Anand Pandian, writing about an acquaintance on the libertarian side of the mask debate, for the Guardian:
For masks and vaccines acknowledge something he won’t: the truth of our vulnerability, our capacity to wound and be wounded by others. I don’t know when Frank and I will talk again. But we remain exposed to each other’s whims and disdains. One way or another, we’ll have to figure out what to do with each other’s company.
What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-masker
The benefit of a commute to work:
Broadly, boundary theory holds that however much Facebook encourages employees to bring their “authentic selves” to work, we have multiple selves, all of them authentic. Crossing between one role and another isn’t easy; it’s called boundary work. And the commute, as Arizona State University’s Blake Ashforth and two collaborators wrote in a seminal paper on the topic, “is actually a relatively efficient way of simultaneously facilitating a physical and psychological shift between roles.”
This dips into role theory in social psychology, which is perhaps the most fascinating speciality of psychology you can study:
Role theory posits that the roles that people occupy provide contexts that shape behavior.
Additional note: the average commute seems to remain constant, at about 30 minutes, from the era of the horse-drawn carriage to the Tesla.
Names Given to Computers is chock full of great idea. Consider:
There are so many more. I realized I’ve been keeping a list of coveted guitars that would work nicely:
Merlin Mann, some time back, linked to a geeky screed about naming your computers. I realized that despite a brief period naming my hard drives on my pre-OS X Macs, I hadn’t been doing much creatively with this.
Andy Ihnatko, I knew, kept the moniker Lillith in rotation for his main production machine. Clever enough.
I thought about the most obvious scheme–songs. But who would you have song titles that were, importantly, one-word titles, but which conveyed both seriousness of purpose with a touch of whimsy?
Rush, you say?
I concur.
Behold this list of possibilities:
I CamelCased where appropriate. That’s a long list of names. You could feasibly name all of your devices Cygnus-Xx, where x is the variable, and call it a life.
But no.
The 16″ MacBook Pro I use at work is BigMoney. BigMoney is my least favorite name, so I got it over with, and it fit the model: I wouldn’t buy that much computer myself, although I am glad to have both the size and horsepower.
But my home Mac Mini? It’s Anthem. I get goosebumps when my watch unlocks it or it pops up in the AirDrop share sheet.
Arnold on Terminating Your Whacked Out Sense of Entitlement:
“I think people should know there is a virus here, it kills people. And the only way we prevent it is we get vaccinated, we wear masks, we do social distancing, washing your hands all of the time, and not just to think about, ‘Well, my freedom is being kind of disturbed here.’ No, screw your freedom. Because with freedom comes obligations and responsibilities. You cannot just say, ‘I have the right to do x, y, and z,’ when you affect other people. That is when it gets serious. It’s like, no different than a traffic light. They put the traffic light in the intersection so someone doesn’t kill someone else by accident. You cannot say, ‘No one is going to tell me that I’m going to stop here, I’m going to go right through it.’
Schwarzenegger, an immigrant and conservative, gets it.
I’m glad to see “Dr” Mercola getting the attention he deserves for his anti-vaccine stance.
The thing that gets me about hucksters, mountebanks, and bounders of Mercola’s ilk is that they are, in fact, selling an alternative. In Mercola’s case, he suggests that you can fight COVID-19 with simple vitamins:
He also began promoting vitamin supplements as a way to ward off the coronavirus. In a warning letter on Feb. 18, the F.D.A. said Dr. Mercola had “misleadingly represented” what were “unapproved and misbranded products” on Mercola.com as established Covid-19 treatments.
HIs “Liposomal Vitamin C” tablets will cost you $37, for example, for 180 pills.
A friend, many years ago, suggested I read Vaccine Epidemic, mistaking me for someone without a scientific bent or who is suspicious of public health. I am neither.
