop Mamdani, including Daniel Loeb, Barry Diller, Steve Wynn, Reed Hastings, and Alice Walton. Terminally online hedge fund manager Bill Ackman donated $1.75 million, while failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg donated $8.3 million, all to no avail.
But we built this creature. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we assembled it piece by piece - Medicare for the elderly, insurance through jobs, Medicaid for the poor, exchanges for everyone else. Each piece solved a specific problem. Each addition made sense in isolation.
Put them together and you get something alive. Something vast. Something no one would have designed from scratch - because we never agreed on what we were designing.
A beautiful essay on the limits of our powers
Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.
I’ve been really enjoying this series. It’s a bit like ‘Dave’, a cringe-inducing comedy with great writing. The episodes are short, and there’s virtually no politics.
37 Tools and Tactics to Protect Your Attention
We all could use some help.
After reading 10+ books about the science of attention, and performing experiments on myself more than a year, I developed a system for unlocking astonishing levels of focus. It requires full commitment but I believe sustained concentration is possible for anyone (even people with crippling ADHD). My biggest breakthroughs came from obscure and surprising sources, not mainstream books.
