Like many, I love the famous New Yorker essay by Anthony Bourdain, Don’t Eat Before Reading This, published in 1999. For some reason, I always thought he submitted it to the New Yorker as a whim, that the success of it was a fluke, and the great books that followed were simply a response to this essay’s success.
So I was surprised to read this interview of him in 1997, “Potboiler Dreams: Chef Hopes To Write His Way Out of the Kitchen”. He confessed in the interview that he already wanted to write his “dream book, a definitive, foody memoir, a ribald account of my 22 years in the restaurant business that would probably appall and horrify anyone thinking of hiring me.” That dream book was Kitchen Confidential, published in 2000. The man had a plan, and with some luck, the plan succeeded. A good thing it did too, for we all benefitted.
P.S. Here’s an excerpt from the film, “The Big Short” in which the film writers get Bourdain to riff on his fish story to explain financial instruments.
In the last year the thing that mostly preoccupies the world are the actions of the second Trump administration. I suspect that this will also be the thing that preoccupies this this newsletter for the next few years.
Trump 2.0
Tariffs were pretty high on the agenda for Trump’s second term in office. I think he dreamed he could eliminate income taxes and replace them with tariffs. (Never mind that tariffs are just another form of tax, which everyone but Trump seems to know). Turns out, it’s not that easy to get rid of income taxes. And while trying to switch over to a tariff based form of revenue, you get things like shipments freezing up just like in the bad old days of the pandemic. Does any of Trump’s tariffs make any sense? Some try to explain away his actions, but the constant changing of tariff rates on various places seems like madness to many.
It’s not only individuals that Trump is after. It’s also institutions, such as U.S. universities. While his administration has gone after a number of schools, Harvard has been hit especially hard, as you can see here. Why Harvard? Perhaps because they are fighting back, unlike Columbia University, which quickly threw in the towel.
What else? He picked up a free plane from Qatar, just one of many corrupt acts. He also got his wish of having a military parade on his birthday. In the end, many thought it was a failure. What does not seem to have been a failure were the No Kings protests that happened at the same time.
Carney has since paid a visit to Trump and it seemed to go well, but one never knows what will happen at any given week in the White House. Meanwhile Carney has also been courting other world leaders like King Charles and members of the G7, no doubt as a way of dealing with our neighbor down south.
Michelin, which has been to Toronto a few times, has now expanded their Canadian presence by going to Montreal and Quebec and reporting back on all the goodness that part of the country has to offer.
Finally
The great Brian Wilson of Beach Boys fame passed away recently. I’ve always loved his song, “God Only Knows”, and here he is with an abundance of new and not so new musicians to perform it with him for the BBC:
As always, thanks for reading the June 2025 edition of my not-a-newsletter newsletter! Enjoy your summer.
Over at my other blog, I recently asked myself, “why record at all”. I didn’t have an answer to it until I looked at some old photos like the one above.
I like that photo, taken using a Diana camera of a wooden wall I made. The wall wasn’t very good: I didn’t know enough and didn’t have enough resources to make it properly. As a result, it flopped around and was prone to getting wrecked when a high wind came along. No matter. I was proud I could make that then. And I was happy with the way this photo came out. I am still proud and happy about that.
The record — in this case a photo — reminds me of what I am capable of. It states: you could do that again. At a time when one is plagued by negative self-talk, a record can provide a voice to drown out the negativity. A record can be a voice of encouragement.
There are many good reasons to make a record in any form. A record that can help you regain your better self is surely a good reason to make it.
When people first started putting things on the Web, virtual tours were very cool. Guess what? They still are. Check out this recent virtual tour of the Basilica Santa Maria.
Wednesday seems to be a good day to take a break from your work and feast your eyes on the work of artists covered in these 10+ pieces. There’s something for everyone’s taste, from classic painters to conceptual artists. Enjoy!
For fans of album art, you will want to see the seven LP album covers that the artist Josef Albers designed for Command Records. You can see them here.
For fans of photography, here is a great piece on the Mean High Water project, the stark impact of water, and the photography of Jared Bramblett, here.
For fans of filmmaking, I recommend this interview with Steven Soderburgh.
I had never seen Haring’s “Altarpiece: The Life of Christ” before. I came across it on Google Arts and Letters. Puts me in mind of Warhol’s later religious work. It was also one of his last works of art.
I recently discovered the work of the artist Brian Charney and I was struck by how he captured what was going on in his mind that suffered from schizophrenia through his paintings.
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that the 21st century is 1/4 completed. When I was young, the 21st century was far off in the future. Now so much of it has already past.
Given this milestone, it seems a good time to look at what some of the best books and films have been of this era.
For films, I recommend this essay in the New York Times of the best films of each year from 2000 to 2024.
For books, I recommend this piece from Kircus Reviews.
