In Shanghai, “a new crowd-sourced transit platform allows riders to propose, vote on, and activate new bus lines in as little as three days”.
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The Trumpist assault on the federal government is a “civil war by other means”, says Rebecca Solnit. “It is a war against the government of the United States and the land and people of this country.”
“The Trump administration’s policy ideas to incentivize women to have more kids resemble those pushed by authoritarian regimes throughout history.”
On Male Social Isolation
I thought this whole Tumblr post by @skaldish was fascinating. The author is a trans man1 who has experienced social situations presenting as both a woman and a man.
There’s a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. All strangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.
It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization — unless, of course, it’s in very specific environments. And the fact I don’t ambiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.
You know how badly this would have fucked my mind up if I had grown up with this?
And then later:
When I’m out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is — the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.
As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn’t run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren’t just being needlessly guarded.)
But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I’ve experienced female socialization. If I hadn’t, I would’ve thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I’m failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn’t social rejection.
I found this via @danximenes.bsky.social (via someone else I don’t remember, sorry!) and the conversation in the thread is interesting as well.
- From the context (“the culture shock I’m going through”, etc.), it sounds like he was newly out as trans when he wrote this.↩
OMG! The universe is going to decay into nothingness 10^1022 times sooner than previously expected. Carpe diem, everyone!
Enjoying the Lane 8 Spring 2025 Mixtape this afternoon.
This is a little bit genius: an analysis of OpenAI based on a close reading of a 22-second video of CEO Sam Altman cooking pasta. “His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.”
Here Is Everything That Has Changed Since Congestion Pricing Started in New York. Uniformly positive results clear from the data after just a few months. And millions raised for public transit. A scandal this didn’t happen sooner.
Jimmy Carter for The Onion: You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President. “Maybe I’m just a sucker. Apparently, all I needed to do was hand off control of the farm to my family.”
4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere. “Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government.”
A streaming music translator: I Don’t Have Spotify. Paste a share link from Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer or SoundCloud and get links to that music on the other platforms.
A Real Life Version of Wallace & Gromit’s Breakfast Machine
I love me some Wallace & Gromit and so I was delighted to see that this guy made a real life version of Wallace & Gromit’s breakfast machine, complete with a spoonful of jam flying through the air perfectly meeting a piece of toast popping out of a toaster.
It starts with this crazy part here, where he falls out of bed into a pair of trousers, landing in a chair, and then his sleeves go on, and the vest. And then, probably the hardest part of all, is throwing jam — through the air — and hitting toast — in the air — perfectly. Some of these stunts are going to be the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted.
Cracking toast, Gromit! (via the kid should see this)
The help desk at Auburn University is still answering questions from the public via telephone. “The rules are these: Be as polite as possible, end the call if the question is offensive, don’t answer anything that sounds like a homework question…”
I’d never seen this before: a thief does some stretches in the parking lot before robbing a Dunkin Donuts. Warming up is important for peak performance!
A Visual Celebration of Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys
A few weeks ago, I posted about the hundreds of stills from their animated movies that Studio Ghibli has made available for free download. Since I’m a big fan of the weird little guys director Hayao Miyazaki loves to put in his films (e.g. the kodama in Princess Mononoke1 and Spirited Away’s soot sprites), I thought it would be cool to pull some images from the Ghibli archive featuring these lovable little freaks.
And an honorable mention to this frame from Porco Rosso:
The weird little guys category generally doesn’t apply to humans, but this image of little kids crawling all over a pig man’s airplane certainly classifies as an unusual swarm.
- I bought a shirt with a kodama on it after seeing Princess Mononoke in 1999. At some point, I got rid of the shirt — why the hell did I do that?! It was very close to this shirt on Etsy selling for $288…the collar/sleeve color was a dark blue or black on mine.↩
Bess Kalb: Hooray for Pills. “I hope you shut out the simplistic, reductive, anti-science voices like RFK’s who tell us that pills are bad, and suffering is good.” Co-sign!
How to Be a Grown Up: The 14 Essential Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed. I saw this in a bookstore recently and wondered if going-off-to-college teens actually read books like these or if they’re just bait for well-meaning adults. Recs welcome!
16-bit Intel 8088 Chip by Charles Bukowski
Today I learned that Charles Bukowski, “laureate of American lowlife”, wrote about the incompatibilities of early computing platforms in a poem called 16-bit Intel 8088 Chip:
16-bit Intel 8088 chip
with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.
Lovely. And accurate. And somehow even maybe profound? (via sing, memory)
I saw Sinners last night (fantastic!) and loved reading Karen Attiah’s piece, ‘Sinners’ is a Black Challenge to White Christianity. Eagerly accepting recommendations for what else to watch/read/listen to about this film.
