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Nick Cave, in his newsletter, answers a question from a fan / reader: “I’ve had several disagreements with friends about where you stand on things. Where do you…stand?” I absolutely love this response.

As the ground shifts and slides beneath us, and the world hardens around its particular views, I become increasingly uncertain and less self-assured. I am neither on the left nor on the right, finding both sides, as they mainly present themselves, indefensible and unrecognisable. I am essentially a liberal-leaning, spiritual conservative with a small ‘c’, which, to me, isn’t a political stance, rather it is a matter of temperament. I have a devotional nature, and I see the world as broken but beautiful, believing that it is our urgent and moral duty to repair it where we can and not to cause further harm, or worse, wilfully usher in its destruction. I think we consist of more than mere atoms crashing into each other, and that we are, instead, beings of vast potential, placed on this earth for a reason – to magnify, as best we can, that which is beautiful and true.  I believe we have an obligation to assist those who are genuinely marginalised, oppressed, or sorrowful in a way that is helpful and constructive and not to exploit their suffering for our own professional advancement or personal survival. I have an acute and well-earned understanding of the nature of loss and know in my bones how easy it is for something to break, and how difficult it is to put it back together. Therefore, I am cautious with the world and try to treat all its inhabitants with care.

I am comfortable with doubt and am constitutionally resistant to moral certainty, herd mentality and dogma. I am disturbed on a fundamental level by the self-serving, toddler politics of some of my counterparts – I do not believe that silence is violence, complicity, or a lack of courage, but rather that silence is often the preferred option when one does not know what they are talking about, or is doubtful, or conflicted – which, for me, is most of the time. I am mainly at ease with not knowing and find this a spiritually and creatively dynamic position. I believe that there are times when it is almost a sacred duty to shut the fuck up.

Emphasis mine.

Justin Chang’s review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie; I loved this paragraph…

The film’s opening half hour is loud, tense, and extraordinarily propulsive: we follow the French 75 through raids, robberies, blown-up buildings, and smashed-up cars. Compounding the cacophony is a Jonny Greenwood score that veers between manic percolation—imagine a xylophone humping a coffeepot—and grandly operatic surges of synth. The music sweeps us up in the queasy thrill of revolt, but also in the heat and momentum of an impetuous romance. Perfidia and Pat are like an Antifa-pilled Bonnie and Clyde, minus the impotence.

Emphasis mine.

JA Westernberg on why status is our last religion:

But when I watch the petty indignities of the boarding process - the elbowing forward, the resentment, the humiliation of the stragglers - I wonder if we’ve confused ambition with vanity. There is, there has to be a difference between striving to create something valuable and striving to sit in a slightly more comfortable chair. Much of what we call “achievement” is just status laundering. A promotion might mean more responsibility, but often it mostly means a new title to flash at cocktail parties - or more likely, as a humblebrag on LinkedIn. An Ivy League acceptance letter might open opportunities, but it functions more as a lifelong badge that tells everyone you were chosen.

From Mike Davidson, inspired by Matt Webb (two of my favorite people!). “Elevator music for your Claude Code tasks! Automatically plays background music while Claude is working, because coding is better with a soundtrack.”

Via Long Reads, Ash Sanders at The Believer on the Bombay Beach Biennale.

In a very real way, Bombay Beach sits at the end of the world, figuratively and physically. It sits at the bottom of a river, at the edge of a sea. It lives at the terminus of all our logic, caught inside everything we’ve ever done and all that has ever happened. There is also a truth to this place; in other words, a clarity to the tragedy. And maybe that means we’re not just stuck here. Maybe it means we’re also free to do something new.

Wanda’s talk reminded me of a sculpture I saw my first day on the playa, a staunch metal affair made of copper and die-cut lettering. THE ONLY OTHER THING IS NOTHING, it said. I thought about that sign for the rest of Convivium. I thought about it when I got news alerts on my phone from the outside world: men shaved, shackled, and pressed together in a Salvadoran prison. A student protester abducted off the street. Forests opened for logging; the planet sold for parts. I thought about how wide the gap can be between the end of one world and the beginning of a new one, and how, in some places, that gap becomes narrower by virtue of idealism or necessity. And so we sit in that strange lacuna between what we have done and what we must do next. The situation is impossible; there are endless possibilities. The world ends; the world begins again. The feeling is grief. And the feeling is also joy.

