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Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: Conservatives are struggling to get ahead of this whole “weird” thing. (My two cents: That’s cuz they’re weird.)

I’m not thrilled with the ageism in the Democrats' new slogan: “Donald Trump is old and weird.” But I’m happy to see it seems to be working. I’ll deal with my issues after President Harris is sworn in.

Also from Broderick: Musk Is Violating His Own Terms Of Service (And Likely Election Law) If You Even Care.

Open standards make podcasting work

A Few Blockbuster Podcasts Are Making All the Money. I listen to about 90 minutes of podcasts daily, but I only listen to one of the listed top ten podcasts. I haven’t even heard of most of these (though some of the hosts are familiar names — they’re real-life celebrities). That’s a testimony to the excellent richness of the podcast landscape, and that richness is, to a large degree, attributable to open standards.

“Nearly 100 million Americans age 12 and older listen to podcasts every week,” according to this article in the Wall Street Journal.

I started listening near the beginning, 20 years ago, when podcasts were very much a nerd affair. It amazes me that they are now mainstream like TV and radio are used to be.

Anchorage [Alaska] will one day be the port of exchange between Asia, North America, and Europe…. I don’t think you all are considering how much an ice free Arctic Ocean will change international trade routes. It will become the very northwest passage explorers had been looking for since like 1500.

— Marginal Revolution

“Bob Newhart holds up”

An insightful essay on what made Newhart’s work genius, by Jason Zinoman at The New York Times:

Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.

Newhart was a master of the slow build and used silence and his stammer as power tools.

Also: Marc Maron interviews Newhart from 2014 and 2018.

Newhart went straight to the top. Unlike other comics, he didn’t have years of playing small gigs to refine his act before hitting it big. He went from nowhere to a #1 album and had to learn his craft in the spotlight.

Newhart repeats the hilarious story about how his wife met Don Rickles. The Newharts and Rickles became lifelong friends. Rickles was an insult comic who spewed racist jokes at a time when a person could do those things, and it was clear they were demonstrating how racism was stupid. But offstage, Don Rickles was, by all accounts, a kind and gracious man—the opposite of his onstage persona.

Newhart shrugs and does not explain how he and Rickles became close friends. But I think a big part of it is that they were both good men who played Rat Pack shows but were not interested in the boozing, philandering lifestyle. They were family men.

Please share tips for managing windows on an ultrawide computer display

I recently upgraded from a 27" 14-year-old Apple Cinema Display to a 34" Dell ultrawide.

Until now, I’ve always run a simple windowing setup: Most of the time, I’m using one app, and it’s maximized to fill the whole screen. When I want to switch apps, I Cmd-Tab between them (that’s equivalent to Alt-Tab on Windows). Often, I use two apps, and I tile them side by side when I do.

But that strategy is not going to work for me on a 34" display because the individual app becomes too big to take in.

If I’m working on just one application, I think I’ll have it centered, full height, 2/3 or 3/4 of the width of the screen. We’ll see how that works out over time. But what goes on either edge?

How do you manage your ultrawide lifestyle?

I use the computer for basic productivity, the web and social media. I’m not a gamer and I don’t generally watch videos or listen to music on my desktop.

I already use Raycast for window management, so I don’t need pointers to software such as Raycast, Moom, or Magnet. However, if there are particular applications you love for window management on ultrawide displays, please let me know.

By the way, I searched the Internet for tips on making the transition and found reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace, where people share tips and photos of their ultrawide setups. 34" seems huge to me, but it barely qualifies for that sub. For example, check this out: a 49" display with another monitor mounted above it.

I finally had enough and deactivated my Twitter account. Recently Musk has revealed himself to be an even bigger schmuck than previously.

Rob Beschizza/Boing Boing: “The New York Times wanted to summon one of its favorite characters: an everyday Dem so upset with the Left that they were going to vote for Donald Trump instead.” They quoted “Anna Ayala, notable to [the Times] only for being a 58-year-old who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but now likes the other guy.”

But Ayala is “the famed criminal who put a human finger in a Wendy’s chili among various other escapades.”

(Corrected to fix typo, credit Rob, post to correct place. Oy.)