I love buying flowers, and there are several good green grocers near me that sell many different types of flowers. The problem I have is, what to buy and how much should I buy? I am always disastified with what I end up as I leave the store.
So I am excited to try this formula which I found at Cup of Jo. You can too! You need to buy:
a seasonal flower (tulips, daffodils, whatever)
a filler flower (like one with little buds on it, like baby’s breath)
a flower that fits the color palette (spray roses look good with everything)
greenery (“I generally like bigger wider leaves,” she says)
Once you get home, grab a vase and fill it like so:
Greenery goes first, since it’s the foundation to hold everything together.
Add the filler flower.
Layer in the spray roses.
Lastly, add the seasonal flower, which is usually the most delicate, but everything else will hold it up.
With any luck, it will look just like the ones in the blog post (which is where the rules and instructions also come from).
There was a Japanese influencer I used to follow on Instagram mainly because I was fascinated by his minimalist life. As someone who has too much stuff, I could watch his daily routine and live a minimal life vicariously this way. No doubt many others do too.
So I was surprised to see he had an page on Amazon that allows (allowed?) you to buy all the things he has in his home. Surprised because I thought a minimalist would not encourage people to buy more stuff. But then I thought about it again and realized he is an influencer first, and like many influencers, he benefits by you buying more stuff. Stuff that makes you think you can be a minimalist, too, if you only had these things.
If that’s you, consider there is an easier way to be a minimalist. Start by having less. When you finish reading this, go and get rid of things in your house. For every new thing you bring in, throw out at least two things. You don’t need more different stuff. You need less of what you have. If you pursue Less, you may get to Minimal. Or better still, you will achieve Optimal.
In politics I believe it is common to talk of political pragmatists vs political ideologues. What is less common is to talk about political consequentialists vs political deontologists. The two “vs” seem to overlap, but there are differences. The key difference is that political consequentialists and political deontologists make their decisions from an ethical viewpoint.
I was thinking of political ethics this week when there was a discussion around whether or not the Democratic Party in the U.S. should accept money from Elon Musk. As someone who is more of a political consequentialist, I thought: of course they should take his money, especially because it could help them win control of the U.S. government and for starters they could reverse the changes he has done. Then I read others who argued they would not take money “from a guy who does a Hitler salute” (i.e. is evil). I get that argument: they think they have a duty to never ally with someone as bad as Musk, and they must believe they can get money from elsewhere that does not conflict with their political duties.
There are pros and cons with either ethical approaches to politics. I tend to take a deontological approach when the consequences are difficult to measure, but when the possible outcomes are measurable, I tend to take a consequentialist approach. For example, thinking like a political consequentialist, I might not vote for a corrupt politician or an anti-democratic politician, even if I think this will lead to good short term outcomes, because I believe there are potentially larger bad outcomes that come in the long term from having corrupt and anti-democratic politicians in power. But that’s a complicated calculus. Thinking as a political deontologist, I would simply not vote for a corrupt or anti-democratic politician because I have a moral obligation to support only those people who are not corrupt and are for democracy.
People can be on the same side of the political aisle and still argue. Sometimes they argue over the practicality of something. But sometimes they will be arguing for ethical reasons. Something to watch for.
P.S. More on the difference between consequentialism and deontology terms, here. Also this piece, which also adds virtue ethics to the mix.
P.S.S. The photo is of Churchill walking through Coventry. The moral question there was: if you have access to the secret communications of your enemies and you know they are going to bomb a certain city on a certain day, do you warn the people of that city, knowing that by doing so, you risk losing your access and potentially lengthening the war? It’s a question that also comes up in the TV series, Andor, where one character (Luthen Rael) sacrifices 31 men in order to continue hiding the fact that he has an informant in the Empire he is fighting against.
If you want to create a basic web page with some css, I recommend you check out this. In no time you will have a web page structured like this:
If you want to have something even simpler, I have it here.
Of course you can use something bootstrap to make a nice webpage too. Indeed a page built with bootstrap is more flexible than the page above. For more on that, check this page out.
Open Benches is a map of thousands of “memorial benches – added by people like you”. Just type in a search request and see if anyone has dedicated a bench to someone or something, like people and their dogs. For example, this bench was dedicate to Veronica Calver.
You can find examples all over the world, including my town, Toronto. Thanks to the folks who put together this wonderful crowd sourced project.
P.S. If you want to first get a commemorative bench or tree in Toronto, you can get more information on that, here.
Over on Timothy Snyder’s web site is a resources page where you can find free resources (posters, postcards, etc.) for you to use. Highly recommended. Also highly recommended is the book it came from: On Tyranny. That page also has links to web sites selling his book. It’s a very smart, very readable, and very useful book to own in these trying times. Get yourself a copy.
P.S. I think a resources page is a great idea. More sites should have one.
