For Leo XIV, those who feel humbled by the explosive progress of AI in traditional domains of human excellence misunderstand that it was never intelligence or ingenuity that gave human life meaning, but rather the transcendent orientation of the human person and his soul. A human person is constituted by his openness to divine love, and is vulnerable, imperfect, finite—not an agent sufficient unto himself, but a being always seeking wholeness through the ecstatic experience of communion with God. In the coming decades, others might struggle to justify the supremacy of man as AI comes to tower over the economic, intellectual, and creative abilities of humans. But Leo XIV and the Vatican have built their humanist claims on a spiritual foundation that does not feel threatened by technological progress.

Emphasis mine. Worth reading in full.

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When was the last time you reread your first book?

I’ve never reread my first. Very few authors reread their work. That’s what I’ve come to learn. I reread Bel Canto last year because I did a hand-annotated version of it, and it was fascinating. My takeaways: way too many adjectives. If I could describe something really brilliantly once, I went ahead and described it three times. And every time a beautiful woman walked in the room, I talked about how her hair smelled. It happened six times in the novel. Appalling.

I’m dead.

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Today’s social media platforms are no longer centered around sociable activities. Instead, most platforms offer us a broadcast medium and invite us to learn how to game the algorithms so that we too can create assets for the major corporations (Cotter, 2019). Since scale is valorized in this platform economy, we are encouraged to curate ourselves in pursuit of fame and attention. We can still, in theory, create content for our 15 friends, but it’s not clear that they will see what we post. To actually be seen, we must work it.

Of course, for many people, it’s not clear whether working it for the algorithm is worth it. For many people, the benefits of joking around with friends on social media doesn’t feel worth the potential privacy risks, reputational risks, and social risks. Scrolling is easier. Sending funny videos to friends via text message feels safer than reposting.

Because of these shifts, we now live in a world of parasocial media. Parasocial relationships are one-sided connections, where individuals keep tabs on the lives and movements of people – like celebrities – who do not know us and feel no pressure to reciprocate. In a parasocial world, people dedicate their attention and emotions to tracking the dramas of individuals who exist at a distance. Parasocial relationships can be emotionally intense, but they do not produce the kinds of social fabric that anchor us when we are struggling.

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Humans cannot make decisions as quickly as computers. This is our blessing, not a curse.

To deliberate slowly is to have time to uncover more than just the immediate answer to the known question but also to arrive at the question behind the question: the known unknowns and the looming presence, the gravitational pull of the unknown unknowns.

Emphasis mine.

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So last night Claude and I summoned my inner Dave Winer and built times.sippey.com, which fetches, parses, and renders the RSS feeds from the Times that I care about, in a format that works for me. Voilà, a quick way to scan the latest news from my favorite crossword provider.

If you’re there, hit ? for the keyboard shortcuts. Here’s the GitHub repo if you’re interested.

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It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end.

…

It’s a massive and impossible assignment to turn around the cruise ship that is David Foster Wallace’s legacy. Amy could simply recede, as many family members of famous artists do after a tragic and untimely end. She could keep the fullness of her brother’s life to herself and stay away from environments where her presence challenges the conventional perspective on him.

But she has a lot to say about David, and she wants people to hear it.

“I remember that when Kurt Cobain died, people started going back for hints and clues in his songs,” Amy says. “When people started to do that with David, I was infuriated and grossed out. His whole life wasn’t an allusion to ‘I will off myself when people least expect it.’”

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I saw people yelling into cellphones, crying into cellphones, taxi drivers whispering in Hindi into cellphones like they were running an OnlyFans ASMR account for fans in Delhi. Make note: It’s illegal to walk your dog without taking a phone call here. I’ve seen a thousand people kissing, a million people hugging. Someone did human diarrhea in front of us as we walked near Washington Square Park. Here be Robert Frank’s old home and studio around the corner from CBGB, which is now a shop selling expensive suits.

…and “got to see a taping of SNL and go to the after party” level.

The “celebrity infrastructure” is especially impressive. Time to go? Your handler escorts you through a series of security locks and down into the bowels of 30 Rock to a sea of Escalades in waiting, doors and trunks ajar. Everyone knows your name and issue forth lots of hellos and good jobs and all that, and then you’re whisked to the after-party, which doesn’t get going until after 2 a.m. Lorne Michaels just sits in his booth and when you leave at 4:30, he’s still just sitting there, flanked by John Hamm, people coming up and bowing like they’re visiting a popcorn-addicted pope. He clearly enjoys it. That this guy has done this for ~fifty years is a bit TV bananas. The scale of it, the slapping together of the show in (basically) two days, the dress rehearsal just hours before going live, the cutting of jokes in real time, the manic set production, the (mostly) nailing it all and then the mega gathering afterwards — there must have been three hundred people in the post-show restaurant — is, well, it’s something else. What a thing to have kept going. And you feel like this is the last of an era, the final scraps of what used to be (the norm?) for network TV. Goodbye whatever this was. Glad I got to see you once.

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I had a lot of not-as-good titles, but there’s no clarity about a title until the very end. Metals. It was like how I chose Big Sur. I knew what the songs were about and who I was going to be working with. Gonzales and Mocky being the kingpins, my brothers-inarms, old witnesses, and I knew the expansion was going to happen. “The Bad in Each Other” was going to be a war cry. I was talking to the guys and I was like, “This has to be like they’re coming – there’s an army bigger than you’ve ever seen that is about to come over the rise of the hill, and you’re in your fortress, and you’re playing, and someone’s going [makes a trumpet noise] because they’re harking to call their brothers out to fight for their lives. It has to be that sense of massive life or death.”