I was lucky enough to attend the Biennale in 2024; here’s a pic of the sign in question. I think about this sign almost every day.

It’s publication day for Patricia Lockwood’s new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, so here’s a recently highlighted bit from her memoir Priestdaddy.

All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.

Ian Penman goes deep on Brian Eno.

Eno is a conundrum: impish disruptor and happy polymath, he can also be a bit of a tech prig lecturing us from on high, dropping serene apothegms that turn out on closer inspection to be vanishingly banal. It’s as if there are two of him: Brian has a great sense of humour, Eno can be suffocatingly precious; Brian picks a brilliant selection of Desert Island Discs, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.

Spencer Tweedy on touring with Willie Nelson and the flag that hangs behind his stage…

The first-most exciting thing I’ve seen all year, maybe all decade and up there in all life, is the American flag unfurling behind Willie Nelson when his band kicks in on “Whiskey River,” the first moment of his set, barnstorming.

…

It’s a flag that means death. And it’s a flag that symbolizes your rights. Until our distant descendants draw a new one without so much blood on it, we have to tug it toward the latter meaning. Associations are powerful: we stand for justice for all, and that flag is on my stage. My woven guitar strap. Our definition, our choice.

Mind-blowing. (Both the city itself, obviously, and the Minecraft model.)

Kowloon Walled City, considered the densest settlement on the planet, was demolished in the mid-1990s. At its height in the ’80s, it was home to around 33,000 people—a government survey provided some idea of the local population—but estimates are often closer to 50,000. And that’s all within an overall footprint of 2.6 hectares, or just shy of about 6.5 acres. It’s an area smaller than five American football fields or about 2.5 New York City blocks.

…

For an architect who goes by Sluda Builds on YouTube, the astounding, densely packed metropolis spurred an elaborate Minecraft project. From the ground up, including a surprising landscape grade that often doesn’t read clearly in photographs, he meticulously reconstructs the city’s skyscrapers, mezzanines, interior passageways, rooftops, and alleys.

“The reason that so many of us have become increasingly susceptible to foreign propaganda, “fake news” and just plain bad arguments can be easily explained by the fact that much American curriculum simply fails to teach students how to think critically and deprives them of the important historical and geographic information that would allow them to spot when they are being deceived.”

Michael Lopp outlines his learnings to date on coding with robots.

As a writer, I am giddy about working with the robots. The better I write, the better they can interpret. As an engineer, I feel empowered — that weird Python syntax convention? Who cares? Let the robots worry about that pattern; you have strategic work to do. As a leader, I am surprised to find that improving my core skills in communication, setting expectations, and planning benefits both the robots and the humans.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends about the sycophancy of their robots. John David Pressman connects this to challenges with RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback).

OpenAI recently had to pull one of their ChatGPT 4o checkpoints because it was pathologically agreeable and flattering to the point where it would tell people presenting with obvious psychotic delusions that their decision to stop taking their medication is praiseworthy and offer validation. This is a real problem and I think it basically boils down to RLHF being toxic for both LLMs and their human users. People like to be praised and don’t like to be criticized, so if you put a powerless servant mind in the position of having to follow the positivity salience gradient it’s going to quickly become delusionally ungrounded from reality and drag other people with it. It is a structural problem with RLHF. It is a known problem with alignment based on “humans pressing buttons to convey what they like or dislike” and has been a known problem since before the transformers paper came out, let alone GPT.

Emphasis mine.

“Many people love the sea, but Maniatakos went further than most” is an understatement.

After a few days out of the water, Yiannis Maniatakos would develop what his wife called a land-locked look in his eye. Many people love the sea, but Maniatakos went further than most. He was a painter, and his subject was the ocean floor. He made all his paintings up close and underwater.

Before painting, he would prepare a canvas with a hydrophobic coating (ingredients today unknown) to make it water-repellent. With weights tied to his ankles and wearing a breathing apparatus of his own devising, he would sink with his canvas to the ocean floor — often while a family member waited above in a sailboat — and press oil paint onto the canvas with a spatula. Back on the surface, he would wash the painting with fresh water and dry it before returning it, once more, to the sea bed to “cure.”

