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In other words, the story is less a rightward shift than an anti-Trump collapse. And, more importantly, that many people have generally exited the political process all together. I'm mostly abstaining from the many hot takes on why the election went the way it did. This may be the most cogent piece I've read. This is a moment indeed, not for destruction but transformation. (Also, I'd like to not link to this newsletter provider, but there's good writing out there, and I wish it were off this service). Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
8 months ago

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More from Naz Hamid — Journal + Links

✏️ Tag, you're it

Tagged by Scott and Luke and in thoughtful return, I’m answering the Blog Questions Challenge here. Some of these answers may overlap with the answers I gave Manu for his People & Blogs series, so I’ll do my best to do something a bit different. Please visit Manu’s P&B site though, and read through many of the excellent interviews there. Much credit to Bear Blog for these questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I noted how I appreciated the early bloggers, in particular from the Pyra Labs/Blogger crew, but to go back even further, I was fond of journaling early. Much of that was in the form of drawings as a child, then coupled with text. It wasn’t until I read about how musicians like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam would keep copious journals, and in particular, Henry Rollins’ Get In The Van, showed me that documenting your life was important as a record of a lived person. Rollins would later read from these journals early in his transition from full-time musician to spoken word artist, and the storytelling inspired me. Since I was online, and web design had captivated me, it all came together. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? I’m currently using the lovely static site generator, Eleventy (11ty). It pushes to a GitHub repository, which triggers a deploy to Netlify. After using so many different platforms over the decades, with my posts and data semi-locked in MySQL databases, the idea of a fast, file-first, SSG was the way I absolutely wanted to go when I started blogging at this domain. Steph Ango’s File Over App is a thoughtful read on data portability. Have you blogged on other platforms before? As mentioned just before this, yes. I started with Geocities, Livejournal, tried Greymatter, then Movable Type was the first to make it all click. I got really comfortable and pushed that system far — Gapers Block was the most involved version that I had done with multiple blogs running under one instance with different layouts and sections and includes all over the place. Dean Allen’s (RIP) Textpattern stole my heart away for many years after MT got acquired, and then I stopped blogging when Weightshift became my focus, and social media started to bloom. Weightshift used various CMSs for clients: MT, TXP, ExpressionEngine, CraftCMS, Wordpress, etc. I toyed with Tumblr, and other things, but eventually restarted with Jekyll, but quickly switched to 11ty. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? Most everything starts in Bear. I have a master note of ideas, that links out to other notes and I keep adding new ones, revisit others, and check off published ones. When do you feel most inspired to write? Whenever an idea strikes. This can happen at any time and drafts are started anywhere. I generally publish in the evening though. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? I used to be more immediate with my publishing decades ago, adhering to a near daily schedule. These days, some thought and care goes into each post, and if possible, I like to add a touch of flavor to a post, like the rotated album covers for the Music in 2024 post. What are you generally interested in writing about? How we as humans live in a world ever-changing because of technological influence and society’s adoption and adaptation to it. I love travel so posts about cultures and countries, as well as overlanding and camping domestically. And personal things that are more feeling the feels. Who are you writing for? Myself first, but through a lens of, “this information or thought could help someone else, and/or I’d love to share a different perspective that’s unique to me.” What’s your favorite post on your blog? 2023 in the Rearview is a big one, and I worked on that for a while. Taken for a Ride is a good one I think about taking a Waymo autonomous vehicle for the first time, but I like the sort of pieces that come from a more emotional and resilient place, like Let This Be a Moment, that allow me to work through things. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature? I’m very content with 11ty. I’m constantly evolving and refactoring the design and code where I can see improvement. This is a lovely mode to be in: it’s iterative like software development than constantly new like marketing. As for features: a work section (underway), and better ways to showcase my photography, which is a longtime interest and activity for me. Tag ‘em. I’m going to tag Bix, Ethan, Gosha, Grant, Matt, Piper, Rachel, Simon, Susan, Thu, and Winnie. Read on nazhamid.com or Reply via email

7 months ago 60 votes
🔗 Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet

We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere, all while showing us how happy we should be with the limitations imposed on us. — Den Delimarsky A long, weighty one, but very worth the read. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

7 months ago 43 votes
🔗 SEEN, READ 2024

01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED — Steven Soderbergh Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of 2024. It's fascinating to see how many movies he watched multiple times, and the reverse watch of the original Star Wars trilogy. Phantom of the Menace twice too? Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

7 months ago 43 votes
🔗 Media Recap 2024

I’m including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works of—creative genius, or something, that I’ve encountered this year. I’m not a critic; I am mostly just talking about things I liked. These are tremendous to me. I hope they can be tremendous to you, too. — Anh The list is great, but this one is also visually gorgeous. Best experienced in a browser near you. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

7 months ago 34 votes
🔗 Future Web

It’s idealistic and very millennial of me to reminiscence the early days of Web innocence, unbound creativity it hosted and wonderful lack of monetisation of virtually every aspect of being online. We can’t turn back time. But, individually and collectively, we can strive for better as the Web evolves as a home for work, knowledge, community, and love. We can resist the ongoing enshittification and corporate capitalism. So I jotted down an non-exhaustive list of what I’d love the future Web to be. — Karolina Szczur A great list. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

7 months ago 39 votes

More in literature

'I Would If Possible Imitate a Tree'