“Confused about the Vance couch thing? Here’s a quick rundown”

It started as a a joke on X, with user @rickrudescalves claiming Vance revealed in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy that he lubed up two couch cushions and had sex with them when he was a teenager. It went very viral and a lot of people believed it because, I mean, look at the guy, it seems like something he would do. The Associated Press, however, made the mistake of trying to debunk all this, declaring in a headline that Vance has never fucked a couch. But as many pointed out, can they actually prove that? How do we know? The AP has since deleted the post, but I think we, as a nation, should keep loudly discussing this until November.

— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day

If you’re participating in get-out-the-vote campaigns, remember that Election Day is when voting ends. For absentee ballots, voting starts Sept. 21. So, get-out-the-vote campaigns start in September.

Julie and I are quite enjoying the TV series “Evil,” which is of the paranormal investigator genre, like “The Night Stalker” and “X-Files.” In this case, the paranormal investigators work for the Catholic Church.

We’re partway through Season 1.

Did “Night Stalker” and “X-Files” invent the genre of the paranormal investigator, or was that trope already around and established?

Today I found my reporter’s notebook for South by Southwest 2007. That was the event where Twitter hit its first tipping point. I remember cruising around in a taxi with a friend who had a 17" MacBook open on his lap, connected with a wireless modem, watching Twitter for news about parties.

The notebook has a page of notes about voicemail messages. Remember voicemail?

I’m planning my first international trip in five years. I can’t find my passport, but I did find a receipt for a fleece I bought from LL Bean in 2011.

Although I have declined to renew my Tumblr premium membership, I’m grateful to Automattic for keeping the service going.

MacStories' Federico Viticci praises wired EarPods as an alternative to Bluetooth AirPods.

I don’t have a use for EarPods because all my sound-emitting devices are from Apple. Weirdly, that makes me more of an Apple fanboy than the editor of MacStories is.

Ghost cities in the Amazon are rewriting the story of civilization

The Amazon rainforests seem like “an environment largely untouched by humans.” But new archeological discoveries are changing that perception.

“With so much evidence of ancient human activity, it is now thought the pre-Columbian Amazon was inhabited by millions of people – some living in large built-up areas complete with road networks, temples and pyramids.”

And they did it all without the benefit of agriculture as we now understand it.

These discoveries defy conventional wisdom about the nature of civilization.

newscientist.com (subscription required)

apple.news

“one of the reasons i have no particular problem with the manner in which harris has become the presumptive nominee is that i think plebscitary participation in internal party processes is overrated.put another way: is the primary process actually better at picking nominees then the pre-1972 system of conventions and party elites? i don’t think so!” — Jamelle Bouie

Tumblr is raising rates for Premium membership by 1.75x. And I'm canceling

I’ve been disappointed in the direction Tumblr has taken under Automattic, though I acknowledge that it’s a hard business. None of Tumblr’s four owners has managed to make the platform financially sustainable, despite an enthusiastic user base.

Also, I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for Tumblr. I am old enough to be the target audience’s grandparent.

The 75 Best Sci-Fi books of all time. esquire.com I added a couple of these titles to my to-be-read list.

Kamala is a happy warrior and that is a powerful political strength for her

America loves happy warriors; it’s why we loved FDR and Reagan. Biden was a happy warrior as VP, but by 2020, his age caught up with him, and mostly, he seemed tired and angry. That’s not his fault, but it worked against him.

Trump seemed like a happy warrior in the 2016 election — or at least he did in the primary — but now he’s an angry, bitter rageaholic, as are his supporters. A happy warrior can do extremely well against angry, bitter rage.

America still employs a ton of news reporters

Wait, does America really still employ a ton of news reporters? Searching for bright spots in the twilight of the newspaper industry. wapo.st

Surprisingly, given the dire state of the journalism industry, America employs about as many news reporters as it did three decades ago.

That’s not a win—America has nearly 20% more jobs and people than it had 30 years ago.

But it doesn’t point to an industry in collapse either.

The catch is that many of these reporters work outside of journalism organizations, often in PR and marketing.

Having read the article, it describes my winding career path well. I’ve been a daily newspaper reporter, covering local government, crime, community and features. I’ve been a business-to-business tech journalist, which some might argue is not actually journalism. I’ve been a content marketer. And now I’m an analyst. During all that time, I’ve been using the same skills. Even the transition from print to the Internet was gradual and involves many of the same skills.

