Tumblr is downscaling after failing to ‘turn around’ the site
What a day for online media.
Turns out running a social network is expensive.
For those who don’t know, Jezebel was one of the many Gawker properties that survived after the OG Gawker was bankrupted in 2016.
I’ve had a long love/hate relationship with Gawker properties, and I won’t miss Jezebel. Catty, angry, mean-spirited, sarcastic and thoroughly millennial, Jezebel was known for pioneering a style and tone of journalism that’s taken over the internet. It has long since given up the populist David-versus-Goliath vibes that it once embraced 15 years ago, and now just throws shade for the sake of throwing shade.
I’ve watched with horror as this millennial tone — a creature of my own design — has taken over legacy media. The pursuit of objective truth, insomuch as we acknowledge “objective truth” is largely an aspirational pursuit (at least when it comes to human experience), went out the window. Activist journalism took over, and did so with a vengeance.
Activism is good and necessary, but I don’t want it near my meat-and-potatoes journalism. I want information, not to be told how I should think.
For that reason alone, I’m not going to miss Jezebel.
Flies in Urinals: The Value of Design Disruptions
I discovered my favorite example of disruptive design about 10 years ago, between flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. This was not a slick new airline logo that attracted new customers or an innovative wayfinding system that helped people find their flights. It was the realistic image of a small black fly inside the white urinals in the men’s bathroom. When I first saw the fly, I wondered why it stayed put. Then I looked to the empty urinal next to me and spotted the same fly. They all had them. In response to dirty bathrooms caused by men urinating on the floor, an airport maintenance worker suggested that they etch the image onto the urinals to give men something to aim at as they hurry to and from flights. According to NPR science correspondent Robert Krulwich, who gave a fuller account of the story, the man thought back to his time serving in the Dutch army during the 1960s, when red dots had been painted on the latrines in the barracks to improve cleanliness. Sure enough, spillage rates in the airport men’s room dropped an estimated 80 percent after the fly was introduced, leading to a much cleaner bathroom.
What’s the Problem with Disability Studies and the “Disability Rights” Movement?
Ramping up the rhetorical and social stakes leaves us incapable of calling bullshit bullshit. As is always the case, the rise of identity politics in disability discourse has created a state of constant emotionalism, threat, and fear. People are afraid to engage because they expect, correctly, that saying anything that contradicts the activist crowd will simply result in them being called bigots. This causes problems all over our debates, but appears most glaring when it comes to the stupidest issues. For example, despite dogged insistence to the contrary, it is not the case that there has been a sudden massive increase in the prevalence of late-onset Tourette’s syndrome among adolescent women with TikTok accounts. There has not been some sort of incredible change to the epidemiology of Tourette’s, and essentially no one really believes that there has been. Instead, a lot of young woman started pretending to have Tourette’s syndrome out of a desire to belong and to differentiate themselves from their peers in the marketplace of attention, and as they were rewarded in that marketplace others responded by doing the same thing. Similarly, there has not been a sudden increase in dissociative identity disorder among very-online adolescent women, given that DID is a controversial diagnosis and the disorder known for its extreme rarity. Pretending to have multiple personalities is fun and edgy so some teenagers have done it a lot recently.
Kids do dumb things and I’m not particularly mad about it. I do, however, think that if it goes unchecked this stuff could have serious negative consequences for how our culture views mental illness. What’s striking is how scared many people seem to be about calling this obvious bullshit out as obvious bullshit. When I talk about this, I press and probe and ask people if any of it passes the smell test. And just about nobody says “Yes, it’s credible that there are more authentic cases of dissociative identity disorder in my TikTok feed than there have been confirmed cases in medical history.” Nobody’s that dumb. But they’re unwilling to just say, yeah, that’s bullshit. They ummm and they uhhhh and they tiptoe around and they dance, and they do so because they’ve absorbed the attitude that criticizing anyone’s specific claims to disability means that you’re somehow callous towards disability in general. They also won’t call bullshit on bullshit because they’re afraid of being tarred with the “ableism” accusation. The whole thing makes it harder for us to think and talk intelligently about how to best accommodate disability in our society.