I concluded of that book that the anti-vaccine movement is cynical at its heart. A crucial issue is the degree to which the prime movers are hucksters:
For a group of people who are suspicious of substances being introduced into their children’s bodies by vaccines, they are curiously eager to offer their children up for experimentation, or to attempt all kinds of “natural” or “homeopathic” cures into them, without anything close to the oversight and study exacted on vaccines.
The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online
Benjamin Dreyer begins his book, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, with the following invocation:
Here’s your first challenge: Go a week without writing
- very
- rather
- really
- quite
- in fact
I happen to use iA Writer when composing anything longer than a quick email (although sometimes BBEdit is the choice), and iA offers to check your writing style. In practice, if you check off the Fillers, Clichés, and Redundancies options, it will unceremoniously render word choices, such as those Dryer excoriates, with a strikethrough.
Take that, Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers1.
I made occasion to re-read Frank Herbert’s Dune again, for what I think was the third time, in anticipation of the Villenueve film. I attempted it once in high school, found it dense and inscrutable, but then read it again in college. I stayed one book ahead of my roommate-at-the-time and read all of the titles in the original series, from Dune through Chapterhouse: Dune. I was crazy about the story and have always wanted to work my way back through.
My introduction to Dune, however, was David Lynch’s movie, which came out when I was about ten years old. Star Wars it was not, but I loved it.
Having gone back to the original novel, what stuck out is how embellished Lynch’s film was. I’m not going to bash it, but there are a number of additions that appear nowhere in the book: heart plugs and the guild navigators, to name two. Topless Robot has a good listicle on this.
I found Herbert’s style terse this go around. Of all the voices in the book, I found the dialog and behavior of Jessica to be hard to believe (yes, I know it’s a book that features giant sandworms who make an addictive drug). And as tersely as it began, it ends suddenly.
My curiosity is piqued now: perhaps it was the six-novel stretch that I loved, which informed the nascent novel, that I look back so fondly upon. Might need to dip into Messiah again.
From the creator of Nylas Mail comes Mailspring. You can run it on Mac, Windows, and Linux (it’s an Electron app, so your feelings about trying it out will depend upon your feelings about Electron apps). The free version is enough for just about anyone, although there’s a pro version that’s kinda pricey. It runs better on Mac than Windows, due to an issue with its very own white screen of death. I can confirm that it’s maddening and it gives me the willies that it’s been documented and unfixed for as long as it has. I really like it, with super-fast keyboard shortcuts and an information-dense display.
I finally filled a notebook and found this particular Field Notes notebook to be perfect for the holiday.
Esquire has a great collection of behind-the-scenes photos taken during the filming of a pile of Bond flicks. I’ll admit to having an affection for the boat-jumping scene photo from Lve and Let Die: It came out around the time I was coming up, had the ironic Roger Moore as Bond, and the title track, of course, is excellent. The opening scene is iconic as well. That Guns N’ Roses covered it on the decadent Use Your Illusion collection only made me love it more.
Brave Search is in beta, and Launchbar users can easily add this to their indices.
ldtephens on why Apple Notes won’t be his daily note-taknig app:
Many of the notes that I take throughout the day are notes that I will want to do something with later. A note may become a task in Things, a reminder, or event in Fantastical, a new draft for this blog in Ulysses, or a journal entry in Day One. Missing from Notes is the lack of export options or actions to get notes out of Notes. This is a dealbreaker for making Notes my everyday note’s app. That’s why I use Drafts. Ya know, the old saying “text starts here”. Any text starts in Drafts, including stuff that may eventually end up in Notes.
I agree whole-heartedly. I like Notes’ ubiquity and Apple Pencil support, but I am never inspired to use it compared to Drafts, OmniOutliner, or BBEdit. Quick note is tempting, and I’ll surely check it out, but the indie tools always call to me.
Remember when Rudy Guiliani assumed the mantle of leadership after 9/11?
Me neither.
Watch: Rudy Giuliani is now pushing products in a MyPillow ad and it’s truly depressing
