Winter 2025 Tiny Letter: Still no national politics!
Hi Friends,
I’m not ignoring the Katamari Damacy-style dumpster fire entirely, just holding off on comment for a bit longer. I know you’re soooo disappointed.
Oh, the phones
My friend Jhon, and yes, that is the correct spelling, but a story for another day, lived in Russia and parts of the former Soviet union for 10 odd years. He arrived shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
John has great stories about his experience, like the time he took a shortcut through a culvert, injured his foot, and when he complained that there was no signage warning of the danger, the response was “why would you be so stupid as to walk through there?“
He also related that once, in an elevator with some friends, he started jumping up and down. The elevator broke down and stopped, and they waited quite a while for a remedy. After a lengthy wait, the friends suggested they celebrate their release by toasting with vodka[1].
Around Thanksgiving, I spent about a week and a half in Piedmont/Oakland, California pet sitting for adorable dog named Lulo. Nearby is a Trader Joe’s and a Walgreens. I stopped at the latter for one single item. The line was long and slow moving, the store looks disheveled, and there is one employee when there should have been three.
I was overcharged for my one item, and I asked if that could be corrected. Meanwhile, there are eight anxious, bored people behind me in line, and the cashier can’t figure it out. I hear the exasperated sighs of shoppers, and when the cashier asks what I would like to do, I say, whatever will be the fastest for me and those behind me.
As I stand there waiting, shifting from hip to hip, I glance back at the line. Most people are eyeballs deep in their phones. And I think to myself, if this were a different era or a different place (Moscow, 1993?), people would be joking, flirting, making sarcastic comments, engaging in some small way with their environment and the people around them. You know, what Grandpa would call “making the best of the situation“.
There’s also a golden rule idea at work here. If I’m stuck in line and not completely miserable, I would very much appreciate someone revealing a little charm—a good joke, a flirtation, anything to mitigate the boredom.
Or put another way, this is how mom and dad met. Do I jest? No. Ask around. Not every tedious drugstore queue will lead to the next great love of your life. But one might.
For just a moment, I really wanted to address the line: “Yo! You know, everyone is doing their best here, but as long as you’re waiting, will it kill you to look up and talk to each other?”
I realize this observation is not new…but it’s still remarkable to me how checked out we’ve become.
[1] Stories recounted to the best of my recollection, which probably isn’t great.
On a related note (not the happiest read)
The internet is designed to stop us from ever switching it off. It moves at the speed of light, with constantly changing metrics, fueled by “‘ludic loops’ or repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback”—in other words, it works exactly like a Jackpot 6000 slot machine. (On a basic level, social media apps like Instagram operate like phone games. They’ve replaced classics like Snake or Candy Crush, except the game is your sense of self.)
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age | The Walrus
Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?
Matthew Broussard’s new comedy special
Paraphrasing the comedian, as he notices his girlfriend’s income on their tax returns:
“My girlfriend makes four times as much as I do, so that makes me a feminist. What kind, intersectional perhaps? More like ‘indentured’.”
I’m happy that one of my favorite comedians, Matthew Broussard, has a 45-minute special.
Boulder’s explicit traffic safety signs are the latest real-looking fakes on Colorado roads
Several of the signs were concentrated along 28th Street, a busy north-south thoroughfare that the city has identified as being particularly dangerous.
According to the article, this isn’t likely to influence driver behavior. But it still resonates with me. I don’t like to be angry at people every time I walk outside (it’s bad for mental health), but I see so much dangerous driving some days that it’s hard to help it. This is also why I could not live in Los Angeles.
Novel: Lake Success
Gary Shteyngart's New Novel 'Lake Success': Author Interview
Acclaimed author Gary Shteyngart researched his latest book, 'Lake Success,' by hanging out with "hedgies," traveling in the Deep South.
I’ve read several of Shteyngart’s novels. I think Super Sad True Love story remains my favorite, but none have disappointed. Lake Success is about a hedge fund manager who tries to escape his privileged but highly dysfunctional life by hopping a Greyhound for a long journey to reconnect with his college girlfriend.
Kyle Kinane on Fast/Furious movies
On a whim, @Elizabeth and I popped in to a comedy tent show at one of Madison’s many summer festivals (La Fete de Marquette?) Kyle Kinane performed a brilliant, what I call ‘post-woke’ set that turned into a decent core workout. I can’t recall much of it, but I know it was epically funny. His take on the incredibly cliche Fast/Furious movies is delightful. These are dreadful films that are nonetheless perfect when you’re lying around with the flu on a Monday afternoon, it’s 5°F outside, no one is going anywhere. Watch a Pontiac Fiero fly into space, why not?
“Rejection,” by Tony Tulathimutte, Reviewed: A Story Collection About People Who Just Can’t Hang | The New Yorker
Niche-porn addicts, self-proclaimed feminist allies, and nightmare optimization bros converge in Tony Tulathimutte’s “Rejection.”
Rejection, a novel by Tony Tulathimutte
Not until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers. It sucks for them, the inept, lonely, self-obsessed, self-righteous, self-imprisoned protagonists of these linked stories, but it’s a thrill for the sickos among us, the king being Tulathimutte, who gives loserdom its own rancid carnival.
Rejection is a phenomenally powerful and troubling book. We’ve all been rejected before, we’ve all been misread or misinterpreted. But Tulathimutte’s characters are the most extreme examples. They never “get it.” You feel for them. This isn’t an easy book to get through, but it’s rewarding in the richness of its metaphors, and the (difficult) depth of its characters.
New Yorker review: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/rejection-by-tony-tulathimutte-is-a-story-collection-about-people-who-just-cant-hang
Can 'colorblindness' lead to equality in America? | On Point
In his new book "The End of Race Politics," Coleman Hughes argues that closing racial divides in America means building a color-blind society.
The end of race politics [Ben-certified **** recommendation]
Coleman Hughes is one of my favorite social/political critics. He is curious, non-hyperbolic, and very pleasant to listen to. He is sometimes referred to as a Black conservative, but he’s really not. He’s more of a classical Liberal who is open to ideas. The End of Race Politics is a short, tightly written easy-to-read (in the sense that it’s not embellished with fancy words and acronyms to make it seem smart, it just is smart) book that I give my highest recommendation.
Hughes takes so-called neo-racists to task, arguing that Ibram Kendi, Robin D’Angelo and other popular academics and writers of the anti-racist camp are misrepresenting the positions of famous civil rights leaders like MLK, and pursuing remedies for past discrimination that won’t actually fix the problems we all should be trying to solve.
52 things I learned in 2024 | by Tom Whitwell | Dec, 2024 | Medium
This year I took a sabbatical, recorded a podcast with Freakonomics, designed and shipped a tiny modular synthesiser, and learned many learnings. Tom Whitwell designs open source music electronics as…
There is a fine line between perseverance and failure to accept reality. If you are going to err on one side or the other, stay with it too long rather than give up too soon."
— Tim Leatherman, Founder, Leatherman Tools
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Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done — it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.
— Animator & filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt on the difference between crate digging & streaming