Emphasis mine. And that song, “The Bad in Each Other,” is a war cry.

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The car emits joy wherever it goes. People smile at you, wave, and give a tiny honk when they see you. EVERYONE wants to ask what it drives like and what you think of it whenever they see you in a parking lot.

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The Seven Sisters shined brighter than I’d ever seen them, Orion’s belt was diorentingly-skewed, but what struck me most was the depth of the universe in its utter darkness. I felt like I was seeing past everything I’d ever seen, and as if in the midst of a tech-filled pitch for a new TV, I was seeing levels of black so much richer and darker than ever before— Anish Kapoor by way of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

…and Canyonlands National Park:

The ensuing night sky was disappointing after the one I’d recently witnessed in Namibia – in the corner of my eye I could make out some of Moab’s light pollution and the stars themselves felt fainter, dustier. But what I will never forget was the silence: as great and powerful as Namibia’s endless starscape, the quiet I experienced at dusk here in Canyonlands was unlike any other. At a certain moment a bird flew about twenty feet over my head, and in the supreme stillness I could hear its wings pushing the air around it. I’d never heard that in my life.

…

These days so much of my spare time is spent hunched over a phone listening to the latest trivialities from food bloggers and stand-up comedians while electric blue light forces itself down my rods. I was so grateful to have two moments of absolute, majestic, universe-sweeping, NOTHING. Here a silence so pure it made my eardrums feel bionic, there a darkness so vast it made my brain melt.

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The horror of the Tonight Show is not found in any singular problem, but in the totality of its project: the systematic replacement of the real world with a brightly lit simulation of “niceness.” Fallon is the court jester of the Anthropocene, a figure who invites us to watch celebrities play parlor games on stage while the air outside the studio begins to smell of tear gas and smoke. In Fallon’s sterile loop of viral repetition comes the final victory of the commodity over human beings—a world where even our laughter is outsourced to the demands of the algorithm. You don’t even need jokes anymore. All you need is to say something that sounds like it could be a joke, and the hollow laughter will come. To watch Fallon is to stare at the face of a culture that has chosen the comfort of a rictus grin over the heavy, necessary terror of the truth.

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Among hyper-engaged politics enthusiasts, almost everyone bashes Obama. Progressives bash him for not being the left-wing hero of their dreams, moderate liberals bash him for not being successful enough at building the foundations for enduring Democratic electoral success, and conservatives basically view him as Satan.

…

But ultimately the rebuttal to the right-wing anti-Obama revisionism should be the same as the rebuttal to the left-wing version: Obama was a good President who did lots of good policies. That’s why the bulk of the American populace remembers Obama fondly. And that’s why commentators of all stripes should discard their fashionable anti-Obama hipsterism and acknowledge the strengths — and the actual weaknesses — of our country’s last truly popular leader.

The “fashionable anti-Obama hipsterism” is why I can’t stand so much of progressive media. I can’t wait for the second volume of his memoirs; I’m sure the chattering class will lose their fucking minds…

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Via Flowing Data, The Public Domain Review on “The Polish System,” a grid system for visualizing a century’s worth of history:

The Polish System — which almost anticipates Piet Mondrian’s abstract checkerboards and the wider modernist fascination with grid figures — coupled chronology to the map-making traditions of geography. In Jażwiński’s original chart, each main 10x10 box is a century and the rows separate decades. Within a century box, each individual square is a year, each color a nation (with shading for different monarchs or governments), and symbols can stand for marriages, wars, treaties, and other types of events. Should one become proficient with this system, they can peer down on the history of the world, summarized on a surface not much larger than a chessboard.

This reminded me (like a lot of things do) of a post of Paul Ford’s, Unscroll Into, about his timelines project:

About fifteen years ago I had this idea: Timelines on the World Wide Web! Hardly an original idea. But I got super into it. I thought I could somehow fix the world a little by making a great website that organized things chronologically.

I did a ton of thinking about time. I learned a lot about how, for example, the Postgres database handles dates. I learned about different dating systems and calendars, and how various disciplines date things back to the beginning of the universe, and how the Library of Congress dates things. Chronology is hard. Time doesn’t lend itself to becoming data, no matter what the stock market tells you. … Nothing is more satisfying than learning about calendrical systems or the calculation of Easter. You feel how much people were stumbling in the dark, timewise.

Emphasis mine.

PS – Oh, and back in 2004 I was mucking around with the intersection of one-line blog entries and iCal files. Here’s the blog post, and here’s the archive.org snapshot of sippey.com/timeline (I should move that over here). “Calendars are not only planning tools, they’re rememberance agents.”

24. Finish. All my coworkers told me I should come to the annual Turkey Trot. And I was like, “Really?” And they were like, “Do it for office morale.” And so I come to find out it’s a speed walking competition, which sort of threw me for a loop, because what counts as running versus walking? Something to do with knees, I think? Anyway, I won, but I had to trip a guy.

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A flag is never neutral: it carries meanings that shift with the viewer’s nationality, historical moment, and personal relationship to the nation it represents. As an emblem of the United States—its government, ideals, and people—the image is inevitably political. It is also a popular symbol that, much like the Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, can be recontextualized through repetition and display. By altering its palette, multiplying its form, or isolating its structural elements, Johns transforms the flag from a stable symbol into a site where cultural attitudes, anxieties, and projections surface.

Via greg.org.

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Sadly, Thee Parkside will close on July 5th, after 25 years at the bottom of Potrero Hill. (Not that Bottom, which is also closing.) If you have plans to stop by for some tater tots on the patio, let me know and I’ll gladly join you.