This resonates. In my masters program, this is all terrifically common. I’ve been afraid to call out bullshit when I see it precisely before I’m afraid of being called out as ‘callous.’ More worryingly, I’ve seen professors and administrators — at multiple universities — be cowed into silence, afraid the DEI office might come from their job should they speak out.
To say this is depressing is an understatement. Academia should be the one institution in American life immune from irrationality, from illiberalism. And yet it’s embraced them with abandon as students, now ‘customers’ in a capitalist model, have become empowered by social media.
The young, myself included, don’t always know best, and it hurts watching people that know better say nothing.
Across the Echo Chamber, a Quiet Conversation About War and Race
“Am I changed? Is she changed? Was there any point to this?” Ms. Minkin said she asked herself. “I don’t know that her overall opinion has changed, and I don’t know that my overall opinion has changed. But maybe if we’re all softening at the hard edges, that’s enough?”
Her voice made clear it was a question, not a conclusion.
A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence From the Pentagon
But it meant that a small number of troops had to fire tens of thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds per crew member, experts say, than any American artillery battery had fired at least since the Vietnam War.
Military guidelines say that firing all those rounds is safe. What happened to the crews suggests that those guidelines were wrong.
The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members’ bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all, the brain.
Strange, isn’t it, how the mysterious can suddenly become obvious.
Asian and Middle Eastern users tilt TikTok balance toward Palestinians
TikTok has denied the claims and said in a blog post they were based on “unsound analysis.” The data reviewed by Semafor suggests that the imbalance on the platform is largely outside the U.S. — and may skew heavily toward the Palestinian side because of the app’s popularity in Muslim countries and the fact that it is blocked in India.
The central promise of the internet was, after all, to be a great equalizer. I’m not saying TikTok’s (a Chinese company) algorithms are “fair” (however you define that), but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that with a global population that’s largely online, America and our interests aren’t always going to be the most popular.
Democratization is great.
Until it’s not.
It’s Possible to Oppose Bias Against Both Jews and Muslims
Republicans insist Biden and his party are complicit in antisemitism. The main reason they give is that the Democrats also oppose bigotry against Muslims and Arabs.
Given that I am accusing the Republicans of failing to grasp a principle a literal child could easily understand, you may be justifiably suspicious I am either making it up or picking on one or two random outliers. So I am going to supply several examples, all taken from published journalism, not random social-media posts.
Trump Leads Biden in Nearly Every Battleground State, New Poll Finds
The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.
Being a citizen of this country feels like standing on the rails, watching a train barrel down the track right at you. You want to move, but none of your limbs seem to agree on what to do.
And I’m becoming angry.
It’s hard not to be angriest at the people most like you, which is why the Left seems to be eating itself alive. It hurts to watch people you know to be kind, caring, and compassionate succumb to the hate, the vitriol, the judgment, the division that’s long polluted the Right.
And it’s hard not to take their succumbing as a betrayal. They so easily gave up on all the shit they claimed to believe in, which only fuels my rage. I’ve known for a long time that the Right was only about power, never about morality or religion or “family values.” But the Left, too?
But watching the hatred consume Liberals has been agonizing, though not unrelatable. I get it — I really do. It’s so delicious, so righteous to hate the people that hate you. I’m guilty of this very thing.
But it’s easy. And unoriginal. And only makes a bigger mess of things.
The Resilience of Republican Christianism
The idea that members of the religious right form an “infinitely diverse and contradictory group” and were in no way “hyperpartisan” is now clearly absurd. Christianism, in fact, turned out to be the central pillar of Trump’s success, with white evangelicals giving unprecedented and near-universal support — 84 percent — to a shameless, disgusting pagan, because and only because he swore to smite their enemies.
Andrew Sullivan, once again seeing through the bullshit.