L’Express restaurant: just the thought of being there again makes me happy. I’ve gone countless times in the last few decades. Whenever I am in Montreal, even if just for a day, I dine there. Everything about it is great: the bistro food, the great value French wine, the superb waiters, the classic decor, and especially the big jars of cornichons. I love the ravioli and the hanger steak, followed by one scoop of ice cream (preferably maple), but I have never been disappointed with whatever is served.
I was worried about it during the pandemic, but they seem to have muscled through those lean times. No doubt because of its many fans who have been there since 1980, and who no doubt will still be going in 2080.
So the next time you are in Montreal strolling the great street of St. Denis, pop in to L’Express, either to have some wine (it’s also a great wine bar) or better yet find a table, scan the wonderfully printed menu, and settle into a plate of savoury bistro food. You won’t be sorry.
Besides a will, you might also want to set up a death binder. For Toronto Star subscribers, you can read this, Death Binder 101: How to ease the lives of your survivors, but if you do a web search on “death binder”, you can find many pages devoted to the topic, such as this.
Since we are on the topic of your upcoming demise, I want to recommend to you this book:
Again, do a search on “swedish death cleaning” and you’ll see lots of free material on the topic. But I recommend buying or borroing the book. Amazon has it here.
For those of you who find the process daunting, the NY Times has a good piece on how to break down the preparation.
Inspiration: I found the following sites give me inspriation to make things. For example, block prints by svPhoenixStudio. More block print material here.
“America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American “pro-Palestinian movement” is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN) that is trying to compel the U.S. government to abandon its long-standing support for Israel. Supported by activists and funders dedicated to the destruction of capitalism and democracy, the HSN benefits from the support and training of America’s overseas enemies and seeks to achieve its goals by taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, coopting the federal government, and relying on the American Jewish community’s complacency. The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism intends to enlist all willing and able partners in a coordinated effort to combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States.”
Let’s unpack that paragraph. Do you find any room there for someone like me who opposes the actions of the Israeli government, never mind those who may be supportive of the Palestinians who are bearing the brunt of the Israeli army against the Hamas organization? I don’t. As far as Heritage is concerned, I am “anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American”. Furthermore, you cannot consider yourself “pro-Palestinian”: you are considered instead part of “a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)”. Not only that, but by being part of the HSN, you and I are caught up with those “dedicated to the destruction of capitalism and democracy”. If that’s not bad enough, Heritage states that we are hurting America by “taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, coopting the federal government”. The only way you could be any worse is if you were Jewish and adding to “the American Jewish community’s complacency”.
To generalize, the formula Heritage seems to be using to demonize their opponents is:
Ignore the spectrum of opposition, from those expressing mild disapproval to other engaging in violent action.
Instead, collapse that opposition and lump all your opponents together.
Make sure you collapse the opposition so that it is associated with the most extreme end of that opposition.
Relabel the opposition with a name and an acronym that ensures others associate it with this negative extremity.
Invent a list of nefarious actions to apply to the opposition.
Claim the leadership of those who would naturally go against such negative extremity.
This particular example revolves around the conflict in the Gaza Strip. But it could easily apply to any situation. For example, during the October Crisis in Canada, all those wishing for more autonomy for Quebec and opposing the Canadian government in various forms could have been lumped into the FLQ Support Network (FSN) and the Canadian establishment could have said anyone in this new FSN bucket was an enemy of Canada and democracy and more. As you can see, it’s an easy formula to apply.
Of course it is not just enough to demonize your opponent. Once you do that, you need to use that demonization to justify your future goals. For Heritage, some of their goals for Project Esther are listed below:
DE1: HSO propaganda purged from curricula.
DE2: HSO-supporting faculty and/or staff removed or fired.
DE3: HSO access to campuses lost and/or denied.
DE4: Foreign members of HSOs/HSN access to campuses lost and/or denied.
DE5: Money from foreign HSO supporters not accepted by schools.
Basically, any thing they don’t like in schools and universities they can label as coming from HSO (Hamas Support Organizations) and work to have it removed under the guise of attacking antisemitism. Attacks on free speech by right wing organizations is not new, and that is part of the point of Project Esther. First demonize your opponent, then use the demonization to ban them or strike them in some way while claiming it’s for a good cause.
Whenever a person or group use the formula to demonize their opponent, you can assume some follow on extreme action is being lined up by them. Don’t be that person or a part of that group, and don’t participate in that form of thinking.
You may only think of transportation in a practical sense of how you travel from A to B. However, there are many hidden assumptions in your travels, including ideas about Comfort, Cost and Convenience. And those three C words got me thinking about another C word, Class.
“I’m just saying that as a person who spends a lot of time in the suburbs: to “most people” — and I here I don’t mean most people in a generic, metaphorical sense, but in a literal and political sense — bike lanes and transit and so on don’t sound so much like options as much as the ravings of a crazy person. And it all sounds insane because the vast majority of them are concerned about their bodily comfort, and we are asking them to be less comfortable. We are saying what at least sounds to them like “you are going to have face your own body and feel more uncomfortable.” Any approach to changing transportation habits or making the case for why we should has to, in some way or another, deal with that simple fact.”