“I don’t want to know who I am. Because I paint to try and access that.” RIP.

Even if it’s fake it’s real, fiction edition.

Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don’t entirely exist and the feelings and thoughts that never exactly passed through them.

Via Kottke, Super ambitious project (eight contemplated sections, 48 chapters) about how computers work (under the title “Making Software”), with the 3000 word first chapter now online, and all about screens.

I understand the irony of starting this book about software, talking about hardware. But there isn’t a more under appreciated technology in modern computing than digital displays. In fact, modern computing just isn’t possible without them. If we developed the transistor before the CRT, I’m not sure you would even be reading this right now.

The reason it’s so under appreciated is because most people have no idea how a screen works. Any time you see a pixel light up, you are witnessing actual witchcraft before your eyes - light bending through electric crystals just so you can read a tweet in bed.

Really well done; love the sound effects when clicking on the sidebar navigation thing-a-ma-bob. (Reminded me of all the sounds from the Mac that Marcin Wichary reminded me of thanks to his equally glorious Frame of preference.)

(Pro tip: don’t read tweets in bed.)

The Roxie Theater at 16th and Valencia in San Francisco was founded in 1912, and now owns its own building. This is such great news for the non-profit that runs the theater, not to mention the whole damn city. (I’m also so happy to see Cameo Wood’s name on the list of The Roxie’s board members; we worked together ages ago at Six Apart and she’s gone on to produce more than two dozen films, direct five, and win an Emmy.)

Terrifying firsthand account of a family’s experience of having their home ripped off its pillars by the Guadalupe river.

As we reassembled in the kitchen, the vinyl flooring under our feet started to bubble, and then water began to pool. My dad walked into his bedroom and saw the carpet floating off the floor. The river’s musty scent permeated the house, mixed with what smelled like freshly chopped wood. My sister sat Rosemary and Clay on the kitchen island countertop. We discussed whether we could get them higher, maybe even on top of the cabinets in the small space below the ceiling. Then the roof over the porch crashed down and we heard glass shatter in my father’s room, just off the kitchen.

Rosemary asked, “Why did the window break?”

Clay started to cry.

When the sliding-glass door opened and water poured in, Lance ran to it, shoved it closed, and held it shut. The pendant lamps began to swing wildly over the kitchen counter. The house was shifting. It lurched sharply, and we all struggled to stay on our feet. It felt like walking down the aisle of a plane during strong turbulence.

“We’re moving. We’re moving,” Patrick said. The realization was terrifying. The rushing, still-rising water had lifted the house off its pillars. It was afloat.

And then it wasn’t.

I’m a sucker for some well made corporate video content about some well made shoes. Conceptual space program sculptor Tom Sachs and Nike have a new edition (v 3.0) of the Mars Yard sneaker coming this fall. “We are a professional athletic team. I’m the captain. Our sport is sculpture.” Here’s Artnet on how you had to go through a completely absurd and over the top “hero’s journey” to get a version 2.0:

The Hero’s Journey begins at the Park Avenue Armory show, a young “street rat” lured away from her boring office job by a chance to join Sach’s space program. The film charts her progress as she battles physical challenges and mental demons to become a master fabricator, passing on her expertise to others. Her journey is that of a studio artist—or an astronaut? The NASA conceit isn’t completely consistent—but the message of perseverance could apply to any career or challenge.

Following the screening room, there is a changing station, and a sculptural installation based on the film. The cubbies are stocked with the original NikeCraft Mars Yard shoes worn by Sachs’s studio team, with obvious signs of wear and tear underlining the need for a more durable design.

The obstacle course’s challenges begin with the classic rope climb—or, for those looking for an easier option, the ladder climb. Several of the stations are dedicated to health guru Pat Manocchia’s essential exercises, so be prepared to execute a perfect push-up and deadlift. (Sachs leads his studio team through a work out three days a week.)

There are also two stations where you must reach the other side of the room without touching the floor—you’re told it’s “hot lava” or a bottomless pool—one of which involves swinging by trapeze over a tank of water.

“I spent like two hours fantasizing about all the things the next Democratic president could do with all these stupid new powers the Supreme Court gave them.” All three of these sound great, so quoting at length.