Is This Autocracy? “Without a distinction between truth and falsehood, we have no basis for a distinction between good and evil. And at present there is barely even an attempt to conceal the absence of such a basis.”
Bertrand Russell on How Fascism Starts
From a 1940 collection of essays called Freedom: Its Meaning, here’s Bertrand Russell on how fascism begins:
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
This technique is as old as the hills; it was practiced in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.
From Kyla Scanlon, a “brief comprehensive guide” about tariffs. “We call a tariff a protective measure. It does protect; it protects the consumer very well against one thing. It protects the consumer against low prices. —Milton Friedman”
Ye Olde Funny Headlines
The Instagram account History Cool Kids has been featuring some funny olde timey headlines recently and I thought these three were worth sharing with you.
A review of the last 25 years of food & dining in NYC. Cool to see lots of my old faves on here: Ssam Bar, Bourdain, WD-50, Death & Co (which turned me onto cocktails), Xi’an Famous Foods, Daisy Mays, Torrisi, Ivan Ramen, etc.
The Catholic Church has selected Robert Prevost as their new leader, Pope Leo XIV. “The cardinals clearly wanted someone committed to Pope Francis’ reform agenda and someone with a demonstrated record for effective management.”
A new Lord of the Rings movie will premiere in theaters on Dec 17, 2027. It’s the first of two films that will focus on Gandalf, Aragorn, and Sauron searching for Gollum.
That Coveted Window Spot
Craig Mod is currently on a book tour for his new walking memoir, Things Become Other Things. While in NYC, he stopped by one of his favorite bookstores in the world, Three Lives & Company, located on the corner of W 10th and Waverly Place in the West Village, to sign some copies of his book. He wrote about Three Lives and what it means to see his book in the window of the shop:
I know of no other store (book or otherwise) with nicer, more knowledgable people working there. It’s uncanny, the amount of unharried, chill, giving-a-shitness you feel as soon as you walk in. The space is small, sure, but every millimeter is covered in arguably one of the best curated selections of books in the world. I dare you to visit and not buy something (I bought Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test today). The taste is unparalleled. I’ve been to enough bookstores in the world now to say this with some confidence. No, they don’t have every book. But we don’t want every book. We want great books chosen by people whose adoration of books stems from a life committed to books.
Like Craig, I’ve been visiting Three Lives for probably 20 years, first as my neighborhood bookstore and now as one of the NYC touchstones I visit every time I’m in town (even when they moved several blocks west a few years ago during the renovation of their building). It’s my favorite bookstore and the place against which I mentally compare every other bookstore I’ve ever been to — my personal mètre étalon for booksellers.
If I ever write a book, the only place I really care about seeing it is in the window or on the front table at Three Lives. When I visit, I always daydream a little about that, my book in that window. Like Craig said: “It’s not about seeing it in every window, just the windows of places I respect the most.”
How Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist’s Digital Legacy. “This was his computer exactly as he had left it, down to his customized Photoshop shortcuts and the positions of the windows.” I love Cory, this is awesome.
A Deep Dive on Daft Punk’s Vocal Effects
Daft Punk are famously secret about, well, most everything they do. Marc Edwards recently took a detailed look at some of the devices that the duo probably used for the vocal effects on their albums.
Talk boxes are relatively simple devices — they’re a speaker in a sealed box with a small opening. One end of a hose is fitted to the opening, and the other end is placed into the performer’s mouth, blasting noise towards their throat. The performer can pretend to speak, shaping and filtering the sound coming out of the tube with their vocal tract. A microphone is then needed to record the resulting sound. A keyboard or guitar is typically connected to the talk box unit as the sound source for the speaker. This lets the keyboard or guitar sound like it’s singing. If you’ve heard Chromeo, 2Pac’s California Love, Peter Frampton’s Do You Feel Like We Do, or Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer before, you’ve heard a talk box.
I can confirm firing loud sounds into your mouth while holding a tube with your teeth is a bit uncomfortable. In terms of vocal effects used by Daft Punk, I think talk box might be the least used and least interesting, in terms of hunting down the exact hardware used. Talk boxes are simple devices and typically all sound similar. The sound source and performance play a bigger role in the result than the hardware itself.
The two videos above are worth watching for their comparisons of the effects of the different devices. They don’t include any direct Daft Punk samples (rights issues?), but if you’re familiar enough with their oeuvre, it’s easy enough to compare w/o samples.