A light bulb went off when I read that. Transportation is about the best way to get from A to B. The best way can be defined in terms of speed, effort, convenience, comfort and cost. For biking advocates, bikes are the best way in terms of cost and convenience (e.g., easy to park, flexible routes). Automobile advocates think cars are the best way in terms of speed, effort (none), and comfort. For patrons of the public transit like the TTC, it is somewhere in between. In every case, travellers are thinking about their bodies, their physical selves, when they think about travelling. Some subway riders don’t want to be all sweaty when they get to work, and some car owners do not want to be crammed in a bus in winter with sick passengers. Meanwhile bike riders love the idea that their commute makes them physically fit, unlike the feeling they get stuck in a car or a bus. Each sees their means of transportation as the best way, depending on what they value.
Class is an additional way people think about themselves as they commute. This is especially so when they are travelling commercially. On trains and planes and ships there are different classes of passengers, and while they may all get there with the same speed and effort, the comforts and costs and even conveniences differ depending on the classification of your seat.
As for automobiles, in cities where public transportation is lacking, class is assumed based on the type of vehicle you ride. People with expensive cars being of a supposedly higher class, people with beat up cars being a lower class, and riders of bicycles being the lowest class. Which is why you will see people driving cars they cannot really afford: they don’t want their vehicle to indicate in any way a lower class status.
Class is more difficult to discern in cities where public transportation is good. Wealthy people in cities like New York might ditch their expensive car and use the subway because it is faster and more convenient. That is also true with cabs: rich and poor hop in and out of the same yellow cars to go from updown to downtown (and vice versa). In New York and beyond, new transportation options like Uber and Lyft also tend to water down class indicators in terms of transportation. While services like Uber offer levels of class in terms of vehicle selection, you can also randomly get an expensive car with the basic Uber X option. Subways, cabs and Ubers all blur the ability to use someone’s commute as a class indicator.
Class and commuting tend to travel as a pair. I would extend this statement to say by daring to state that bike lane advocates and public transportation advocates are likely to fall in the left wing/progressive side of politics and their views on class tend to mix in with this, even as car advocates are likely to fall in the right wing/conservative side of politics. So when people are advocating for adding or removing bike lanes, they are promoting their ideas on class as much as they are promoting their ideas on the best way to travel. It’s hard to rationally argue for better cities with more bike lanes and congestion pricing with someone who for many years has worked hard and aspired to drive a very expensive car freely all around the city.
If you are going to advocate for certain transportation options, you need to account for speed, effort, convenience, comfort and cost. But you’d be wrong to leave out class: it is an essential element of any decision made when it comes to travel.
(Image of “Planes, Trains, and Autombiles” from Wikipedia, a movie as much about class as it is about transportation, with class being a theme that comes up often in John Hughes’s films.)
It is easy to find out which foods are fresh in Ontario. There are several guides, including this one from Foodland Ontario, that can help you with this. However, I wanted a particular guide that would list for me all the fresh foods for a given month only. And since I couldn’t find a guide like that, I decide to write a python program to make such a guide.
In the past, to write a program like that, I would go through sample code I have, pull out bits of code that were good, and cobble together something from all these bits. Lately, though, I simply ask a service like ChatGPT or others to write the code for me. I find nowadays it’s just so much faster to go that route. Call me lazy. 🙂
Since I wanted this done quickly, I pointed chatGPT at the Foodland Ontario guide and asked it to do the following:
Did ChatGPT do that? Yes, it did. Was the program any good? No, it was not! It somehow looked at that web page and decided the values were stored in a table, even though they were not. The web page is more complex than that and so the program was a pretty failure.
After many prompts, I gave up and took an alternative approach. For this new approach, I stripped out the data manually and created a simple CSV file. I then asked ChatGPT to write a program to process the CSV file. Since it is a simpler file, ChatGPT was able to produce a workable Python program that was able to process the CSV file and output the information I needed.
Perhaps a more skilled prompt engineer could have written a better prompt to process the code. I dunno. I am finding that LLMs — not just ChatGPT — are fine with writing some straightforward code based on non-complex inputs and outputs. They are not so fine once the inputs or outputs get complex. But that’s just my experience. YMMV.
I have also concluded that even warmer months like May in Ontario do not have much in the way of fresh food. No wonder there are so many food stories on asparagus and rhubarb! 🙂 You really need to hit June or later before you get into a cornucopia of fresh produce.
J.D. Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio who is vying to be Donald Trump’s running mate, declared: “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there’s no law, there’s just power. And the goal here is to get back in power.”
Masterful bit of projection there by Vance of his own ideas on to the American left.