The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preachers. And Christianism is to the American right what critical theory is to the American left: a reductionist, totalizing creed that “others” half the country, and deeply misreads the genius of the American project.
The submission to (male) authority is often integral to fundamentalism, which is why it isn’t actually surprising that self-professed Christians came to support a man who cultivates greed, gluttony, pride, lust, envy, sloth and anger more assiduously than Satan. Trump was an authority figure, period. He was a patriarch. He was the patriarch of their tribe. And he was in power, which meant that God put him there. After which nothing needs to be said. So of course if the patriarch says the election is rigged, you believe him.
What I do know is that, unchecked, this kind of fundamentalism is a recipe not for civil peace but for civil conflict. It hasn’t gone away, even if its actual policy prescriptions are unpopular, even if it represents only a fraction of Americans, as wokeness does. It’s a mindset, a worldview, as deep in the human psyche as the racial tribalism now endemic on the left. It controls one of our two major parties. And in so far as it has assigned all decisions to one man, Donald Trump, it is capable of supporting the overturning of an election — or anything else, for that matter, that the patriarch wants.
What happens when there aren’t enough Jews to lynch?
Hundreds of people stormed the airport to greet that flight—of 45 passengers, 15 were Israeli, many of them children. “Allahu Akbar,” they shout in videos that have emerged online, some men waving Palestinian flags. On the tarmac, they attack an airport employee, who desperately explains: “There are no passengers here anymore,” and then exclaims, “I am Muslim!” Some of the rioters demanded to examine the passports of arriving passengers, seemingly trying to identify those who were Israeli, and others searched cars as they were leaving. Another video emerged of two young boys at the airport, proudly declaring that they came to “kill Jews” with knives.
According to the local health ministry, more than 20 people were injured in the skirmishes. One video showed a pilot telling the passengers over the intercom to “please stay seated and don’t try to open the plane’s door. There is an angry mob outside.”
This is horrifying.
I’m ashamed to admit I still fall for the “I cant believe this is happening now” line of thinking. Yet I cannot believe this shit is still happening.
The danger in not being able to imagine it happening is that it then happens. October 7th is evidence of that. How, then, to demand people imagine — or even fear — the worst, so that they might remain vigilant?
At UK Summit, Global Leaders Warn AI Could Cause ‘Catastrophic’ Harm
On Wednesday morning, his government released a document called “The Bletchley Declaration,” signed by representatives from the 28 countries attending the event, including the U.S. and China, which warned of the dangers posed by the most advanced “frontier” A.I. systems. “There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these A.I. models,” the declaration said.
“Many risks arising from A.I. are inherently international in nature, and so are best addressed through international cooperation. We resolve to work together in an inclusive manner to ensure human-centric, trustworthy and responsible A.I.”
The document fell short, however, of setting specific policy goals. A second meeting is scheduled to be held in six months in South Korea and a third in France in a year.
Governments have scrambled to address the risks posed by the fast-evolving technology since last year’s release of ChatGPT, a humanlike chatbot that demonstrated how the latest models are advancing in powerful and unpredictable ways.
There must be a word, probably German or Yiddish, for the feeling of your curiosity spooling up…
I feel adventure a-comin’.
Frontline: From Jesus to Christ
I’ve long been interested in beginnings of things, be it a river, a time period, or a belief system. The Middle East has all three in spades. I’m drawn to that region not as a believer, but as someone compelled to understand the beginnings of a moral framework of my culture.
Why did Judaism and Christianity spring from this part of the world? What was/is so compelling about these stories?
Once we understand the source, it becomes infinitely more compelling to look at the current manifestations of these beliefs in my own time, culture, and country. Having lived in the Middle East, it becomes apparent that American Christianity is a bastardization — a cheap facsimile — of the religion as it was. Yet here I am, living in a culture full of people that believe in the watered-down version of those stories. How on earth Christians can be such rabid capitalists, I’ll never understand, but watching people twist their beliefs into knots to justify their actions and desires — a behavior not exclusive to Christians…or the religious — is a favorite pastime.
