Adam Serwer writing about the yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that guts much of whatever remains of the Voting Rights Act:
In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control — half of the Black American population resides in the South — lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory — against white people.
What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.
I can’t tell you how much I fucking hate this, and every other stupid fucking thing conservatives have done to this country. I try to keep my cynicism (or what I like to think of as being realistic) about the American political situation off the site for the most part, but seeing this decision come down yesterday morning let all the air out of my balloon. Not that it contained much air to begin with…the balloon is shot right through with holes from the past decade+ of authoritarian shenanigans and general acquiescence of institutions that are supposed to protect us.
On a personal note, in these moments I find it increasingly difficult to go on — being engaged here, keeping up with the news, highlighting positives in the world, showcasing the enthusiasms of others, informing ppl of harms & how they can help, hyping hope, not letting the bastards grind me down. It’s nothing new — I’ve talked about it here before — but as the situation becomes more unstable & uncertain (or rather: as I grow more certain about its instability & fuckedness), it grows more difficult to keep going. I know this is self-defeating & self-centered, but I’m angry and scared and grieving and tired. I’m gonna publish this before I just delete the whole stupid thing.
Come on everyone, we’re going to Cursor Camp!
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The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. “If universal basic income enables even one more Einstein to become Einstein over the course of the next century, it will have paid for itself a thousand times over.”
Who Are the Unexpected Friends in Your Life? “Little did I know that I would find this kind of friendship with my 70-something neighbor, Jesse.”
“There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive. I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.”
“Trump did not cause the attempts on his life. But it would be dishonest to deny that he is responsible for shaping the environment in which we live — for creating an atmosphere in which these kinds of events are more likely.”
Holy moly, DJ Shadow is doing a 30th anniversary tour for Endtroducing… Starts Sept 24 in San Diego. Endtroducing… is one of my all-time favorite albums.
I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It. “I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.”
A Georgia teen diagnosed with a rare cancer used his Make-A-Wish gift to help the homeless in his community. “I got out of my version of heck, and I want to help others who are in a similar situation, their own version.”
The intelligence of LLMs is “a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested”, and their widespread use will lead to a thinning of that complexity, “undermining the conditions for its own advancement”. (And ours.)
Teaser trailer for season four of Ted Lasso. Looks like he & Coach Beard are back in the UK to coach AFC Richmond’s women’s team. Premieres Aug 5 on Apple TV.
vintage post from Mar 2013
· gift link
This story by Kevin Guilfoile about his aging father (who worked for the Pirates and the Baseball Hall of Fame) and the mystery of what happened to the bat that Roberto Clemente got his 3,000th hit with is one of my favorite things that I’ve read over the past few months.
[My father’s] personality is present, if his memories are a jumble. He is still funny, and surprisingly quick with one-liners to crack up the staff at the facility where he lives. He is exceedingly polite, same as he ever was. He is good at faking a casual conversation, especially on the phone. But if you sit and talk with him for a long time, he gets very anxious. He starts tapping his forehead with his fingers. “Shouldn’t we be going?” he’ll say. You tell him there’s no place we need to be, but 30 seconds later he’ll ask again, “Shouldn’t we be going?”
What happens to memories when they’re collapsed inside time like this? They don’t exactly disappear, they just become impossible to unpack. And so my father, who loved stories so much — who loved to tell them, who loved to hear them — can no longer comprehend them. The structure of any story, after all, is that this happened and then that happened, and he can’t make sense of any sequence.
That is the real hell of this disease. His own identity has become a puzzle he can’t solve.
Objects have stories, too. Puzzles that need to be solved. Like a pair of baseball bats, for instance, that each passed through Roberto Clemente’s hands before they passed through my father’s. One hung on my bedroom wall throughout my childhood. The other is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
These objects never forget, but they never tell their stories, either.
Without a little bit of luck, we’d never hear them.
Or more than a little luck:
My father has lots of old baseball bats given to him by players he worked with over the years. He has Mickey Mantle bats from his years with the Yankees, and Willie Stargell and Dave Parker bats from his days with the Pirates. The one I always loved best was an Adirondack model with R CLEMENTE embossed in modest block letters, instead of the usual signature burned into the barrel. On the bottom of the knob, Roberto had written a tiny “37” in ballpoint pen, presumably to indicate its weight: 37 ounces. It also had a series of scrapes around the middle where someone had scratched off the trademark stripe that encircled all Adirondack bats. Former Pirates GM Joe Brown gave my dad this bat several years after Roberto died. For much of my childhood it hung on the wall of my bedroom, on a long rack with about a dozen other game-used bats.
My dad had been working at the Hall of Fame for more than a decade when, in 1993, his old friend Tony Bartirome, a one-time Pirates infielder who had become their longtime trainer, came to Cooperstown for a visit. Tony and his wife went to dinner with my folks and then came back to our house to chat. The only way to go to the first-floor washroom in that house was through my old bedroom, and on a trip there, Tony noticed that Adirondack of Clemente’s hanging on the wall.