Give the rise of Nazi thought on the American right, it should not be surprising that some of its members are turning to Schmitt. For those who are unfamiliar with him, his Wikipedia entry starts with this:
Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. An authoritarian conservative theorist, he was noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism.His works covered political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology. However, they are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for, and active involvement with, Nazism.In 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and utilized his legal and political theories to provide ideological justification for the regime. Schmitt supported many of Hitler policies including the Night of the Long Knives purge and the Nuremberg Laws.
Based on what we have seen so far, expect to see the Trump administration put more of Schmitt’s ideas in action over the length of Trump’s latest term in office.
To learn more about Schmitt and his ideas, you can read the Times piece and the wikipedia page. You can also check out a review of this book on him. For German readers, you can read his defense of the Night of the Long Knives, here.
(Image credits: By Government of Germany – Flickr: Nuremberg Laws English, Public Domain, Link. It’s important to see just where Schmitt’s ideas lead, hence why I included this terrible diagram. After all, “he praised the Nuremberg Laws for dispensing with the commitment to “treat aliens in species and Germans equally.” – NY Times)
Anyone who works with a group of people needs to understand the idea of bike-shedding (as known as the law of triviality). Let me jump right to the Wikipedia entry to explain it:
The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
The law has been applied to software development and other activities.The terms bicycle-shed effect, bike-shed effect, and bike-shedding were coined based on Parkinson’s example; it was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by the Danish software developer Poul-Henning Kamp in 1999 and, due to that, has since become popular within the field of software development generally.
Coming from the software development community, I’ve known about and seen countless examples of bike-shedding in meetings I’ve attended. I just assumed everyone knew the term. It was only when talking to people outside of software did I realize the term was not as well known.
Now you know it. And now that you do know it, you will see examples of it in many of the meetings you attend this week. 🙂
Here’s a number of pieces I’ve gathered in the last few months related to science and math that I found worth sharing. A few of them require deeper knowledge on the topic, but many of them are suitable for anyone to read.
Right now lilac season is starting in Toronto. Shouldn’t that be a true season in it’s own right?
When you think of it, it makes sense that we have more than four seasons. Heck according to this piece, Japan has 72 microseasons. Meanwhile in Canada, we often joke about having many microseasons, too, and they go like this:
WINTER (brutal cold)
fool’s spring (don’t get used to it)
second winter / bleak midwinter (oh well)
spring of deceptions (is spring here? As if!)
third winter (snowdrop flower season, snow melts fast, weird snowfalls in April)
pollen season (lilac season, tulip season)
SPRING (cool but green)
Nice summer (perfect weather)
SUMMER (brutal heat)
false fall (where’s the sweaters?)
second summer (that’s better)
AUTUMN (leaves turn color and fall)
Lovely holiday winter (not too cold)
I think we could easily get new names for all those seasons not capitalized.
One good reason to have more seasons is that they remind you to appreciate the changes in the world around you. Another good reason is that it breaks down the seasons that can be difficult (winter for many, summer for me) and helps you get through them. Whatever the reason, having seasons based on the climate and less on solistices and equinoxes makes more sense.
I hope we get more seasons in Canada. For now we will have to stick with the four official ones and the many unofficial ones. Now go and enjoy the lilacs.
The rule I follow when I see actions taken against books is this: book bans or book removals are about preventing kids from learning about minority and oppressed groups in their society.
The materials they have targeted are often described in policies and legislation as sensitive, inappropriate or pornographic. But in practice, the books most frequently identified for removal have been by or about Black or L.G.B.T.Q. people, according to the American Library Association.
Next time you see a book ban list, check to see what the books have in common. If what they have in common is that they are associated with specific groups (e.g., stories about gay families, black or brown authors), then the ban has nothing to do with publications that are “sensitive, inappropriate or pornographic”. The ban has to do with preventing kids from learning about the minority and oppressed groups.
If you are like me, you struggle with supply and demand curves. Maybe it’s because I am used to drawing curves in mathematics, which are different than these curves, which tend to show a ‘before and after’ of where the curve shifts to on the graph when the price changes or the quantity changes. That change in price or quantity causes the curve to shift.
To see what I mean, I took these two examples from wikipedia. In these examples, we have right-shifts.
A right-shift of demand curve increases both price and quantity. Pretty straightforward: price goes up, quantity goes up. However…
A right-shift of supply curve decreases price and increases quantity. Here the price moves in the opposite direction of the quantity.
In short: with demand, price and quantity go hand in hand while with supply, they move in opposite directions.
P.S.These are supply and demand curves for most goods with elastic supply and demand. The curve changes if you have inelastic supply and demand. And they also change when you have Giffen goods or Veblen goods.
I’ve been collecting articles on police forces, gangs and prisons over the last while.
I don’t have any great insights, and as someone who has not studied sociology at any length, I don’t have much confidence in any conclusions I might make from reading such a list.