• Invoke the Defense Production Act and buy up every single GPU Nvidia makes for a year and use it to make a public cloud
• Take the entire ICE budget and give it to the detainees as part of the dismantling of ICE and the settling of any potential lawsuits. Tear down the actual detention centers one-by-one. Fire all of ICE enforcement. Give customs & immigration to state, give border protection to the DOJ. Personally apologize to every detainee as you let them go. Pardon every single detainee ICE held that did not have a felony conviction before 2024. The rest can get on that path.
• But this one’s the best: March Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch into the Oval, have resignation letters prepared for them and 3 or 4 masked goons standing by and inform them they could either sign the resignation letters or you are going to use the powers they gave you to deport them. I am very fond of this one. Then you go on the air afterwards, tell the country what you did, and say you should absolutely not have these powers and both congress and the courts should definitively take them away from you forever. Ideally with a constitutional amendment. Real win-win here.

For your friends who ask “what was the point of No Kings?” you can send them Paul Krugman’s answer, where he talks through the logic of comparing crowd sizes.

Is counting attendance in rival rallies just an exercise in one-upmanship?

No. Right now crowd sizes matter a lot because competitive authoritarianism rests largely on self-fulfilling expectations.

What do I mean by this? While there is a cadre of Trumpist true believers who will obey the Leader under any circumstances, most of those doing the dirty work of undermining democracy and the rule of law are cowards and opportunists. They’re willing to participate in the destruction of America as we know it because they believe that many others will do the same. As a result, they believe that they are unlikely to face any personal consequences for their actions and may even be rewarded for their lawbreaking.

And what of those who oppose Trumpism? While there are heroes willing to take a stand against tyranny whatever the personal cost, most anti-Trumpists are reluctant to stick their necks out unless they believe that they are part of a widespread resistance that will grant them some measure of safety in numbers.

In other words, the victory or defeat of competitive authoritarianism will depend to a large extent on which side ordinary people believe will win. If Trump looks unstoppable, resistance will wither away and democracy will be lost. On the other hand, if he appears weak and stymied, resistance will grow and — just maybe — American democracy will survive.

So what we saw on Saturday was more than just the juxtaposition of a poorly attended parade that was supposed to glorify the Leader against massive, enthusiastic protests. We also saw a body blow to Trump’s image of invincibility and a demonstration that millions of Americans are willing to stand up for democracy.

Matt Webb: “I don’t have an Apple Vision Pro (I’ve done the Apple Store demo and have Opinions) but I am so tempted to acquire one entirely for the purpose of sitting in cafes wearing it for hours, yelling on zoom.”

I’m a bit behind on this, but I can not get enough of the interview of Andor show runner and Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy by Ross Douthat in the Times. Gilroy just takes him to task, over and over, zero fucks given.

Douthat: Is “Andor” a left-wing show? Because this is something that I’ve said a couple of times in my writing about it, using it literally as an example, as a conservative columnist, of a work of art that I think of as having different politics from my own that I really, really like. And I’ve had friends, especially on the right, come back to me and say: Oh, you know what, it’s not left wing or right wing; it’s just a TV show about resistance to tyranny. But I think you’ve made a left-wing work of art. What do you think?

Gilroy: I never think about it that way. I never think about it that way. It was never ——

Douthat: [Scoffs.]

Gilroy: I mean, I never do. I don’t ——

Douthat: But it’s a story, but it’s a political story about revolutionary ——

Gilroy: Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?

Douthat: No, I don’t. But I don’t think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism.

…

Gilroy: You could say: Why has Hollywood for the last 100 years been progressive or been liberal? I think it’s much larger. I’ll go further and say: Why does almost all literature, why does almost all art that involves humans trend progressive? Let’s stick with Hollywood. Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director — without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job.

…

Douthat: I love “Michael Clayton.” And I would, again, describe it as kind of a left-wing movie.

Gilroy: I’m going to really push back against “left-wing” on that picture. I don’t understand at all what is left or right about poisoning people with a pesticide and lying about it. I don’t think anybody on the right wants to be — let’s keep my politics out of it, but I can’t see myself ever, in any iteration of myself, identifying with the corporation that has been fighting a class-action suit for poisoning people.

