The day of the attack in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza to “get out now” to avoid being hit in the retaliatory strikes against Hamas. But there is nowhere to go. Since Hamas took over the territory by force in 2007, Israel has almost completely banned Palestinians from leaving Gaza through Israel or the Mediterranean Sea. On Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, the Rafah gate — the lone entry point into the Sinai — has been shut down by Cairo, fearing a mass exodus into its territory. Negotiations were underway this week between Israel and Egypt to establish a safe corridor to bring in supplies and get foreign nationals out, but for now the Egyptian president said on Thursday that the residents in Gaza must “stay steadfast and remain on their land.” Israeli officials have also retracted Netanyahu’s earlier advice to “get out,” with an Israeli Defense Forces spokesman acknowledging on Tuesday that there is, in fact, no way out.
The flatness of log gives you the power to make it your own in the grade. The other huge advantage of log is that it is known, meaning it’s possible to convert it to and from various color spaces accurately.
For one night’s opener, Usher wore a white three-piece suit: slacks and a tailored shirt with a vest. He held a drink of dark liquor — the main stage took on the ambience of a cabaret. Like Frank Sinatra, that other Vegas icon, Usher sang the hits. A fuchsia-clad dancer bent over at the waist. Usher placed his drink on top of her behind. The gesture was flirtatious and naughty without seeming rakish. The crowd erupted. His moves were graceful and fiery, infused with the influence of Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Ben Vereen, Bob Fosse and James Brown — a kind of liquid movement that rivals the notes he sings.
R.&B. is nothing if not a marriage of opposing energies. A dance between hard and soft. Real life versus fantasy; vulnerability and force; Holy Ghost and heaving flesh. A thin line between love and hate. Traditional R.&B. men were complicated, and they weren’t always truthful about it. Yet the music’s expansiveness and range — topics like climate change, war and political disappointment were all fair game — gave us a pathway toward understanding the conditions of the day. Some contemporary R.&B. men ceded ground to hip-hop in storytelling about the world and in relaying broad truths. Similarly, Usher exists at the threshold of contradictory ideas. His persona gleams with sheen and shine, but he is often tightly coiled, a bundle of nerves underneath glistening skin.
“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews.
We are walking in the footsteps of previous generations of modernizing, secular, intellectual Arabs. They too wanted nothing to do with their native lands, which they saw as having none of the power, prestige, or respect they craved. In their egotism and intellectual narcissism, they didn’t want to belong to “backward” societies. So they sought in foreign, mostly Western ideologies a refuge and a hiding place from backwardness. They joined the progressive secular movements and trendy revolutions because they offered an escape hatch from the drudgery of slow, marginal, local change. They became revolutionaries because they were afraid and insecure. Like Edward Said, they were anti-Zionist and anti-American “humanists” because they did not want to be, or could not be, “Arabs.” Their obvious cultural chauvinism was simply an urge to self-annihilate, to disappear into universalism. Their lives were a hopeless quest to shed their own skin.
While it’s too early to judge the long-term consequences of Saturday’s traumatic events—and there is no doubt they will reverberate for decades to come—what is becoming clear is that many Israelis are experiencing a new feeling, one we have never known before, and more importantly, that we were never supposed to know: that of victimhood. And unlike Jews outside Israel, that feeling is now compounded and worsened by the fear that we have become not merely victims, but victims in our own land.
On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
…
What would this death cult do if it could do anything? We have glimpsed that over the past 72 hours. We know what they are capable of, and we know that they have many defenders here at home. Those who imagine themselves fomenting the long-awaited revolution. Those who know that the beloved academic language of decolonization means nothing if you’re unwilling to see it enacted in flesh, and especially blood.
This is a fascinating time to be watching the politics of academia.
The question of what constitutes humanity is at the heart of Constantino’s attack and the tensions in Portland, a city buckling under the weight of its ostensible benevolence. Few U.S. cities have offered as fertile an environment for drug addiction and homelessness to take root, via hands-off policies and the idea that a moral society is a tolerant society – all of which might have stood a fighting chance, had the riots and violence of 2020 not kneecapped a city already struggling under COVID.
I voted, in 2020, for Measure 110, the ballot measure decriminalizing the possession of many controlled substances, i.e. drugs, below a certain amount. When I did, I was thinking of my experience with drugs like mushrooms, molly, marijuana, all of which I’ve used and enjoyed. (And not just recreationally — having suffered in the past from severe, debilitating, and suicidal Depression, these drugs have helped me immeasurably. It’s not an understatement to say I owe them my life.)
