🤖 Mitch's newsletter
Mitch's Blog
An inside look at the New York City subway’s archaic signaling system. NYTimes — Fascinating article, beautiful photos and graphics.
Under Hegseth, Chaos Prevails at the Pentagon. NYTimes
Please Enjoy These Images Of The 2025 Corgi Derby. Defector
“The Pitt’s” very horny fandom swallowed the web. Garbage Day — I love “The Pitt” but have not shipped anyone.
The evolution of the alpha male aesthetic. Bloomberg — Derek Guy walks through male style, from 19th Century bodybuilder Eugen Sandow to Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. My style is best described as “are you sure you want to go out wearing that?”
At 77, she’s as fit as a 25-year-old. What her body tells us about aging. The Washington Post
The Patriotism Trap: Accepting the premise leads inevitably to the outcome. Hamilton Nolan
I just received an error message that says my magic link is no longer valid. My magic link is too valid. My magic link is in its PRIME.
Phoenician culture spread across the Mediterranean not through mass migration but through cultural transmission and assimilation. “Ancient Mediterranean societies were cosmopolitan, with people from different regions trading, moving often over large distances and having offspring with each other.” The Max Planck Society
Shakespeare may not have left his wife Anne in Stratford for decades when he went to London. A researcher says a newly discovered text from a letter shows she lived with him in London, potentially upending the established belief that their marriage was unhappy. The Guardian
I sometimes see memes about Americans offended to hear Spanish or other foreign languages spoken publicly. Living where I do, when I go out around people, it’s unusual for me to not hear people speak Spanish or an Asian language. Somehow, I bear up under the strain of being around people minding their own business and doing things that don’t harm me in any way.
A Facebook friend commented on Robert A. Heinlein’s distinctive writing voice. I have noted this myself, and to me it is one of the pleasures of re-reading Heinlein.
It is a very, very midcentury American voice. To me, it seems strongly influenced by hard-boiled noir movies and screwball comedies. Although it is perhaps more likely that Heinlein was influenced by hardboiled authors rather than movies — maybe not Hammett and Chandler directly, but that school.
In Heinlein’s 24th Century, men drive spaceships and wear kilts, but they also smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes. Cab drivers have stogies sticking out of their mouths, and they call men “Bub” and “Mac.”
On a video meeting at work, someone’s dog was pestering their cat in the background. Later, someone mentioned this viral video from years ago. It’s even funnier than I remember it, and it just keeps getting better and better and more and more chaotic.
One day more than 20 years ago, a friend was coming down from Los Angeles, about two hours away, to visit. We were going to meet up downtown. Until that day, we would have decided on a specific time and location to meet. That day, we agreed my friend would text me when he was about a half-hour out from downtown and I’d hop in my car and we’d figure out a place to meet on the fly.
This is perfectly ordinary behavior today, but at that time it felt like we were living in the future.
While I was walking the dog a few days ago, a car rolled up next to us and a young man rolled down his window and shouted, “THAT IS A BEAUTIFUL DOG!”
Minnie has been insufferably vain ever since.
I cannot bear to throw away an empty cardboard box if it looks like a good box.