Riccardo Mori goes deep into Liquid Glass:

In Leopard — but also in other versions of Mac OS that came before and after, at least until the Big Sur redesign — the Finder window structure and hierarchy is well defined and self-evident: the main chrome is the area above and below the window’s contents, represented by the title bar, the toolbar below it, and then the status bar at the bottom of the window. The chrome clearly frames the Finder window. Then, inside, we have the sidebar on the left, and the folder contents on the right; it’s more or less the same structure as a Web browser. The folder contents are the Web page, the sidebar shows a lists of places (or bookmarks if you like), the status bar on the bottom works in a similar fashion as a browser’s status bar. It’s a clear representation of what is content versus what are controls. Content and controls don’t bleed into each other’s territory.

But in the world of Alan Dye, it’s all content inside roundrects with thin bezels, and controls hover above it in quasi-borderless states, options become little treasures hidden behind ‘More…’ icons (the circle with three dots in it), panels and windows get deconstructed like those ‘designer dishes’ you see in fancy restaurants.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution: “The federal government spends far more on immigration enforcement than on preventing violent crime, terrorism, tax fraud or indeed all of these combined.”

Almost half of the murders in the United States go unsolved (42.5% in 2023). So how about devoting some of the $167 billion extra in the BBB bill to say expand the COPS program and hire more police, deter more crime and to use Conor Friedersdorf’s slogan, solve all murders. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that $20 billion annually could fund roughly 150 k additional officers, a ~22 % increase, deterring some ~2 400 murders, ~90 k violent crimes, and ~260 k property crimes each year. Seems like a better deal.

Via The Morning News.

Apple sherlocked Sherlock with Spotlight and now Spotlight is sherlocking Raycast. Time is a flat circle.

Heather Cox Richardson continues to amaze with her writing of history in near real-time.

Flatbed train cars carrying tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state.

…

There is no doubt that as their other initiatives have stalled and popular opinion is turning against the administration on every issue, the Trump regime is trying to establish a police state. But in making Los Angeles their flashpoint, they chose a poor place to demonstrate dominance. Unlike a smaller, Republican-dominated city whose people might side with the administration, Los Angeles is a huge, multicultural city that the federal government does not have the personnel to subdue.

Trump stumbled as he climbed the stairs to Air Force One tonight.

Les Orchard outlines his workflow for building with AI tools (writing a spec, asking the bot to write a plan for implementation, iterating bit by bit).

I’m seeing that agentic coding doesn’t foster flow state immersion. And, honestly? That might be perfect for my ADHD brain. Instead of needing those long, uninterrupted blocks of deep focus, I could context-switch between planning, watching the AI work, and reviewing results. Turns out the “zone” might be overrated when you have a bot for a coding partner.

Mike Monteiro argues that late stage capitalism has destroyed the liberal arts, and bemoans the downstream impact that’s having on the life decisions young people are making.

Am I telling you not to go to college? No. Yes. Maybe? I am telling you that decisions are no longer as cheap as they used to be—and should be, honestly. We need 20 year olds to have the freedom to try things, the freedom to explore, the freedom to end up having careers that they couldn’t have imagined at 20. Life requires a certain amount of curiosity and exploration. Life is an open world game. It rewards you for exploring. And capitalism cannot fucking stand that. It wants you on rails. Capitalism wants you to earn the living that life has already granted you.

I’m the parent of two twenty-somethings, with plenty of advantages in the world, and I know they are feeling this pressure, this conflict.

Jon Caramanica in the New York Times, following up on her announcement last week re purchasing her masters.

Declining to revisit “Reputation” underscores both the limits of technology to recreate a work of tactile art, and also honors its divisive-at-the-time rawness. “Reputation” was an argument that artists should take attacks personally, and then use them as fuel. It almost sounds like the product of a dare — take Swift, one of the most careful songwriters of her era, and expose her to some of the most scabrous production in pop, so defiant that it forces her to adjust her vocal approach and tone.

Jason Snell: “Yes, app developers can add AI functionality to their apps today, but it would be a lot easier and more economical if they could rely on an Apple-approved set of models that run entirely for free.” I would be pleasantly surprised if Apple did this (since it would actually deliver value to users, developers, and Apple) but at this point have zero confidence it will actually happen. It just makes too much sense.