I still believe that you cannot have a society without an effective armed authority (e.g., a police force) and some form of exile (e.g., a prison). The challenge I see is most societies do not do a good enough job with their armed authorities or their forms of exile, perhaps because most citizens in a society don’t care what happens to people who run a ground with the police or prison. Only recently in America, with Trump and his desire to use authorities like ICE to capture and ship people to prison in El Salvador, have citizens (mostly white, I suspect) turned to paying attention to this again.
You can read the articles I collected here and form your own conclusions:
Gang violence is not just a Haitian problem: it’s in Ecuador too. In fact, it’s a problem in many countries from Mexico down throughout central and South America.
With the destruction of everything in Gaza, it’s not surprising there was a breakdown there and you had looting. There was no effective armed authority for the people of Gaza once the invasion occurred.
Danish hippies had to resort to a police force (shown above) due to gangs of drug dealers taking over. (More on Christiania, Copenhagen here). They would have preferred to have neither the police nor the gangs, but in the end they had to choose one over the other.
A classic study of resorting to an effective armed authority over gangs occurs in the film The Seven Samurai, where farmers hire outside warriors to take on thieves who swarm their farms every year.
Mark Zuckerberg was roasted recently for saying the following:
“There’s the stat that I always think is crazy, the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends,” Zuckerberg told Patel. “And the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”
“The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have,” he concluded, hinting at the possibility that the discrepancy could be filled with virtual friends.
Some thoughts on that:
He’s wrong. The majority of Americans say they have four or more close friends, according to this Pew Study. And 2/3rds of Americans have three or more close friends. That just close friends. Obviously the list of total friends is much higher than 3 for most Americans.
Zuck just wants to find justification to start forcing AI into the social technologies that Meta owns so he can sell more ads. But he and Meta don’t seem to want to come out and say that. So he offers up these “virtual” friends as justification.
Meta’s products don’t foster real friendship and social connections. Meta exploits people with technology that makes it easy and desirable to connect with others. Once you establish social connections there, they short circuit that by inserting ads into your communications. They also enable others (e.g., influencers) to insert their communications into your feed. In the end the technology you used to communicate with your friends becomes a firehose of others trying to get you to buy things.
You might push back and say: what do you expect? That’s the deal you made to use their “free” social media technology. There’s some truth to that. But there are degrees of exploitation, and Meta is the most extreme form of it and have been since Facebook first took off in the early 2010s. They aren’t just a parasite living off their host: they take over the host and eat it alive.
It’s instructive to compare Zuck’s proposition with what is being offered by the porn actress Sophie Dee, as outlined in this Washington Post piece. She too is offering up social connections, albeit of a different nature. In the end though, the game is the same: foster enough social interaction to push and promote the services she is selling.
There are ways to foster real friendship and enable communication with technology. That’s not what Mark Z or Sophie Dee are offering though. They are offering an illusion via AI to sell more things to you. Let’s be honest about all this. Let’s ignore this talk from Zuck about his virtual friends, for they are no friends at all.
Art Deco turns 100 this year, and Wallpaper celebrates it by highlighting some art deco buildings around the world in this piece.
All those art deco buildings are great, but for me, the Chrysler Building in New York is still the greatest. CNN has a fine feature on it, here. (More material on this New York City masterpiece, here.)
I highly recommend you check out both the Wallpaper and the CNN piece not just for the excellent photos, but for the in depth histories of the art deco era and the buildings that era produced.
(Image of the Dellit theatre in Australia is from the Wallpaper piece.)
Recently I’ve been trying to ask myself these questions whenever I write paragraphs for a new piece:
– For each paragraph, if I leave only the first sentence, does the collection of paragraphs still make sense?
– For each other sentence in the paragraph, does it help support the first sentence?
– Does each sentence do one thing in the paragraph?
– Are the sentences varied enough to make it interesting to read?
– Can I take words out of each sentence and still have a good sentence?
– Can I take out sentences of the paragraph and still have a good paragraph?
– Do the paragraphs hang together?
– Does the first paragraph make me want to read the next paragraph?
– If they only read the first paragraph, is that enough?
I came up with these questions because I wanted to make my writing better. It doesn’t matter what I am writing: an email, a press release, a blog post, you name it. Whatever it is, if I apply those questions, the collection of paragraphs gets better.
These questions are related to rules for writing paragraphs in many pieces you will find on the Internet. I thought I would share my version of that. I hope it helps!
I was reading this piece by Austin Kleon, and there was a reference to a piece by Philip Pullman in which Pullman discussed drawing and spoke of “Rembrandt’s astonishing drawing of the toddler learning to walk”. That led me to the link which all these great Rembrandt drawings, including the one above. What a joy it was to serendipitously see these sketches of the Dutch master.
That experience reminded me of the joy of the Web: you surf from one page to the next, and suddenly you find something unexpected and wonderful. There’s so much bad material on the Web these days, it’s was great to have the kind of experience I used to have when I first started using a browser.