“When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the gov’t because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
Personal Raincloud is a trope in TV & comics where a character gets followed around by their own personal rainstorm. “If the cloud has a mind of its own it may be a Cumulonemesis.” I love TV Tropes.
4th Grader to RFK Jr: “I Have Autism and I’m Not Broken”
At a recent Princeton Public Schools’ Board of Education meeting, Teddy, a fourth-grader from one of the district’s schools, got up and delivered a speech about the many reasons that PPS should teach about autism and other disabilities, including “so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future”. Here are Teddy’s full remarks:
Recently, the U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr, made false comments about autism like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families. But that’s not true. I have autism and I’m not broken, and I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr’s lies.
Autism and all disabilities should be taught in the Princeton Public Schools curriculum at all grade levels because it will raise awareness, increase acceptance, and improve the quality of life for kids with disabilities.
But first, here is a quote from a Changing Perspectives article called Disability Inclusion in Education: “A truly inclusive environment does not value one marginalized group over another; instead, it recognizes the unique backgrounds of all members of the community, including but not limited to cultural heritage, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender, disability, or any other differences.”
Princeton Public Schools already recognizes Autism Awareness Month, but not much. There are posters in the cafeteria that say to be kind and inclusive. Students wear blue on April 2nd. But we are never taught about the spectrum of autism. Kids need to be taught more about the different kinds of autism, that autism is a natural variation in the genes that you are born with, not caused by vaccines, and about successful people with autism. The lessons should also be extended to other disabilities like ADHD, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, dyslexia, apraxia, and more.
This is important because it will teach kids how to accept people with disabilities. Accepting someone means really understanding someone for who they are and not minding their differences. I want everyone to know that people with autism and other disabilities are not tragedies, but just different, like all people. If everyone understood more about autistic people, and about people with other disabilities, they would know more about how to treat them, what their lives are like, and that they don’t need to be fixed or cured. This will help kids with disabilities have a better life.
When people are aware of disabilities and are accepting them, they will have friends and less bullying. Also, the teachers might be more aware because they learned about the disabilities also. Kids and teachers should know more about disabilities so they do not believe RFK Jr is right about autism, and they choose to treat them in a nice way that is good for the kid. By knowing more about it, kids and teachers will be nicer to the kids with disabilities.
This is important to me and Princeton Public Schools because I have a disability, and I noticed that disabilities are not being taught, only a few people mentioning autism. When teaching about culture, we teach many different cultures to accept them better — because that’s what disabilities are like, a culture, a culture of differences. Princeton Public Schools must add this to the curriculum of all grades and students, so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future.
I want to end with the district mission statement: “Our mission is to prepare all of our students to lead lives of joy and purpose as knowledgeable, creative, and compassionate citizens of a global society.” Adding disabilities to kids’ education will make them knowledgeable and compassionate, and help kids with disabilities to lead lives of joy and purpose.
Come on, challenging the district to uphold their own mission statement? That’s an S-tier move right there.
Defector’s Sabrina Imbler is interviewing civil servants who have been fired/purged from their jobs at EPA, US Forest Service, USAID, NOAA, USDA, CDC, etc.
WWII Vet Crushes a Tesla With a Sherman Tank
In this video, 98-year-old British WWII veteran Ken Turner demolishes a Tesla with a Sherman tank. Here’s what Turner had to say before getting down to business:
I’m old enough to have seen fascism the first time around; now it’s coming back. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is using his immense power to support the far-right in Europe, and his money comes from Tesla cars. Well, I’ve got this message for Mr Musk. We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again.
A Popeless Situation: The election of Gregory X in 1271 took 1006 days to decide, during which the cardinals were eventually locked in a palace and fed only bread & water. The deliberations lasted so long that three cardinals died during the conclave!
Gears and Other Mechanical Things
This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work.
(thx, matthew)
Some of the cardinals tasked with choosing a replacement for Pope Francis have watched the Hollywood movie Conclave in preparation for the real-life process. “So many of the conclave participants have little experience of Vatican politics and protocol.”
McMansion Hell on Trump’s gaudy “dictator chic”. “This ruling class nostalgia for times of absolute domination over the populace and its use as a conservative signifier is a defining characteristic of Rococo Revivalism…”
Graphic Novel Biography of Eadweard Muybridge
The life and work of photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge is the subject of a new graphic novel called Muybridge by Guy Delisle.
Sacramento, California, 1870. Pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge becomes entangled in railroad robber baron Leland Stanford’s delusions of grandeur. Tasked with proving Stanford’s belief that a horse’s hooves do not touch the ground while galloping at full speed, Muybridge gets to work with his camera. In doing so, he inadvertently creates one of the single most important technological advancements of our age—the invention of time-lapse photography and the mechanical ability to capture motion.