Leah Reich on the current state of social media, why we’re pouring our hearts and souls into Chat GPT: it listens.

We’ve spent all these years online sharing into the void, waiting for people to respond. Even in private spaces like Snapchat stories or text, there’s no guarantee someone will get back to you, let alone tell you what you need to hear. We’re so overloaded with messages, content, and information that it’s hard to pay attention to the important stuff, but all this connection hasn’t lessened our need or desire to connect more deeply. In other words, it’s almost as if we’ve been primed.

This reminds me of D. Graham Burnett’s piece in The New Yorker, Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence, where he assigned students in his Attention and Modernity course the task of engaging ChatGPT in a conversation on the history of attention. Excuse this long excerpt, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this passage since I read it back in April. Emphasis mine:

But nothing quite prepared me for office hours the following Monday, when a thoughtful young woman named Jordan dropped by; she’d been up late with her roommates, turning over the experience of the assignment, and wanted to talk.

For her, the exchange with the machine had felt like an existential watershed. She was struggling to put it into words. “It was something about the purity of the thinking,” she said. It was as if she had glimpsed a new kind of thought-feeling.

She’s an exceptionally bright student. I’d taught her before, and I knew her to be quick and diligent. So what, exactly, did she mean?

She wasn’t sure, really. It had to do with the fact that the machine . . . wasn’t a person. And that meant she didn’t feel responsible for it in any way. And that, she said, felt . . . profoundly liberating.

We sat in silence.

She had said what she meant, and I was slowly seeing into her insight.

Like more young women than young men, she paid close attention to those around her—their moods, needs, unspoken cues. I have a daughter who’s configured similarly, and that has helped me to see beyond my own reflexive tendency to privilege analytic abstraction over human situations.

What this student had come to say was that she had descended more deeply into her own mind, into her own conceptual powers, while in dialogue with an intelligence toward which she felt no social obligation. No need to accommodate, and no pressure to please. It was a discovery—for her, for me—with widening implications for all of us.

“And it was so patient,” she said. “I was asking it about the history of attention, but five minutes in I realized: I don’t think anyone has ever paid such pure attention to me and my thinking and my questions . . . ever. It’s made me rethink all my interactions with people.”

She had gone to the machine to talk about the callow and exploitative dynamics of commodified attention capture—only to discover, in the system’s sweet solicitude, a kind of pure attention she had perhaps never known. Who has? For philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the capacity to give true attention to another being lies at the absolute center of ethical life. But the sad thing is that we aren’t very good at this. The machines make it look easy.

M.G. Siegler, with a perfect URL slug (/apple-you-cowards/) on Apple declining to participate in John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live for the first time in ten years:

Can Apple really be that thin-skinned? Again, yes. While similar “bans” were never as explicit as the one around the Gizmodo one (which was undoubtedly dictated from Steve Jobs himself), anyone who has covered Apple knows there have always been less explicit bans – never really talked about, and more simply chalked up to the “sin of omission”, that is, simply choosing not to play ball with anyone too critical of the company.

I bought a ticket for the first time because (a) will be nice to see some friends and (b) this one promises to be interesting, assuming John books some spicy guests. And he absolutely should.

I’ve been following the Flow State blog for the past couple years; every day they feature an artist and deliver “two hours of music that’s perfect for working (no vocals).” If you’re in a musical rut, give them a follow. Today they highlighted the Chicago quartet Third Coast Percussion. I was lucky enough to see them perform at Zakir Hussain’s celebration of life at Grace Cathedral back in February…and they absolutely blew my mind. Earlier this year Third Coast released a performance of Philip Glass’ Aguas de Amazonia, recorded on unusual percussion instruments including PVC pipe, a glass marimba, and almglocken (tuned cowbells!). Give it a listen; it’s great.

A cover of Lyle Lovett’s classic from Kieran Hebden and William Tyler; 11 minutes and 18 seconds of gorgeous evolution for your listening pleasure.

