Laid Off in Your Living Room: The Chaos of Remote Job Cuts. (NYTimes/Emma Goldberg).

First time getting laid off is lonely and scary.

A Happy Memory Can Help You Fall Asleep, if You Know How to Use It. “Lying in bed each night, Andy Buelow often finds himself thinking one thought over and over: How awesome it was to ride the ferry across Lake Michigan as a kid.”

Fort Walgreens The recent spike in shoplifting is both overblown and real. And almost everyone is profiting from it (including you)..

James D. Walsh, Intelligencer staff writer:

“They’re professional and self-employed,” said David Rey, who, after years overseeing security teams in New York department stores, published Larceny on 34th Street: An In-Depth Look at Professional Shoplifting in One of the World’s Largest Stores. “Just like what we do for a living — going to work — they pay their bills and rent and raise their children off the proceeds that they get from shoplifting.”

None of the boosters interviewed for this story could name someone who shoplifted for any other reason than to support a drug habit.

“Mandy” was Barry Manilow’s first #1 pop hit this month in 1975. He scored 21 more top-40 hits between 1975 and 1983.

Seth Godin nerds out about typography for a bit. “Typography is a signal, not just a way to put letters on a page.… They say you can tell a lot about someone from their handwriting. For my professional life, my handwriting has always involved a keyboard.”

“When I tell people I earn my living as a copyeditor, I am typically met with one of two responses: rapt admiration or an almost physical revulsion.”

“… a close examination of the work produced by CNET’s AI makes it seem less like a sophisticated text generator and more like an automated plagiarism machine, casually pumping out pilfered work that would get a human journalist fired.”

A brief history of the Apple Lisa computer, lavishly illustrated with historical images. Released in January, 1983, the Lisa was a commercial flop, but it pioneered the graphical user interface still in use in Windows and Macs today.

Eggflation is just more price-gouging. Cory Doctorow: One company controls the US egg industry, Cal-Maine Food, and it’s making record profits—up 65% net year-over-year.

In its communications to investors, Cal-Maine’s eminently guillotineable CFO Max Bowman attributed the monopolist’s good fortune to “significantly higher selling prices” and “our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures.”

Dumb and shameful until it’s not

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says Web 3.0 is here. It’s not “the blockchain-backed cyberlibertarian free-for-all, where internet access is predicated on using crypto wallets to buy and sell digital assets” or the metaverse. It’s AI.

Now, you might say, “Ryan, A.I. is completely overhyped. Generative-A.I. art tools can’t even figure out how many fingers people have. There are all kinds of legal and ethical problems around this technology. It’s exploitative. It’s wildly insecure. We don’t even fully understand what it will do to our brains, yet. And there is a new dumb company every day hawking worthless A.I. fixes to problems no one actually needs to solve.” Well, fun fact: That was true of Web 2.0 too! In 2013, I used an app called Foursquare to check-in to a dive bar in Greenpoint every weekend via the geotargeting on my phone so I could get free tater tots. Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.

Also: " … the internet is giant machine that turns harassment against women into advertising revenue."

And Mutekimaru, a Japanese YouTuber, “created a system that lets his fish play Pokémon.”

Well, last week, the fish were playing the newest Pokémon release Pokémon Scarlet. The problem is the game is very buggy and during the playthrough it glitched out and the game crashed, but the fish continued controlling the Nintendo Switch’s buttons. The fish opened up the Nintendo Store, bought a game, and, for a brief moment, flashed their owner’s credit card number on the screen. Whoops!

The Reality of Being a Parent With a Controversial Past

Lily Burana wrote a bestselling memoir about her life as a stripper. Now she’s the mother of a four-year-old.

Our cultural fondness for outlaws is context-specific: Everyone loves a badass, but no one loves a bad parent.

…

we Parents with Pasts plead for the clemency of kindness, for assumptions of our inherent normalcy. After all, we wrestle our kids’ pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else.

Prisoners use contraband cellphones to educate themselves, get healthcare, earn income in legitimate business, do political activism, and connect with loved ones and the outside world.

Florida teachers face threatened felony prosecution for having unapproved books in classroom libraries.

The Last Days of Hollywood’s Most Reviled Reporter (NYTimes). A profile of the late Nikki Finke, the most hated and feared reporter in Hollywood. She was an internet journalist in the tradition of Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.

Julie and I went for a walk and saw this house around the corner. It looks nice.

This Guy Noticed Jigsaw Puzzle Companies Use The Same Patterns, So He Made Some Mashups.

“Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable. As a result, I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined.”

Seth Godin: Bitterness is “a wall you can lean against, whenever you choose.”

Jacobin: A Marxist View of Tolkien’s Middle Earth

J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world is a medieval utopia with poverty and oppression airbrushed out of the picture. But Tolkien’s work also contains a romantic critique of industrial capitalism that is an important part of its vast popular appeal.

Also: race, gender, and sex in Middle Earth.

Good morning. Here are your daily ducks.

That strange quality of light you’re seeing in this photo is called “sunshine.” We have not seen it here in a while. True fact: San Diego was once famous for it!

Everywhere on Earth, from Europe to China to Africa to Australia and the Americas, is dominated by Europe or its legacy.

The whole world is either Europe, a European colony, or conquered by Europe or the US (a European colony).

That’s all coming to an end now, says Ian Welsh.

And it’s happening so fast we can see it.

The Death Throes Of The World Europe Made:

[Conflict with China] is about whether a non-European power will be allowed to remake the world Europe made. … It is an existential threat to European rule, and it is being treated as such. The “yellow peril” has arrived.

In 30 years, will Mandarin be the the new English? The new lingua-Franca? The language everyone has to know and that you can, if clumsily, get by on almost everywhere?

Absent a major war, likely nuclear, or civilization collapse, I find it hard to see a scenario where China doesn’t become the most important global power.

In Santee, which is a few miles from where we live, 17-year-old Rebecca Philips says she saw a naked “adult male” in the local YMCA dressing room. The naked person was reportedly a transgender woman. Philips later appeared on Tucker Carlson, the story got picked up by the New York Post and Gateway Pundit, and now a local right-wing wannabe-demagogue is claiming Antifa is going to target the community for violence and their people will “send them [effing] packing.” And the Y is closing early for fear everything will blow up.

Can everybody just chill here? And not go on Tucker Carlson or get ready to send people [effing] packing?

Santee YMCA Closing Early, Fearing Rally Clashes Over Teen’s Report, Trans Rights (Times of San Diego/Ken Stone)

Instagram video: British comedian loves Fahrenheit.

Fahrenheit is the best. Celsius is for losers.

Is Micromanaging Your Life With an App Really a Good Idea?. I’ll add a reminder to myself to look into that.

Winners of the 2022 dog photography awards.

Good morning. Here are your daily ducks.