I was thankful to read Marcin Wichary’s review of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything. I first heard about the book months and months ago; it sounded potentially interesting but I was afraid it was going to suffer from a now-familiar myopia of the “tech” old guard. Wichary writes:
I will just say it: I wish the author was more woke. The book is very male-coded. The main chosen areas of investigation are: motorcycles! tanks! guns! wars! There are moments towards the end where Elon Musk and Bill Gates are talked about as if it was still 15 years ago and we haven’t actually learned anything since. (No word of Cybertruck, either.)
We know maintenance tends to be unrewarded and forgotten come promotion time. We know that tedious tasks are often assigned to women and people of color while white men go around doing “genius things.” It’s hard to imagine women not being present in a book about maintenance, and yet — and I wish I was joking — the only woman of any significance in the entire book is… The Statue Of Liberty.
Oof. Yeah. Writing a book with that title (and its attendant aspirations) while ignoring the expertise and experiences of the vast majority of the world’s population (and more than half of the US population) is just not good enough at this point. It’s lazy and incurious, especially for an author frequently lauded as the opposite of both.
(Bit of a sharp turn perhaps, but a recent contrast to Brand’s approach is the PBS series The American Revolution, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. Instead of yet another retelling of the Revolutionary War focused on battles, Founding Fathers, and heroic tales of the good guys, Burns and his team drew from a broader pool of participants (many voices of women, free & enslaved Black people, Native Americans, etc.) and emphasized the extent to which the Revolution was many different things to many different people: a fight for freedom, a campaign to continue the enslavement of Black people, a cover for raping & pillaging, and the birth of a new colonizing nation. The result was a balanced, truthful, and insightful look at the war, an event that should be reckoned with at least as much as it’s celebrated.)
The Pioneering Coffee House Serving Since 1645. “In Oxford, ‘runners’ would go from coffee house to coffee house, picking up all the best news and delivering it back to customers, said Garner. You’re talking human wi-fi.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
After two years off, Tom Scott is back with a new YouTube series: “I took a road trip through every county in England, and filmed something interesting in each of them.”
Tech investor and billionaire Marc Andreessen has many bad opinions (as evidenced by his investment portfolio). On a recent podcast, he shared a real boner: that he isn’t introspective, that people 400 years ago weren’t at all introspective, and that introspection was a construct invented by Freud in the early 1900s.
If you’ve read one (1) book, it’s not difficult to see what is wrong with Andreessen’s assertion and The Nation’s David Futrelle does a good job of rebutting it (archive link). But importantly, he also talks about why Andreessen might say such a thing (either because he honestly believes it or he’s performing the belief):
When you examine your own motivations, desires, and inner life, neuroscientists have discovered, you are using the same parts of the brain that allow you to understand the motivations, desires, and inner lives of others. This means in turn that when you wall off access to your own inner life you also impair your capacity to imaginatively inhabit the experience of other people. Zero introspection is not just a personal quirk or a supposed productivity hack. It’s a permission slip for zero accountability. And Andreessen, it turns out, has good reasons for wanting to avoid accountability.
His firm has bet big on war and the companies that provide the technology behind it…
Futrelle goes on to add:
A man with enormous influence over the technologies of war and surveillance, over the political direction of the country, over the infrastructure of violence that his firm has spent a decade funding, has, in effect, announced that he has no interest in examining his conscience.
Andreessen has built the perfect ideology for Silicon Valley in the Trump age: Move fast, break people, and don’t devote even a moment to self-examination.
As a commenter said on the video snippet I linked to above: “He’s just describing psychopathy. Zero introspection, zero remorse, 100% actions that benefit you.”
Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism. “Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former.”
The 2026 issue of the HTML Review, “an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web”.
Mark Simonson reminisces about when he discovered type design. “The idea of coming up with an original alphabet design fired my imagination. And learning that it was possible to design type professionally was a revelation.”