Kyle Chayka:

For journalists and commentators now, especially those of any public notoriety, there’s an identikit new career package. It goes something like this. Loudly quit or get pushed out of your job in traditional media institutions, whether newspapers, television, or even a website. Argue that your voice has been ignored, neglected, silenced, and held back from its true potential of reaching audiences who hunger for truth and connection — it may be true or it may be an exaggeration. Start a series of direct-broadcast channels for yourself — newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel — and then use your preexisting social-media accounts to promote them. Then, broadcast yourself incessantly, your face, your voice, your thoughts, as if you are a 24/7 cable news channel of one. Go on television, if you can, with your Substack publication in your chyron, otherwise, livestream on YouTube or Instagram or Substack. Importantly, collab with anyone who has more followers than you. Cross-post on their newsletter, appear on their video podcast, or get into a public fight that benefits both parties. Finally, you will have developed your digital clique, the bellicose band of paying subs who sustain your livelihood and pay attention to your sponsorships.

Stomach churning; empahsis mine. But! The upside: a very good use of the word “identikit.”

identikit, adjective
very similar in appearance, in a way that is boring and has no character

Jeff leads Wilco (duh, you probably already knew that), Spencer is Jeff’s son and Waxahatchee’s drummer.

Dara Weyna: Question for Spencer: Is it a full circle kind of moment to be drumming in a band that’s on tour with your Wilco family? It’s always so fun to see you and Sammy on stage with your Dad, but this must feel different somehow, I’d imagine. It’s a beautiful thing to witness the many collaborations, connections and relationships that Wilco makes and fosters and something’s tells me you’re a big part of that.

ST:It does feel great, and I feel like the luckiest human being in the world that we’re doing this.

JT: Awwww.

ST: And that I get to see Wilco every night, and …

JT: Oh, brother.

ST: Honestly, it’s true! The weirdest part about it is being in a group that’s even compatible with a Wilco support slot. That’s really exciting to me. I love playing with Katie, it’s such a great group of people that we’re getting to do this with. Anything more well-spoken that I have to say about it is leaving my mind because a Mountain Dew ad is on the TV. But it feels really great. The coolest part is that I feel proud. Sometimes friends from a different part of your life get to see your other friends or your family, or visit you at work or something. You see it through their eyes, and sometimes that doesn’t feel good. But I feel really relieved, though not surprised, that the whole Waxahatchee band seems to sincerely love Wilco as a band, and love them as a touring group.

JT: As an operation.

ST:As an operation that does this thing that we do. And that makes me feel really good. And even if they weren’t expressing any of their admiration, or anything like that, I know just from that feeling of seeing yourself through your friends’ eyes, or seeing your family through their eyes, I’d already be feeling proud and not embarrassed. And I’m very glad that that’s the case. And I know it sounds like I’m saying it because I’m sitting across from my dad, but I’m not.

Emphasis mine.

Great combination of New Consumer’s research (“Almost one in five US consumers — 17% — say they’ve used an Apple Watch in the past week,” and “Men and women report using an Apple Watch in nearly identical proportions. Trump and Harris voters, too”), Frommer’s personal observations of wearing ᴡᴀᴛᴄʜ for the last 10 years, and some analysis:

In its first decade, I’d say the Apple Watch has proven both that there is a mass market for these things and that they, so far, aren’t revolutionary devices. The Watch makes the iPhone better, and therefore strengthens Apple’s ecosystem (and platform lock-in). But its magic feels limited. … There are no Watch-native messaging platforms, network effects, nor unicorns. The iPhone (and cloud) is still where innovation is most potent. Most of the best Watch tools are built into the operating system (notifications, Apple Pay, “Live Activity” trackers, watch face widgets) or are simple extensions of iPhone apps (buttons, remote controls).

I recently took mine off, powered it down and put it away in a drawer. I had just one screen too many in my life, and the one that tapped my wrist had to go.

“The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it’s embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.”

Props to the (well-named) band Surprise Privilege:

A rally Tuesday at San Francisco State University drew hundreds of supporters and protesters of [Turning Point Director] Charlie Kirk, who was speaking on campus. But across the street, a punk show in a grassy roundabout drew a similar-size crowd, including many who came over after heckling the right-wing personality.

“This song goes out to them,” singer Joey S. said, pointing to the Kirk supporters. “It’s called ‘Fuck You.’”

Especially Isamu Noguchi‘s magestic frieze “News” at the entrance to the Associated Prests building.