Lest I sound judgmental (because I am, to be clear), I’m guilty of these moral contortions, too. It’s human nature to do so, but the least we could do is own up to our moral hypocrisies. But that is not a hallmark of religion.
Human nature is endlessly fascinating, at least from a distance. Get too close and you risk your life, as evidenced by this documentary.
When after the brutal Hamas attacks, many organizations on North American campuses either refused to condemn Hamas, or minimized or justified the attacks—to say that I was “triggered” is a gross understatement.
Awful as it sounds, before I knew it, I started dividing people into “those I can trust” and “those I can’t.” I’ve become my parents. Some friends from abroad have reached out, on email and social media, expressing concerns or sympathy. Those, I know, are people I can trust.
The ones who didn’t? I don’t know. In my reasonable mind, I know that people are busy, or simply so (understandably) tired of the media’s obsession with the Israel-Palestine conflict that perhaps they can’t appreciate the significance of what happened. But I’m not in my reasonable mind anymore. I’m in an animallike self-preservation mode, and this is my visceral reaction.
A Mac event is the perfect time for Apple to show off its peripheral vision
On the functional side, Apple either needs to improve or replace its Bluetooth support. My Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad frequently disconnect from my Mac mini, which is all of about eighteen inches away, and the keyboard in particular is egregious in terms of the amount of time it takes for typed characters to show up on screen. This certainly seems like a place that Apple could use its vaunted engineering prowess to offer something that’s a little extra in much the same way that it does with AirPods. Not only would a custom wireless chip potentially allow for more robust and reliable connections, but it could also simplify switching peripherals between devices, a process that Bluetooth makes fairly painful.
My wish is for a backlit TouchID keyboard. 🤞🏻
Marina Abramovic Thinks the Pain of Love Is Hell on Earth
…it feels strange to be happy? Yes! We are living in the strangest period of human history. We are ending this year with two wars: in Ukraine and Israel. Then there are natural disasters. Things are not getting better. We have to understand that the only reality we have is living every day as if it’s the last. Which is also the philosophy of performance: to be in the moment. How important are we? We are dust. I was also thinking how interesting it is that in war, when everybody was making art that reflected what happened, Henri Matisse was painting flowers. I finally understand that. The way to fight is not to reflect horror and put your spirit down. It’s to create something with beauty that gives you hope.
You don’t think any good art comes from happiness? Louis Armstrong or Stevie Wonder — Ah! Music is a whole different issue because singing, in general, you have to sing from your heart and open your heart. I’m talking about visual art. I’m talking about literature. Especially writers. You think Beckett is happy? You think Kafka is happy? Do you think Dostoyevsky is happy? Is Proust happy?
“Especially writers.”
Marina, more than any other artist aside from Prince or Daniel Quinn, has been a central, singular inspiration. Her work has changed my life. The Artist is Present found me at just the right time, and it’s not an understatement to say that her work helped me persist at a time when I felt lost and alone, not far from suicide.
Her sentiments on writing echo something you hear often, especially in the halls of a creative writing MFA, from which I’m currently on a, well, let’s call it a ‘sabbatical.’ Pointedly, pain is art.
I’ve long suspected this to be true, and it once filled me with insecurity. I’m no stranger to pain, sure, but in our current moment, when trauma is traded as cultural currency, I have no interest in doing so.
What a funny thing to have been insecure about, eh? Not having enough trauma? It must be as obnoxious to read that sentence as it feels to write it.
I can’t say I’m still insecure about this, but I’ve largely given up on any dream of writing in hopes of getting paid to do so. Or in hopes of getting much validation at all.
Funny — in my MFA, a person who enjoys writing for the sake of writing is…rare. You probably wouldn’t be shocked at how often someone utters “I’m going to start a Substack,” then proceeds to spill five thousand words on the why of it. It’s all a bit much, a little through-the-looking-glass.