But slowly, over the last few years, I’ve come to regret my vote. I did not understand the potency of these new synthetic drugs like fentanyl, sent in from China via Mexico.
I voted as I did in hopes that people with mental illness would not be jailed. I still feel this way. But I recognize it’s not compassionate to leave people on the streets either, left in the grip their addiction.
To leave someone to their addictions is not compassion. It is at times necessary, but it is not love.
You are about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.
Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such an ugly, barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud. Turn on cable news and you can hear some of them right now.
I like Bari Weiss. I admire her integrity, her commitment to journalistic ethics, and the compassion and curiosity she shows interviewees and guests. (Strangely, nothing enrages my more liberal friends than saying I admire Bari Weiss - a fellow liberal.)
I was listening to the recent episode of her podcast with Michael Oren and I found some of their language to be…unsettling. One part in particular, when they mention a “clash of civilizations,” and Michael says no, this is not a clash of civilizations, this is a clash between civilization and barbarism.
This. This is precisely why I can’t get onboard with much of the rhetoric surrounding the conflict. Do I condone the attacks on Israel? Absolutely not. But how on earth can anyone refer to their own culture (in this case, Israel) as “civilized” when they let such suffering happen just over the border in Palestine?
While I can’t begin to feel it myself, I understand the anger Israelis must feel. Many Palestinians, including Hamas, the “government” of Gaza, want to wipe Israel off the map. That’s a bit different than “kill all the Jews,” but it’s not an arbitrary distinction. I have Palestinian friends that feel as though their homes were stolen from them when the State of Israel was formed in 1948. I feel for them. I also have Israeli friends that have profound and lasting generational trauma from the Holocaust and so many other despicable, horrific attacks on Jewish people over the last, well, if we’re honest, many thousands of years. I feel for them, too.
But a civilization as I define it is a relentless, dogged pursuit of peace, of justice, of fairness, of civility. The arrogance of throwing a rave on the border of the Gaza Strip? To literally throw a party just over the fence from Gaza? Sorry, but the optics of that are terrible. Talk about arrogance…
Civilization is the pursuit of justice for all, not just those that think or believe as we do. Trust me, I get how endlessly frustrating-bordering-on-enraging it is to always try to be fair to those that don’t themselves practice fairness. (I, a gay man, must accept the strangeness of both caring for the Palestinian people…and recognizing that many among them would want me dead.) But there is no other option.
This commitment to principle in the face of an irreconcilable reality? This is the bedrock foundation of a civilization.
Barbarism is not just the slaughter of innocents, but allowing innocent people to suffer because of your own cultural indifference. And I say this as an American. The suffering that takes place around the world because of my own culture’s indifference is staggering.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out that indifference wherever and whenever we see it. Israel is a bastion of many good things in the world. But like America, should they allow their neighbors to suffer, no matter how much those neighbors might hate Israel? If so, is Israel — are we — civilized?
I arrive at this conclusion by looking at the current situation and applying three basic principles:
Large-scale ethnic cleansing will be minimized.
Israelis and Palestinians will not want to share a state.
Non-contiguous states aren’t viable.
A good place to start.
Thus, a two-state solution is really off the table, and always has been — not because of Israel’s actions or Palestinian irredentism, but simply because it’s not practically possible for Gaza and the West Bank to stay united.
This can’t be overstated.
I have many thoughts and many more feelings on the events of the last two days. I’ve long been interested in the Middle East and in Israel-Palestine in particular. I have friends on both sides of that border.
But it hardly seems worthwhile to wade into the morass at the moment. For now, here’s a photo I took a few years back — a view of the Gaza-Israel border.
From 1950 to 1972, all liquid waste streams generated at TAN were introduced directly into the basalt aquifer (Snake River Plain Aquifer), approximately 200–300 feet below ground surface, through injection wells. Waste streams included low-level radioactive wastewater, industrial wastewater (including organic liquids), and sanitary sewage. Historical records provide little information on the types and volumes of organic wastes injected into the groundwater; estimates of total TCE injection range from 350 to 35,000 gallons. The direct result of these injection activities was a two-mile trichloroethene (TCE, C2HCl3) plume at concentrations >20,000 µg/L.