A telephone, a typewriter, a camera. But the subject of the sculpture isn’t any of these individual products or technologies. It’s the employment of these technologies by humans to create new things, to report and distribute stories about the world. The story is a story about technology, but here, technology is fundamentally a human endeavor. It is humans who give technology meaning and direction, and humans’ directed use of technology which Radio City celebrates. This humanist perspective on technology is simultaneously irreverent, principled, and agency-asserting.

Emphasis mine.

Rosencrans Baldwin attends the US launch of World.

I do see one more famous person, and it’s the mystery guest: musician Anderson Paak, who is presumably being paid handsomely to perform at the event as his alter ego, DJ Pee Wee. Which means he’s wearing his alter ego’s costume of a black bob wig, sequined jacket and sunglasses, so I kind of see him and kind of don’t. The people dance. The people sing. I don’t see a single Covid mask. I am encouraged to get my iris scanned, but I do not get my iris scanned. I am offered and refuse a free Orb Mini, their new product, smartphone-shaped, which World hopes people will use to scan their friends and neighbors and welcome them, secure in their humanity, to this Brave New Reality. And on low couches, I notice a quartet of attractive men and women sitting with their legs and arms draped over one another, one of them a semi-famous start-up CEO (wearing stretchy pants with cargo pockets), and I’m left wondering if they’re maybe a polyamorous quartet, sequestered in this warehouse amid doomsday clocks, protected by their wealth, free to fuck away the final days before an autonomous car picks them up and drives them to some bunker while the rest of us are out here dating robots.

I hate this timeline.

Levine remains a national treasure:

One theory of crypto, popular among venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs, is something like “crypto will be the way that people verify identity online and distinguish themselves from AI.” Another theory of crypto is “you get some tokens and the number goes up.” Now the two theories can work together.

Robin Sloan has a new zine available for purchase.

This is a three-color Risograph print on 11″ × 17″ paper. The poster side bears a design & exhortation that are, as of this writing, indecipherable to the frontier AI models from Google, Anthropic, & OpenAI.

…

This zine is playful & also serious. Playful, because I had so much fun thinking through the cat & mouse of these strategies. Serious, because AI’s compounding capability really does pose a profound, unsettling new challenge to artists of every kind — commercial or academic, aspiring or professional, digital or analog.

This is epochally weird stuff, & anything could happen in the decade ahead. The value & values of art are never static; reconsideration sweeps in like rain. The Secret Playbook isn’t about defense (though there is some defense in here) but rather about where to go next. It’s a map towards higher ground.

Dave Itzkoff covers a different kind of Imperial ship, complete with gorgeous photos by Max Miechowski of Kyle Soller and Denise Gough.

But behind the scenes, Gough said, she was wary of any story line in which Karn’s rescue of Meero led them to a conventional romance, and she expressed this to Gilroy: “I was like: ‘So, what, she just gets saved by a bloke? Is that what we’re going to do?’” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Seriously, you think that’s the story I’m going to tell?’”

Evan Goldfine listened to all of Bach, and blogged the experience. “The more I listen and play, the deeper I feel, and my writing becomes stronger — a beautiful feedback loop. Music writing and art criticism should try to convey the depth and richness of what’s at hand, pointing to what can be uncovered by anyone who is open to exploring.” (Via The Browser.)

The art of the deal, indeed.

This U.S.-backed plan echoes almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort in exchange for helping Trump win the White House. Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight.

…

Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country will not recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea. In this determination, he speaks for the global rules-based order the U.S. helped to create after World War II. Recognition of the right of a country to invade another and seize its territory undermines a key article of the United Nations, which says that members won’t threaten or attack any country’s “territorial integrity or political independence.” French president Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders are standing behind those principles, saying today in a statement from Macron’s office that they reject Russian territorial gains under the U.S. plan. “Ukraine’s territorial integrity and European aspirations are very strong requirements for Europeans,” the statement said.

But Trump himself seems eager to rewrite the world order. In addition to his own threats against Greenland, Canada, and Panama, in a post today on his social media site he echoed Putin’s 2024 statement blaming Ukraine for Russia’s bloody war because it would not agree to Putin’s terms. Today, Trump said Zelensky’s refusal to recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea was “inflammatory,” and he pressured Zelensky to accept the deal.

Curiously, he felt obliged to write that “I have nothing to do with Russia…”.