Like in life, try and follow and associate with the better people of the Internet and the World Wide Web. It will pay off with benefits you didn’t know were possible.
If you use Substack, should you stay on it? You might want to leave because of its Nazi problem, and that’s a good reason to do so. However for this post I’d like to focus on why you might you might want to leave for financial reasons.
To see what I mean about financial reasons, take a look at this chart above. I found it via this post on Bluesky: “Here’s some napkin math for how expensive Substack is compared to its competitors, assuming that roughly 7% of all subscribers will pay for their subscriptions, and that subscriptions cost $5/month. — Molly White (@molly.wiki) April 11, 2025 at 10:47 AM”. According to the chart, once you get above 18 paid subscribers, it gets worse and worse to be on Substack vs some of the other platforms there. And if you have 350 paid subscribers, all of the alternative platforms are cheaper.
I commented that I thought 7% was the highend, since I’ve seen a numerous substacks with 3% pay/free, but she replied she got the 7% from substack. Fair enough. I did come across this chart that showed the percentage varies, depending on the substack topic. Regardless of what percentage of your followers are paying one, once you start getting a significant number of paying subscribers, you should consider moving.
The great Timothy Snyder has written an excellent post on the use of State Terror within the Trump administration. You can find it here. I recommend everyone read it.
I think he made a mistake with this sentence, though: “This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror”. It may seem like the beginning for some people. But as this piece by Christina Greer in the New York Times argues, it is not a new thing at all. A key section from her piece is this:
“How can this be happening in America?” these people ask. “This is not the country I know, the country of rights and laws and due process.”
Needless to say, these people are almost all white and liberal and are not used to feeling this fear of arbitrary, brutal state authority. But this moment, the one that was explicitly promised by Project 2025 and Donald Trump when he was a candidate, looks a lot like what my grandmother experienced every day for much of her life. It is frightening and disappointing but not surprising if one knows anything about the Black experience in America. And not the sanitized just-so version of the Black experience in which America skips from slavery, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and somehow ends with a postracial America and Barack Obama.
Black people have seen this America before.
Japanese Americans have also seen this when they were interned by the U.S. government during World War II. And they weren’t the only ones interned: German Americans and Italian Americans have also been thrown into American concentration camps in the 20th century. I can go back further and include the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans during the Trail of Tears in the 19th century. The list of State Terror activities within the United States of America is a long one.
Trump may be unique in the way he goes about using State Terror this time. But it is not a new thing in America.
(Image is a map of the locations of internment camps for German enemy aliens during World War II. From Wikipedia.)
People have many perspectives on generative AI. On Bluesky in particular, it’s perceived negatively. They see it as a huge drain on environment. They see the people who develop it as IP thieves. They see it as taking away jobs.
For people who think this is the only way generative AI can be, I’d like to point them to the work my employer is doing with AI and the AI ethical guidelines they’ve published here.
Generative AI can be seen in a positive way. My opinion (not speaking for my employer) is that as the tools that sit in front of gen AI get better and the models that underline gen AI improve, we all will use it every day, in the same way we use search engines and spreadsheets every day.
I’d add that gen AI technology can be considered an accelerant. In any given social order, some participants will choose to adopt an accelerant and disrupt that order by speeding past others. It could be high skilled or low skilled participants. Those who value the current order and their place in it will try to prevent that from happening but likely will fail. This happened with previous accelerants like personal computers and the Web. People who were invested in the order before PCs and the Web were disrupted by those who adopted and exploited the capabilities of the accelerants. (Not all accelerants are technological: literacy, voting rights and access to financial services are also accelerants. I just feel more confident talking about comp sci vs poli sci.) I think this will be true for generative AI. Back in the 80s I thought that individuals and companies that invested in personal computers would leapfrog individuals and companies that ignored PCs. That turned out to be true, just as it was true for individuals and companies that embraced the Web. I think the same will hold for generative AI.
So don’t be like Linda: learn more about gen AI and do not confuse it with A1 sauce. 🙂 If it can help, I wrote a guide on it recently that could be worth your while to check out.
P.S. For anyone wondering, this post is my own and doesn’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions. For more on that, see IBM’s social media policy, which as an employee I follow.
P.S.S. I think if you are going to be speaking on AI as the Secretary for Education, you should at least know how to say it.
Even if you don’t normally watch Star Wars movies, consider watching Andor. Like the movie it arises from, Rogue One, it stands apart from much that is Star Wars. There’s no light sabre battles, no Force, none of the things you may associate with the franchise. It is still in the Star Wars universe, which is why you will see Storm Troopers in their white uniforms, as well as other such things. But it really is a good dramatic series that’s well written and well acted. For fans of Star Wars, it’s good TV. But people indifferent to Star Wars will find it is good TV too.