Giving it to the shareholder means that the company says “It belongs to you, I don’t know what to do with it on your behalf, so here, you figure out what to do with it.” The shareholder can then make an allocation decision that suits their sense of what is valuable or useful. The return is a deferral of decision to the owner rather than their agent.
When it was completed in Lower Manhattan in 1974, 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, was intended as the world’s largest facility for connecting long-distance telephone calls. 1 Standing 532 feet — roughly equivalent to a 45-story building — it’s a mugshot for Brutalism, windowless and nearly featureless. Its only apertures are a series of ventilation hoods meant to hide microwave-satellite arrays, which communicate with ground-based relay stations and satellites in space.
Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
The final draft of the show isn’t the script. It’s the version we air. My fellow writers and I always wrote and rewrote scripts with the knowledge that we could in safety try something a little more grayed-out and subtle, or a little odder, or a little more vivid and “red,” as Lucy Prebble would say in the room; knowing that if the execution on celluloid left something too opaque or too vivid we had a safety net. That we could dance closer to the precipice with the assurance that the final, final edit was yet to come. It’s a great freedom. Without the power American TV gives a showrunner, the temptation can be to write in a closed-off, invulnerable way with every scene sleek and sealed — less prone to misexecution or misinterpretation. And that’s a shame. Because I do think the cracks are where the light gets in — the bits of a show that elbow out at odd angles, the bones that stick in your throat.
What I always hoped for in the show was that sense of something you couldn’t look away from. Episodes that both demand the viewers’ full attention and were worthy of it. And that quality comes from the careful plotting in the room, and then careful writing and rewriting. But it also comes from what we choose to leave out. Because there’s a paradox about the core of a TV show, especially one that lives somewhere in the world of the satirical. If you don’t have anything you want to say, there’s a danger the show will never live. But at the same time, if you do have something to say, there’s a danger that if you ever state it, it will kill the whole endeavor, so it lies flat and dead, like a propaganda leaflet dropped in the street. What you have to do is trust that if you set things up right and hold the tone and create the universe correctly, you can step back from the mechanism, let it run, and say, as in Walter Benjamin’s useful but disingenuous declaration: “I have nothing to say, only things to show.”
An ancillary benefit of keeping yourself out of the show is that what you thought you were transmitting is not necessarily what people will receive. And that’s a good thing. People are hungry, especially right now perhaps, for things that are other than what they seem — characters and situations that are allowed to be multiple. We all have an impulse to want to pull the mask off the baddie and have something simple revealed — base truths and clear explanations. But that first reducing, simplifying impulse will likely never wholly satisfy because it offends our deep sense of what the world is really like.
Taking a hard look at the world as it is, that would be my definition of satire, I think. This might be a less lofty ambition than an older version where satire functioned — or was imagined to function — in a sort of dialectic relationship with power. The idea that things happened in the public-political arena, and were then critiqued and mocked, and that interaction provided a release valve or even pointed in the direction of an alternative — I’m not sure that was ever how it actually worked. But even the idea of that relationship feels falsely soothing now that the powerful and the satirists are all seeking attention in the same ring of the circus. Which doesn’t mean that the annual article, “Is satire dead?” is ever going to be more fresh. That article will forever be boring and wrong. But it does mean the satirical approach needs to come in at a different angle. It probably always does, every generation. Comforting the afflicted feels relatively straightforward. But afflicting the comforted? Maybe it will go better if you avoid announcing your intention too clearly at the door.
iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10 are the most stable point-zero releases I’ve ever seen from Apple.
Very impressive. I have no qualms encouraging everyone to update.
The Vision Pro is Apple’s initial foray into spatial computing. But Vision Pro is not Apple’s first product in the world of augmented reality: AirPods Pro (and to a lesser degree, at the moment, AirPods Max) are. We humans are visual creatures and we naturally tend to think of augmented reality as a primarily visual experience, but AirPods Pro offer profoundly enjoyable and useful augmentation of the aural world around you. Starting today, Adaptive Audio takes that to another level.
Adaptive Audio is only available for the AirPods Pro 2, which means I’m only going to be more irritated if I ever again find myself wearing my old first-generation AirPods Pro out of necessity. At this point AirPods Pro 2 are as much better than the original AirPods Pro as the original AirPods Pro seemed from the original non-pro AirPods. They’re far more than wireless earbuds — they’re clever, powerful, delightful computers you put in your ears.