Tony carried it into the living room. He said to Dad, “Where did you get this bat?” My dad told him that Joe Brown had given him the bat as a gift, sometime in the late ’70s. “Bill,” Tony said. “This is the bat Roberto used to get his 3,000th hit.”
My father was confused by this. “That’s impossible,” he told Tony. “The day he hit 3,000 I went down to the clubhouse, and Roberto himself handed me the bat he used. I sent it to the Hall of Fame. I walk by it every day.”
“Well,” Tony said. “I have a story to tell you.”
It’s a wonderful story, read the whole thing. Or get the book: the story is excerpted from Guilfoile’s A Drive into the Gap, available here or for the Kindle.
This is interesting: Talkie is a vintage LLM, trained on “historical pre-1931 English text”. “The training data for the base model is entirely out of copyright (the USA copyright cutoff date is currently January 1, 1931).”
Listen, sometimes you just want to watch things blow up. But safely and without consequence (although Arnold Schwarzenegger did somehow become the governor of California). So, can I interest you in three minutes of movie explosions? The 80s and 90s were really a golden age for kick-ass movie explosions. (via @tvaziri.com)
“A half-century after it was published, The Soul of a New Machine does a better job challenging AI hype than most current criticism.” I thought something similarly (about the web) when I read Kidder’s book 25 years ago, during the aftermath of the dot com bust.
Do I Belong in Tech Anymore? “Why am I here? Does any of this work actually matter? And if I stop caring about the quality of my work… will anyone notice?”
“British energy major BP on Tuesday reported that first-quarter profits more than doubled from a year ago, following a surge in oil and gas prices driven by the Middle East conflict.” Oh, surprise surprise.
Boots Riley made his directorial debut with the totally weirdo (complimentary) movie Sorry to Bother You in 2018. He’s been quiet since then, but he’s back with a new comedy, I Love Boosters. This looks great. From a review on Letterboxd:
Maximalist social commentary delivered with anime action and colourful high strangeness. Did it kind of fall off the rails towards the end? Absolutely. Was it fun as fuck and creative right to the end? You best believe it. God bless the shoplifters. I got major Everything Everywhere All At Once vibes from this…
The film debuted at SXSW in March and is opening in theaters on May 22.
On the Propaganda of Early Nazism, and How We See it in America Today. “Unlike other political systems, fascism was not meant to be intellectualized or discussed; it was meant to be experienced.”
The Era of AI Malaise. “The AI has learned to code. The AI is building itself. Will I have a job tomorrow? Will the market crash? Why does OpenAI need a bunker? Do I need a bunker? Maybe I should have a bunker.”
It’s the Age of Electricity and America Isn’t Ready. “Our grid is too old and our supply of electricity too small. If we don’t meet this moment, we will face an impoverished future of more expensive, less reliable energy, and slower economic growth.”
Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of EPA head Lee Zeldin. “In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters.”
Greg Sargent writing for The New Republic:
There’s no clean way to hive off terms like fascism or authoritarianism from Trump’s policies. Even if you disagree that the words apply, their use is backed up by a genuine attempt at intellectual justification for it. The use of these terms just is deeply linked to assessments of Trump’s actual policies, from the lawless renditions to foreign gulags to the unleashing of heavily armed militias in American cities to the naked intimidation of large swaths of civil society.
By contrast, when Trump and MAGA media figures call Democrats “Communists” or “antifa,” all of that is entirely disconnected from any policy realities. Many press figures would like it if there were an Archimedean midpoint between the two parties on all these matters. But there isn’t. At the most basic level, one party continues to function as an actor in a liberal democracy, whereas Trump and much of his movement, with the eager participation of many Republicans, simply do not. Dispensing with harsh but accurate descriptions of his real goals would whitewash them.
See also Republican Extremism and the Myth of “Both Sides” in American Politics.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on magical thinking and elite impunity. “We are ruled by a class of people who seem either to believe or presume that war, disease, and apocalyptic destruction are things that will only ever happen to poorer and browner people.”
Nicole Nikolich is a textile artist whose current focus is making crochet artworks that reference old school technology. You can explore her work on her website, at Paradigm Gallery and on Instagram. Some of her artworks are available for sale here.
I’m a sucker for these types of projects because innovations in textile production led to the development of the first computers and the work of artists like Nikolich bring that relationship full circle. See also The Embroidered Computer.
Livestream of the Big Bear bald eagle nest (perched 145 feet up in a pine tree) with two fuzzy bald eagle chicks that hatched 3 weeks ago.
Presidents Can Be Impeached Because Benjamin Franklin Thought It Was Better Than Assassination. “The Constitution’s impeachment procedures make the removal of the chief magistrate less violent, less disruptive, and less error-prone than assassination.”