I could go on, but Don Moynihan is miles ahead in terms of making a strong and thoughtful case for it, here. Don writes about governance, so he sees the series from that lens. And quite the lens it is. I highly recommend you read his piece.
One thing I noticed that wasn’t in his piece is the colonialism that comes through in the series. The Empire has taken over planets in a way not unlike earthly empires take over countries, and the series explores what that does to both those loyal to the Empire and those fed up with it.
Andor starts up season 2 this month. Go watch season one on Disney+ now. Check out Rogue One too (though you can watch Andor independently of it and the rest of the Star Wars films). Hopefully season 2 will be worthwhile TV too.
People often joke about which non-traditional films are Christmas Movies, with “Die Hard” being at the top of the list. Unlike Christmas, not many non-traditional films are associated with Easter.
I’d like to nominate the Matrix to non-traditional Easter movies. The movie is soaked in Christianity. As this really good piece on The Matrix explains:
Neo’s buyer also jokes that Neo is his “own personal Jesus Christ,” a moment that sets up the many biblical allusions in the film — the city of Zion (a biblical name for Jerusalem as well as the idea of the city of God), Cypher’s Judas-like betrayal, a very important character named Trinity. At the time, this was catnip to youth group leaders looking for a way to make religion cool.
And “The Matrix” as religious allegory has stuck. The last 25 years have seen books published with titles like “Escaping the Matrix: Setting Your Mind Free to Experience Real Life in Christ,” “The Gospel Reloaded” and “Christ—The Original Matrix.” If you’re looking for it, it’s definitely there.
Neo escapes the Matrix when he is released from his pod (an egglike device). He is considered The One, before he is betrayed by Cypher. He is killed by the Agents who could be stand-ins for the Romas, but then is resurrected. If you look, you can see all sorts of similar themes.
Of course that films has many other good themes in it. To see what I mean, check out that piece in the link above. The Matrix really is a good way to think about much of our current world.
P.S. I got the idea for this from this post on BlueSky, which pointed to the Alien films as great Easter films. This post got me thinking that The Matrix also has all this too.
Eggs, sacrifice, resurrection … the perfect Easter films?
offers an exceptional encounter with antiquity. Using the world’s most advanced imaging technology, the Digital Library preserves thousands of scroll fragments, including the oldest known copies of biblical texts, now accessible to the public for the first time.
It’s quite something to see what they have on display, especially for non-scholars like me who would never get this close to such ancient pieces. It’s well worth taking a look, especially during Passover / Easter.
Speaking of Martha, Netflix has a good documentary on her called….Martha. Was Martha happy with “Martha”? No, she was not. She has trashed the film in several places, partially because she comes off as a “lonely old lady” and “prickly”. I get why she would not like it, but I think as documentaries go, it was good. Martha can be a difficult person to like, though that depends on your tastes. Indeed, some critics like that she is “a perfectionist control freak” and all that goes with that designation.
However likeable she is, I think Martha did something massive early in her career: she transformed our culture and the way people do business. She is as significant a figure as a major artist or a major executive. Perhaps even more so, because she was all of that rolled up into one package. When you get big enough in our culture, you get to go by one name, and Martha was and is big enough.
Anyone else who had such a big impact early in their life might retreat to a simpler life as they aged. Not her. Despite all her ups and downs, she continues to march on in her own perfect and precise way even in her 80s. She is truly Unstoppable. And that’s a good thing.
Once I got an Apple Watch, it was hard to wear any other time piece again. In some ways that’s great, since my Watch can do anything other wearable time pieces can do. And then some. That said, I do miss wearing other time pieces.
For example, the Timex Ironman watch. When I was seriously into running I wore my Ironman until it literally stopped working. I’m glad to see Timex still sells the versions of the ones I had, the original TIMEX IRONMAN Flix 100 Lap watch and the updated TIMEX IRONMAN watch. I liked the updated version, but the original was a watch I loved.
Another watch I loved was the Pebble. It too was an original, as far as smart watches go. Then Apple released their watch and like many people, I swapped my Pebble for Apple. Some time after that, the Pebble company itself disappeared, until now. As the new developers proclaim: We’re bringing Pebble back! For fans of it, and even those curious, check out that link.
Finally, this device from the flipper zero creators (shown below) seems almost too smart. But for people who work constantly in an open office and need to get people to leave them alone while they focus, it could be just what they need.
As someone who is overwhelmed by the multitude of paint colors to use and make, the idea of a limited palette appeals to me, That’s why I liked this piece on 
You may only think of transportation in a practical sense of how you travel from A to B. However, there are many hidden assumptions in your travels, including ideas about Comfort, Cost and Convenience. And those three C words got me thinking about another C word, Class.
The rule I follow when I see actions taken against books is this: book bans or book removals are about preventing kids from learning about minority and oppressed groups in their society.
Smart People I Know 