He’s right. I’ve used the AirPods Pro 2 for the last year and they are incredible little computers. For years, I only used regular AirPods, insisting that for my lifestyle, I don’t want anything that slides into my ears and seals — I need to be able to hear what’s around me.
But these second-gen AirPods do exactly that, but they make it optional. I can hear what’s around me when I want to, but I can also enable noise canceling and tune it all out. Most often, I find myself in a noisy place and just sliding them in. I don’t listen to anything, I just enable noise canceling. It’s helped my focus tremendously.
The new Adaptive Audio feature in iOS 17 is scary good. Though it’s only been a day, I no longer find myself toggling between transparency and noise cancellation — the AirPods do it themselves.
Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too.
That line makes my skin crawl.
I am not quiet about my antinatalist beliefs. More than any other belief I hold, these have alienated me from people that either a) have children, b) want children, or c) have never questioned why someone would want fewer people in the world.
Thing is, my antinatalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I don’t wish for the human race to go extinct, which means I’m not against the entire concept of having children. I’m against having children in the context of our current climate, of our civilization, and in large part because I know people will never stop breeding (though this article seems to suggest otherwise). My antinatalism is both contextual and aspirational.
I’m not stupid. I get why this triggers people that have children or want them, but we as a culture have forgotten how to get along with people that hold different beliefs than our own. (I, a liberal, am friends with many conservatives — something my liberal cohort seem to be having a harder and harder time tolerating. Strangely, my conservative friends, though none of them are diehard Trumpsters, don’t seem to have the same hang-ups… grist for a later mill.) Plainly: it’s impossible to be in your late 30s and not have friends that have children.
But my friends that want children, and specifically want their own biological children… That still triggers much of my self-righteous ire. Why — why?! — when we know there are so many children in the foster/adoption systems that are already born, why do people insist on having their own? It’s the same feelings triggered by people who only adopt puppies and kittens. I have experience managing animal shelters — it’s always the older animals that get left behind in kennels and cages. Consequently, those are the animals I love. I am, as you can imagine, pro-adoption.
An argument I often hear from the opposing side is this: I want something, be it a child or a dog, that I can shape and mold. I want the experience of having the utmost control over this creature. Hell, my parents did that when they had me, and they did so very intentionally, perhaps to the detriment of some of their other relationships. I sympathize with this urge. I too would love the experience of having a creature I can shape completely, passing along the best qualities that were passed down to me. I adopted my current dog when she was just shy of two — the youngest animal I’ve yet had — and it’s been a delight to see her open up to the world, and I wince every time I pat her on the head or I introduce her to a tall man — each triggering a reaction born of abuse she suffered before I had her. Do I wish I could spare her those experiences? Absolutely.
But ultimately, I derive joy from knowing that she’s seen some shit and that only makes us luckier to be in each other’s lives. I put down a dog a few months ago — he was an old man when I adopted him, neglected and full of cancer — but gosh, the appreciation he had for our time together was undeniable, an appreciation born of relational experience. He knew love because he knew the absence of it.
That is the foundation of my antinatalism. I’m against the birthing of new people until the ones that are already here can have a chance to be loved. We all deserve it.
In my opinion, the strongest reason for any random person to start a blog is that you will have more awesome friendships—both in the sense that you will meet new awesome people as a result of your blog, but also in the sense that writing will cause you to have more interesting ideas, which will make your existing friendships more awesome because you’ll have better stuff to talk about.
Most other important things in life, like job opportunities and romantic relationships, are downstream of the quality of your friends, so this is pretty great.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been writing on the internet for much of my adult life, here and there, anonymously and, at least recently, not. The power of the internet is in finding connection, and I’ve made friends or acquaintances via my online presence that make my life far more rewarding. In “real life,” I know at most one person that’s interested in iOS app development, another one person that might appreciate (yet doesn’t love) Star Wars action figures, and maybe two or three that are interested in technology in general. “Real life” is bounded far more by geography and circumstance, but online, people with similar interests flock to each other like moths to a flame.
Thing is, none of this has happened on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok… These companies that tout their “we’re all about connecting people” bonafides are advertising companies and nothing more. Don’t be fooled. The only site that has a semblance of camaraderie (in my experience) is Reddit, and even that has started to undergo some unpleasant changes.