“By focusing its narrative on the tech industry itself, Halt and Catch Fire’s staying power has only increased. The story it tells still has something to say about our present-day reality.”
For the latest episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman interviews Timothy Snyder about “how we misunderstand freedom, why truth and empathy are under threat, and what this political moment asks of us”. Millman is an *excellent* interviewer.
Endgame for the Open Web, brought on by LLM bots, content summarizing while driving no traffic, increasing paywalls for information of all kinds, locking down APIs (due to AI abuse), attacks on Wikipedia, disruption of open source communities, etc.
NASA’s LRO found a new crater on the Moon…it’s 225 meters across and 43 meters deep. “According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years.”
In a conversation with economist Paul Krugman, climate journalist David Roberts asserts that the United States and China are going in different directions in energy, one forwards and one back.
One of the grand international stories right now — though it’s very hard when you’re in the midst of as much chaos and insanity as we are to get clear about the big narratives — is that the US is basically aligning itself as the last big petrostate. We’re going to go down with the fossil fuel ship, and China is aligning itself as the first electrostate. It is rapidly electrifying its economy, and it is dominating the technologies that enable an electrostate: batteries, EVs, etc., all that stuff. So where do you think the future lies?
All these emerging nations right now are stuck on coal. The story the US is trying to tell you is “shift to LNG. It’s cleaner than coal.” You’ll get some emission reductions. And then, basically, you’ll become dependent on our LNG. And for emerging nations, that’s an enormous 50 year investment program. They’re thinking now, “well, where is the energy situation going to be in 50 years? Do we think that fossil fuels are going to win in 50 years?” By launching this war, I think we have accelerated the process of pushing emerging nations into China’s arms and faster toward clean energy. That’s going to be the big effect of all this.
Help! My Favorite Athlete Is an Idiot (Alt headline: When Sports Heroes Have Terrible Opinions). “Just root for the jersey and not necessarily the nitwit wearing it?”
Astronaut Michael Fincke was rendered unable to speak while on the ISS, prompting an evacuation to Earth. “We’re almost 100% sure that this is a space-related thing.” Uh, I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi recently; this is *exactly* how It starts.
A new study shows that since 1990, the United States has caused $10 trillion in global climate damages. China is responsible for $9T. “Our emissions have caused damage not only to ourselves, but pretty substantial damage in other parts of the world.”
Jesus Clarifies Return Will Be Strictly Limited To Carpentry Business. “My sole focus during this Second Coming will be various woodworking projects and not the establishment of a messianic kingdom.”
I love these looping GIF animations from perfectl00p that use Windows 3.1 elements (Minesweeper, Solitaire, SkiFree, Notepad).
For his recent London run of shows, Fred Again coaxed Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter out of his helmet and in front of the decks for a 2-hour collaborative DJ set. And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
Test footage from a slime simulator game made by former Epic Games employee Asher Zhu. You try to stay hydrated in the hot Tokyo summer by showering and drinking beverages from vending machines.
There’s an upside-down “H” on the facade of a Frank Lloyd Wright building in Illinois. Here’s a deep dive into how it got there.
A comparison of different sorting algorithms (bubble, merge, heap, timsort). You can run them one at a time or race all seven.
Stephen Colbert is co-writing a Lord of the Rings movie. “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is set 14 years after the passing of Frodo. Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure…”
“Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy…could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime.”
We watched Zoolander last night and right before the Derelicte DJ throws on Relax, there’s a 2-second snippet of something that sounded super familiar. It took me a bit to track it down, but it’s trance banger Free by Mono Culture.
“Plain text accounting is a way of doing bookkeeping and accounting with plain text files and scriptable, command-line-friendly software.”
Just renewed my membership for The Kid Should See This, a genuine internet treasure.