Thoughtful thread on the armed man who rushed the WHCA dinner. “This guy is indicative of people who are anti Trump not having a voice because Congress and SCOTUS have enabled Trump to obliterate any recourse they have when he does horrible things.”
“Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, often found in plastic, coupled with climate change’s effects…are each linked to reductions in fertility and fecundity across global species – including in humans.” Argh, no one wants a Children of Men prequel…
Teaser trailer for season four of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. “Space is limitless in its beauty. And in its terror.” (Reminder: they are doing an episode with puppets this season.)
An amazing capture of galaxy Messier 104, aka the Sombrero Galaxy, by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera mounted on a Chilean observatory.
The Sombrero galaxy (Messier 104) is a galactic masterpiece that captivates scientists and astronomy enthusiasts alike. Its intricate system of globular star clusters lends insight into stellar populations, and astronomers are intrigued by the supermassive black hole at its center. Its distinctive visual features and relative brightness make it a favorite among amateur astronomers. The fascinating story of its discovery, involving three esteemed astronomers, has earned it a spot on one of the most important lists of deep sky objects. Today, it stands as one of the most iconic galaxies in the night sky.
If you want the full image, you can download the 725 MB file from the project’s site. (via petapixel)
Gunfire of the Vanities: Trump Dinner Shooting Defines a Violent, Unserious America, “a land where guns are everywhere and a callous elite media dons formalwear to toast its own humiliation by our narcissist king”.
Daredevil Michelle Khare ran 7 marathons on 7 different continents in 7 days. The first one was on Antarctica.
Moderna developed an mRNA Covid-flu combo vaccine and it’s been approved for use in the EU, “but it continues to be shelved in the US, where it was developed”.
Paul Ford: This Is How We Get Moral A.I. Companies. (Tl;dr: regulation.) “The entire culture of American technology is built around two terms: disruption and, of course, scale. But ethics are constraints on disruption and scale.”
Wow, Sabastian Sawe set a world record with a 1:59:30 marathon. “They call Sabastian Sawe the silent assassin. But it was impossible to ignore the beautiful destruction on the streets of London as the 30-year-old Kenyan…”
vintage post from Feb 2015
· gift link
A collection of weekly bus passes from Milwaukee, WI. Years covered are 1930-1979. Was there a new design every single week? (via @slowernet)
A papyrus of part of the Iliad has been discovered in a Roman-era tomb of mummies in Egypt. “The papyrus contains a passage from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, specifically the section known as the ‘Catalogue of Ships’…”
“We had the idea to make a Bodoni interpretation with potato stamps, so we bought 8kg of potatoes, some knives and [started carving]. When we finally had the full alphabet we stamped it on paper, made a font out of this and called it Bodedo.”
While reading this article about the structure of complex knots, I ran across this diagram drawn by scientist Peter Guthrie Tait in 1885 for a paper called On Knots Part III. It’s one of two figures that together show all of the possible variations of knots with 10 crossings. I think the color plus the small multiples activated the Tufte array in my brain; anyway, I love this diagram. (via damn interesting)
(I tried for the better part of an hour to track down a high-resolution copy of Tait’s paper to no avail. There are various contenders, but nothing that includes high-res scans of both knottiness diagrams. I’m curious about this archive of the original paper but not $41 curious. If anyone has access through their institution and wants to send me a PDF, I’d love that. Update: I have a copy of the paper and will be posting updated images soon! Thank you, Michael!)
Instead of Losing Democratic Elections, What If We Just Stopped Having Them Altogether? “My goodness, imagine the efficiency. No long lines. No campaign ads. No need to pretend Wisconsin matters every four years.”
How The Heck Does Shazam Work? “By throwing away almost everything and keeping only a handful of landmark peaks, a noisy 5-second clip from a coffee shop becomes a set of coordinates precise enough to pinpoint one song out of millions.” Fascinating!
What’s on your mind lately? What’s going on in your life? Witnessed anything amazing? Anything you’d like to share with the rest of the class?
Here in Vermont, it’s barely spring (which means it’ll probably snow at least one more time before I need to start mowing the lawn). No mountain biking yet. A local theater is playing Silence of the Lambs this weekend (35th anniversary!), so I might go do that. I’ve been working on a new post editor for KDO and it’s coming along — building software and designing interfaces is fun and maddening. Autumn is going to come with some big changes for me, and I’ve been making some progress in preparing for that.
Hows about yous?
1D Chess. “You might initially find it more difficult than expected, but assuming optimal play, is there a forced win for white?”
Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed on the Michael biopic out in theaters right now: “How can you tell an authentic story about Michael Jackson without ever mentioning the fact that he was seriously accused of being a child molester?”
Twin Peaks × LCD Soundsystem: a video mashup of Dance Yrself Clean and the Twin Peaks theme music. Perfect. A damn fine cup of coffee, even.
ProPublica explores what a future without vaccines would look like in the US. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of children paralyzed, and many other children stricken with serious but easily preventable health issues.
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