Yet another hero of autodidacticism is Michael Faraday (1791-1867), the English physicist and chemist who discovered electromagnetic induction, which eventually led to development of inductors and transformers, and such devices as electric motors and generators. True to the practice of rigorous self-education, Faraday was also a first-rate writer, with a gift for clarity and vividness. He had little formal education and starting at age fourteen, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder and bookseller.   Faraday was then employed as a chemical assistant in the Royal Institution in London, where he worked with the great chemist Humphry Davy. He went on to discover benzene and carbon tetrachloride, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularized the use of such words as anode, cathode, electrode and ion.   In 1818, Faraday and four friends organized what we would call a self-help writing group, and much of what they produced is collected in Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London (2008). Faraday sought naturalness in his writing, and blamed the practice of what English teachers today call “topic sentences” for his early awkwardness:   “[It] introduces a dryness and stiffness into the style of the piece composed by it for the parts come together like bricks one flat on the other [. . .] I would if possible imitate a tree in its progression from roots to a trunk to branches trees & twigs where every alteration is made with so much ease & yet effect that though the manner is constantly varied the effect is precise and determined.”   I recommend Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle, which started as a series of six lectures for young people in 1848 on the chemistry and physics of flames and was published in 1861: “There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy,” Faraday writes, “than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.”   He suggests we look first at the brightest part of the flame. Writers, like scientists, are rewarded by close observation:   “Why, there I get these black particles, which already you have seen many times evolved from the flame, and which I am now about to evolve in a different way. I will take this candle and clear away the gutterage, which occurs by reason of the currents of air; and if I now arrange a glass tube so as just to dip into this luminous part . . . you see the result. In place of having the same white vapour that you had before, you will now have a black vapour. There it goes, as black as ink. It is certainly very different from the white vapour; and when we put a light to it, we shall find that it does not burn, but that it puts the light out.”   Faraday’s exercise is simple and easily repeatable even by young people, and certainly by non-chemists. Note Faraday’s conversational prose:   “Well, these particles, as I said before, are just the smoke of the candle; and this brings to mind that old employment which Dean Swift recommended to servants for their amusement, namely, writing on the ceiling of a room with a candle.” In “Directions to Servants” (1798), Jonathan Swift had written: “Write your own name, and your sweet-heart’s, with the smoak of a candle, on the roof of the kitchen, or the servants hall, to Shew your learning.” Faraday goes on:   “But what is that black substance? Why, it is the same carbon which exists in the candle. How comes it out of the candle? It evidently existed in the candle, or else we should not have had it here. And now I want you to follow me in this explanation. You would hardly think that all those substances which fly about London, in the form of soots and blacks, are the very beauty and life of the flame, and which are burned in it as those iron filings were burned here. Here is a piece of wire gauze, which will not let the flame go through it; and I think you will see, almost immediately, that when I bring it low enough to touch that part of the flame which is otherwise so bright, that it quells and quenches it at once, and allows a volume of smoke to rise up.”   A self-educated man, Faraday encourages the ongoing self-education of his audience by encouraging close examination of commonplace phenomena.   Faraday died on this date, August 25, in 1867, at age seventy-five.

13 hours ago 3 votes
Cici Osias

Sewing cultures together The post Cici Osias appeared first on The American Scholar.

14 hours ago 3 votes
Are we living in heaven or hell?

It's a showdown between Elysium and Tartarus.

3 hours ago 1 votes
'We Talked About Philip Larkin'

Two of the three copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson I own were gifts from my brother. He loved garage sales and thrift shops and had no shame about looking for second-hand bargains. He liked the English expression “jumble sale.” Ken wasn’t cheap but never seemed to have enough money. My final loan to him he never repaid before his death on August 24, 2024. I’m not bitter about that. In fact, I now find it endearing. It is quintessential Ken, one more confirmation of his personality. I’m glad he felt he could ask.  There was a lengthy spell when we stopped talking. Friends tell me this is hardly unusual between siblings, though it never felt comfortable. His daughter Hannah in 2005 (she was then about ten) wrote me a letter saying that both of us ought to grow up. Besides, she wanted to meet her uncle. Ken didn’t fly so I made an annual trip to Cleveland to visit him and his family. A family friend, Rumanian-born Giorgiana Lascu, always known as "George," posted a nice remembrance of my brother:   “Dinner always at 5:30, which nobody ever missed for the good conversation, we never talked about our feelings, but we talked about Philip Larkin or smack to each-other or about the news, or whatever people were reading. Everyone was always reading something. Sometimes dinner was followed by a lively drum circle, conducted on the table top. We were always welcome, though feeding two extra girls during a recession must have been hard.”   The first Boswell Ken gave me was the boxed, three-volume Heritage Press edition from 1963. I remember lugging it through the airport in my suitcase along with other books I had purchased in Cleveland. The other copy is a heavy, one-volume, leather-bound brick of a book. It’s an American reprint of the English edition edited by John Croker in 1831, the one Macaulay famously savaged. It’s an extravagantly ugly book, printed in blindness-inducing small print, and if anyone other than my brother had given it to me, I would have unloaded it long ago. Ken also gave me two hardcover volumes of Boswell’s journals -- yard-sale treasures.   Sadness mingles with a diffuse sense of guilt and the pleasures of memory. Every day I think of something I what to tell Ken that would make him laugh or at least snort. Death resolves little or nothing. Johnson writes in his Rambler essay on September 22, 1750:   "When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."

yesterday 4 votes
Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: Pioneering Philosopher of AI Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of… read article

2 days ago 6 votes