The real fun lies in the small web. What started back on uJournal and LiveJournal back in the late 90s and early 2000s led me here to Micro.Blog twenty years later. It’s the joy of hunting for great writing, for righteous opinions, for scathing dissents, for unique voices, all unfiltered by the cruft of advertising. It’s the human internet.
I am, as ever, torn. I both love my corner of the internet and hate The Internet. But I have to remember: I’m an anomaly. I pay for my search engine so I’m able to tweak my personal search algorithm. How many people do you know pay for a search engine? How many people spend a good deal each year on bespoke software for their iPhones and Macs so that they might use them to their fullest potential? My internet is not most people’s internet, and that’s easy to forget.
But I am, at heart, in love with my internet. I am so immeasurably grateful for the opportunity to have connected with so many people over the years. After all, what else is there?
MAGA is not interested in building anything, in winning a real majority, in constructing an actual future rather than lamenting an invented past. Everything is performative and destructive. It’s all driven by who they are against rather than what they are for. As a Republican Senator told Romney as he settled in, their view is that the first consideration in voting on any bill should always be: “Will this help me win re-election?”
There’s no definitive moment in the collapse of a republic, but that quote comes close. If all you care about is your own grip on power, regard the opposing party as ipso facto illegitimate, and give zero fucks for the system as a whole, a liberal democracy has effectively ceased to exist. A single major party, captured by radicals and nihilists, can do that.
The Ace Theater boomed with laughter, a thousand bodies convulsing right back at him, blonde beach waves straight from the dry bar bouncing with mirth. That energy hit the stage. He kept shaking. This was not the sound of “offense,” but its opposite, the release of people hearing something they had long wanted to say, reassuring themselves that they are not culpable for the misery they Lyft beyond.
On Tuesday, Apple revealed yet another reason why we might want to have our Apple devices with us at all times: Roadside Assistance. The service, which is compatible with the iPhone 14 and later, lets you contact AAA via satellite in case your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.
In the West, I use location sharing via satellite connectivity on my iPhone 14 constantly, but visiting family in the Midwest I don’t (and can’t) use it at all. It’s a testament to cell carriers that they’ve blanketed much of the eastern half of the United States with cellular connectivity.
When people attack a teaching by criticizing the behavior of the messenger, they fail to distinguish between truth and authority. Truth does not depend on the person preaching it because truth is objective. If objective truths did not exist, then any discussion on moral codes is meaningless because two persons could have opposing views on the acceptability of murder and both would be correct from their subjective standpoint. Murder being right and wrong at the same time is absurd. Thus, though humans may err in interpreting truth, truth itself is objective and outside of humans.
I’ve always been a touch uneasy with the charge of hypocrisy — both leveling it and having it leveled at me. It’s a bit too…easy. Online, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free deflection, a charge you can throw at someone to put them back on their heel and thus distract from your own inevitable failings.
I found this article particularly interesting given it’s a Catholic publication and, well, need I say any more? But in our cultural slide toward relativism, I find myself with strange bedfellows yet again.
On the photography front there were two major new features announced Tuesday. The first is a new generation of portrait photography, where Portrait mode can be applied to an image after it was shot as a regular still image. I’ve wanted this feature ever since Portrait mode debuted. While capturing, you don’t have to do a damn thing. You just frame your photo and hit the shutter. No switching modes. But on-device machine learning will decide on the spot whether Portrait mode would improve the image (which will only happen automatically if the subject is a person, dog, or cat), but you can enable it, disable it, and adjust it to your heart’s content in post.
The second is the iPhone 15 Pro models’ ability to capture spatial video. I had speculated over the summer that it would be cool if Apple could launch this for iPhones this year, and they did it. Clearly the optimal way to watch spatial video will be with a Vision headset, but the best way to capture them — especially in terms of the old adage that the best camera is the one you have with you — will be with iPhones. I considered it a lock that iPhones would eventually be able to capture spatial video memories, but to me it’s a sign of operational excellence and cross-device collaboration that Apple pulled it off this year, with iPhones that will ship months ahead of the first-generation Vision Pro. (The ability to shoot spatial video using an iPhone 15 Pro isn’t available yet — it’s “coming later this year”. And the hands-on area units didn’t have the feature, nor any example spatial videos preloaded. So the only thing we know about the feature is what was broadcast in the keynote.)