You can find Muybridge at Drawn & Quarterly, Amazon, or Bookshop.
Phew, for a Minute There, I Thought the Arts Were Going to Get Too Much Funding. “I mean, what were we thinking…handing out grants to novelists with weird names like Marisol or Devin? Some of them were using metaphors. OPENLY.”
A guide to staying safe during civil unrest. “Know who you can call on for help. Even if the threat isn’t right on your doorstep, it can be a relief to just let someone else watch the news for a while so you can put your phone down and get some rest.”
Altair at 50: Remembering the First Personal Computer. “The Altair didn’t survive for very long, but essentially being responsible for the creation of Microsoft is a pretty Big Deal. It also inspired Steve Wozniak to create the first Apple computer…”
48 Things Women Hear In A Lifetime (That Men Just Don’t)
HuffPost gathered a diverse group of girls and women for this video on the sexist things that they hear throughout their lives that men don’t.
Don’t be so bossy. Why are you getting so emotional? You’d be much prettier if you smiled. I was just trying to give you a compliment.
See also 48 Things Men Hear In A Lifetime (That Are Bad For Everyone):
The invention of the transformer (and LLMs) has upended the field of natural language processing. John Pavlus interviewed NLP researchers about the breakthrough. “Look how absurd this is, but look how well it works.”
Subtly Geometric Birds
There’s something a little bit mesmerizing about Aled Thompson’s illustrations of birds. They are at once highly detailed and also slightly vectorish — and it shifts back and forth while I’m looking at them, like one of those young woman/old woman optical illusions.
You can find more of Thompson’s work on Instagram and Bluesky and can purchase prints here. (via @mims.bsky.social)
“When we think of love, we think of romance and happily-ever-after fairy tales. By telling this story, I want to invoke something different — the radical power of seeing, understanding, and showing up for another human.”
The Phony Physics of Star Wars Are a Blast. You can’t see laser shots and X-wings wouldn’t turn like that in space, but “it’s more fun this way”.
Things Become Other Things & A Physical Education
Fun day today: two of my online pals have books coming out. First is Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things, a memoir of a walk (and a life) in Japan and on a childhood friend who didn’t have the same opportunity.
Photographer and essayist Craig Mod is a veteran of long solo walks. But in 2021, during the pandemic shutdown of Japan’s borders, one particular walk around the Kumano Kodō routes — the ancient pilgrimage paths of Japan’s southern Kii Peninsula — took on an unexpectedly personal new significance. Mod found himself reflecting on his own childhood in a post-industrial American town, his experiences as an adoptee, his unlikely relocation to Japan at nineteen, and his relationship with one lost friend, whose life was tragically cut short after their paths diverged. For Mod, the walk became a tool to bear witness to a quiet grace visible only when “you’re bored out of your skull and the miles left are long.”
Also out today is Casey Johnston’s A Physical Education, the subtitle of which is How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting.
In A Physical Education, Casey Johnston recounts how she ventured into the brave new world of weightlifting, leaving behind years of restrictive eating and endless cardio. Woven through the trajectory of how she rebuilt her strength and confidence is a staggering exposé of the damaging doctrine spread by diet and fitness culture.
Both Casey and Craig are wonderful writers who care deeply about their craft and passing their experiences, insights, and enthusiasm along to their readers. I’m picking up my pre-ordered copy of Craig’s book from my local bookstore this afternoon and I’m hoping there’s a copy of Casey’s book on the new nonfiction table so I can grab that too.
A Physical Education is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and at other booksellers. Casey is on tour for the book right now; check out the tour dates here.
Things Become Other Things is also available at Amazon, Bookshop, and other booksellers. Craig is currently on tour too; you can find his tour dates here.
A history of music album art. “Before most people owned a TV set, Steinweiss’s album covers were affordable multi-sensory entertainment. Looking at the album cover & listening to the music created an experience that was more than the sum of its parts.”
New Language for Slavery and the Civil War
Drawing upon the work of colleagues, historian Michael Todd Landis proposes new language for talking about slavery and the Civil War. In addition to favoring “labor camps” over the more romantic “plantations”, he suggests retiring the concept of the Union vs the Confederacy.
Specifically, let us drop the word “Union” when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in “Union troops” versus “Confederate troops.” Instead of “Union,” we should say “United States.” By employing “Union” instead of “United States,” we are indirectly supporting the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a “sandy foundation” (according to rebel Vice President Alexander Stephens). In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished; etc. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared.
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