This is why, it seems, that I feel most at home here. I’ve received precious little feedback about my website. After deciding to no longer write anonymously (about six months ago), I’ve sent this page to at least a hundred people. You know how often someone I know has made a comment about something I’ve written?
Twice.
I may as well be screaming into the void. I can’t be accused of selling out or writing for attention. After all, I can’t monetize here (at least not as far as I’m aware).
And it’s precisely for this reason that I’m more excited about writing than I have been in years.
Feist and Hundreds of Choir Members Sing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ in Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor
Feist. Prince. Sinéad. Three of my favorite artists.
In death, I hope Sinéad found peace, and in that way, it doesn’t hurt.
But the loss of Prince still moves me to tears, almost eight years later.
Eight years.
2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory
We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Is it any wonder so many younger people are overwhelmed by anxiety? We have to live with this.
On a good day, my anxiety about the climate (and the apathy of humans to the impending changes) is a low hum.
On a bad day, it makes my ears ring. I can barely get out of bed. I’m paralyzed by it, unsure of where to direct my anger. Often, my ire turns (unfairly or not) to people who just won’t stop having kids, followed by people that never make any efforts to want less — the only antidote to consumer capitalism. No amount of innovation will innovate our way out of the disaster that comes of always wanting ever more stuff.
Want less.
Unfortunately, most people I know can’t seem to find a way to want less. Family. Friends. Strangers. It’s everyone. The whole world feels as through its gone fucking mad, and the only way I remain a half-decent person is to spend much of my time far away from other people.
So we’re fucked.
This is not news.
Geolocating Hamas-Led Attacks on Israeli Civilians
Since the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 that killed hundreds of civilians, Telegram has been a key platform for the distribution of footage of the events. Many videos that emerged can provide insight into the massacres.
Bellingcat analysed footage from the sites of two attacks at kibbutzim — one at Kerem Shalom and one at Sufa — filmed by militants to verify the footage and details of the attack.
In my little corner of investigative journalism, Bellingcat is the best-of-the-best of digital forensic analysis. I’ve learned much of what I know from them.
The Aftermath of a Massacre Is Always the Time to Push for Gun Legislation
This “now is not the time” argument gets trotted out by Republicans after each and every gun massacre. Right after their tweets offering “thoughts and prayers”. Bullshit. The aftermath of a massacre is the time to demand sane gun control measures. That’s when the issue is clarified. Would Republicans argue that October 8 was “not the right time” for Israel to discuss Hamas terrorism? Was September 12, 2001 “not the right time” to discuss Al-Qaeda? Should FDR have delivered an address to the nation on December 8, 1941, advising that we relax, let cooler heads prevail, because the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor “was not the time” to consider retaliating?
A friend recently asked about my media diet. What are the ten-ish sources of news that I go to consistently (and obsessively)?
I’ll share them here.
- Daring Fireball & The Talk Show
- My various Substacks
- The Verge
- Dithering
- Hacker News
- The Dishcast
- Places Journal
- Tablet Magazine
- The Gray Lady, as is probably obvious
- New York Post
- New York Magazine, completing the trifecta
- Social Science Research Network
- High Country News
At the time of his suicide I would have thought that, though he once attained a level of literary celebrity that was rare then and hard to imagine now, he would in short order slip gracefully into the realm of respected but little-remembered dead writers. Ah, but he has his champions: people who want everyone to know they hate him.
Matter 1.2 brings robot vacuums, fridges, smoke alarms, and more
The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), the organization behind Matter, released the Matter 1.2 specification this week, a year after launching Matter 1.0, following through on its promise to release two updates a year. Now, appliance manufacturers can add support for Matter to their devices, and ecosystems such as Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings can start supporting the new device types.
Big news in my little world.
Detroit synagogue president Samantha Woll found fatally stabbed outside home
and
6-Year-Old Boy Dead in Anti-Muslim Attack Near Chicago, Police Say
This is unacceptable. What the fuck is wrong with people.