2023
Yesterday I accidentally made myself super-strong coffee and liked it. This morning, I attempted to reproduce the coffee strength I made by accident yesterday. I may have overcorrected.
Cory Doctorow reviews “Doppelganger,” Naomi Klein’s memoir about how she’s often confused with Naomi Wolf. From that gimmicky springboard, Klein explores the progressive-to-Qanon pipeline that Wolf traveled—folks who formerly considered themselves staunch liberals becoming Trump supporters and embracing right-wing conspiracy theories.
Doctorow:
Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf’s politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to “empower” individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.
Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.
By the way, I had not encountered the phrase “bell hooks” before seeing it in Cory’s post. Initially, I thought it might be an error of the sort that comes up when you’re thumb-typing or dictating into a phone. It’s not.
Late lunch with Julie at Shakespeare’s Pub, San Diego. Good food and spirits, comfortable interior, and many delightful posters and postcards on the walls
10 fall TV standouts, including “Changeling” debut and “Frasier” reboot.
I’ll give the “Frasier” reboot a try. I’m glad to see “Gilded Age” is returning. “Murder at the End of the World” has the most cliched possible premise and I am there for it.
Two series feature the wonderful Jon Hamm, but alas neither seems appealing to me.
Currently reading: The Silo Series Collection by Hugh Howey 📚
1,663 pages. That’ll take a day or two.
Overheard: me at 13: wow i can’t wait til we have immersive computers everywhere like Star Trek
me at 30: wow i can’t wait until we destroy all computers like in dune
NotebookLM, Google’s AI-powered note-taking app, is the messy beginning of something great. “What if you could have a conversation with your notes?” By David Pierce at The Verge.
Google has a history of shutting down products after a few years, so I’m reluctant to rely on anything new from them.
The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel.
Recent astronomical observations are shedding doubt on fundamental theories of cosmology and physics.
… a revolution may end up being the best path to progress. That has certainly been the case in the past with scientific breakthroughs like Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s relativity. All three of those theories also ended up having enormous cultural influence — threatening our sense of our special place in the cosmos, challenging our intuition that we were fundamentally different than other animals, upending our faith in common sense ideas about the flow of time. Any scientific revolution of the sort we’re imagining would presumably have comparable reverberations in our understanding of ourselves.
At Yale’s Long COVID Clinic, Lisa Sanders Is Trying It All
Long-COVID patients, generally speaking, have been very miserable for a very long time, and because the illness attacks their brains, their hearts, their lungs, their guts, their joints — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently, and sometimes in a chain reaction — they bounce from specialist to specialist, none of whom has the bandwidth to hear their whole frustrating ordeal together with the expertise to address all of their complaints: the nonspecific pain, the perpetual exhaustion, the bewildering test results, the one-off treatments. “These are people who have not been able to tell their story to anybody but their spouse and their mom — for years sometimes,” Sanders tells me. “And they are, in some ways, every doctor’s worst nightmare.” From the perspective of a time-pressed physician under ever-more-stringent productivity expectations, who has at most 30 minutes to do a new-patient intake and 15 for a follow-up, “someone who comes in with a very long story — it just sinks your day,” Sanders says.
In America, the Cheese Is Dead:
… in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that’s why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It’s the same; it’s alive.
Kottke: The Infinite Hotel Paradox. A guest walks into a hotel with an infinite number of rooms….
No, Trader Joe’s employees are not trained to flirt. Or so they would like us to believe!
I loved the final scenes of “Justified: City Primeval” and I hope they’re setting up for a second season. The miniseries was enjoyable but lacked the punch of the original series. Those final scenes supplied the missing ingredient.