The Kid Should See This • Smart videos for curious minds of all ages · thekidshouldseethis.com
Over 7,000 Videos: TKSST shares stories about art activities, astronauts, auroras, ballet, chocolate, classical music, composting, cookies, dance, desserts, farms, food chains, fossils, harvesting, instruments, the Milky Way, the moon, NASA, national parks, orchestras, the sun, the Overview Effect,
Hey folks. The site is going to be very light this week and early next week — I’m spending some time with my family and accompanying my daughter on some spring break college visits. I’ll be back to full force mid-next week.
In the meantime, I thought the open thread we did a couple of weeks ago was so lovely that it should be a regular thing. So, what’s going on in your world? What are you working on? Reading or watching or listening to anything good these days? How can we help you with something that’s been weighing you down?
An interview with Andy Weir about the accuracy of the science in Project Hail Mary. “I’m proud that the only true violation of physics in the story is something you have to go down to the quantum level to find.”
“Stop naming things after people, living or dead. No schools. No streets. No courthouses. No fountains. Just quit it.”
A cartographer posits that our maps should be messier. “The idea that we must have a crisp line dividing one country from another is often inaccurate when it comes to what states are actually claiming.”
This is a diabolical phishing attack. “That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers.”
This is hilarious. A man was pictured in two different photos on the same front page of a local newspaper: one of him painting a holiday sign and a gs station security cam still of him taking a wallet.
“Some countries are better positioned to weather this energy crisis than they would have been just a few years ago. That’s because of the rapid growth of renewable energy, battery systems and electric vehicles…”
vintage post from Nov 2012
· gift link
Of the current 200 nations in the world, the British have invaded all but 22 of them. The lucky 22 include Sweden, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Bolivia, and Belarus. The full analysis is available in Stuart Laycock’s book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded.
Stuart Laycock, the author, has worked his way around the globe, through each country alphabetically, researching its history to establish whether, at any point, they have experienced an incursion by Britain.
Only a comparatively small proportion of the total in Mr Laycock’s list of invaded states actually formed an official part of the empire.
The remainder have been included because the British were found to have achieved some sort of military presence in the territory — however transitory — either through force, the threat of force, negotiation or payment.
Incursions by British pirates, privateers or armed explorers have also been included, provided they were operating with the approval of their government.
The US currently has military personnel stationed in all but 43 countries.
For instance, as of Sept. 30, 2011, there were 53,766 military personnel in Germany, 39,222 in Japan, 10,801 in Italy and 9,382 in the United Kingdom. That makes sense. But wait, scanning the list, you also see nine troops in Mali, eight in Barbados, seven in Laos, six in Lithuania, five in Lebanon, four in Moldova, three in Mongolia, two in Suriname and one in Gabon.
But the presence in most of those countries is due to diplomatic usage of military personnel. (thx, aaron)
The words shark (the animal) and shark (a predatory scoundrel) may have two different origins. “This would make ‘shark’ possibly the only word borrowed from a Mayan language into English directly.”
Parachord is “a new kind of music player that invites all your streams, local audio files, and playlists scattered across multiple services to the same party”. Interesting!
Every Fashion Designer, Explained. If you don’t know anything about fashion, this video will get you up to speed quickly. Vivienne Westwood, Nigo, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, Dapper Dan, Hubert de Givenchy, etc. etc.
“The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”
Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. There’s the 1631 Bible that says “thou shalt commit adultery” but James Joyce resisted some of his corrections: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”
Paris now has a cycling network bigger than Amsterdam and “more daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car”.
Photographer and drone pilot Pio Andrea Peri captured this overhead photo of a Sicilian city called Centuripe. Perched atop hilltops, the city looks like a person from above — even on Google Maps. (via daily overview)
Gender Play in Nineteenth-Century Theater. “The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and Iago…”
A study pitted adults vs little kids to see which was better at making paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock. “The researchers found that the kids’ paintings made in this manner resembled genuine Pollocks more than did those from adult painters.”
Dawn Wilcox’s quest to chronicle the life & death of every woman in the US killed by a man. “Did women have no choice, Wilcox wondered, but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?”
Older posts
Socials & More