Silicon Valley is getting behind Universal Basic Income but that’s not enough to resolve the tech-driven wealth divide. “‘We get to be billionaires and you get a few hundred a week’ doesn’t really solve the broader problem.” — NextDraft

This blog is breaking up in two

I decided I don’t like having the memes, vintage photos and other found media on mitchw.blog, so I spun up a couple of separate places for those.

If you’re reading this in Mitch’s Newsletter, you’ll soon be getting two newsletters, one for my posts and the other for the memes, etc. One is Mitch’s Newsletter and the other is Mitch’s Other Newsletter.. You can tell by those newsletter names that I have worked as a marketing professional.

You can also find the memes, etc., on zestymonkey.micro.blog.

More changes to come.

“There is no ‘online world.’ That was always a metaphor, and as it turns out, a bad one. But what can take its place?” — Karl Schroeder. kschroeder.substack.com

San Diego GOP Rep. Darrell Issa Claims Harris Supporters Could Disrupt Netanyahu Speech. timesofsandiego.com — This is not the sick burn Issa thinks it is.

Jo Walton: “The worst book I love: Robert Heinlein’s ‘Friday’”

Walton:

Friday is one of Heinlein’s “late period” novels. The general rule if you haven’t read any Heinlein is to start with anything less than an inch thick. But of his later books, I’ve always been fond of Friday. It’s the first person story of Friday Jones, courier and secret agent. She’s a clone (in the terms of her world an “artificial person”) who was brought up in a creche and who is passing as human. It’s a book about passing, about what makes you human. I think it was the first female out-and-out action hero that I read. It’s also a book about being good at some things but with a large hole in your confidence underneath. No wonder I lapped it up when I was seventeen!

What’s good about it now? The whole “passing” bit. The cloning, the attitudes to cloning, the worry about jobs. The economy. It has an interesting future world, with lots of colonized planets, but most of the action taking place on Earth–that’s surprisingly unusual. There’s a Balkanized US and a very Balkanized world come to that, but with huge multinational corporations who have assassination “wars” and civil wars. There’s a proto-net, with search paths, that doesn’t have any junk in it–that’s always the failure mode of imagining the net. It was easy enough to figure out you could sit at home and connect to the Library of Congress, but harder to imagine Wikipedia editing wars and all the baroque weirdness that is the web.

Also:

Heinlein’s ability to write a sentence that makes you want to read the next sentence remains unparalleled.

The novel predicts a near-future California that is an independent nation. If I recall correctly, the chief executive is called a Sachem and wears a feathered headdress as a token of office. The whole government is structured like B-movie American Indians. Friday, the hero of the novel, says the government is ridiculous — but it works, and California is a good place to live.

I thought about that sequence often during the special gubernatorial election in 2003, when leading candidates included a washed-up action hero, an even more washed-up former child star and a porn star. The washed-up action hero won. He actually was a pretty good governor and has emerged since as an elder statesman.

Much after the election, I came across a retrospective on the former child star, Gary Coleman, which acknowledged he never had a chance of winning but actually had excellent grasp of the issues.

Cory Doctorow: “Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare”

Cory:

Look, cybercrime is a real thing, from pig butchering to ransomware, and there’s real, global harms that can be attributed to it. Cybercrime is transnational, making it hard for cops in any one jurisdiction to handle it. So there’s a reason to think about formal international standards for fighting cybercrime.

But that’s not what’s in the Cybercrime Treaty.

Here’s a quick sketch of the significant defects in the Cybercrime Treaty.

The treaty has an extremely loose definition of cybercrime, and that looseness is deliberate. In authoritarian states like China and Russia (whose delegations are the driving force behind this treaty), “cybercrime” has come to mean “anything the government disfavors, if you do it with a computer.” “Cybercrime” can mean online criticism of the government, or professions of religious belief, or material supporting LGBTQ rights.

Nations that sign up to the Cybercrime Treaty will be obliged to help other nations fight “cybercrime” – however those nations define it. They’ll be required to provide surveillance data – for example, by forcing online services within their borders to cough up their users' private data, or even to pressure employees to install back-doors in their systems for ongoing monitoring.

These obligations to aid in surveillance are mandatory, but much of the Cybercrime Treaty is optional. What’s optional? The human rights safeguards.

"What Homeless San Diegans Think About the Mega Shelter Pitch"

Many homeless and formerly homeless San Diegans expressed reservations about a plan to build a 1,000-bed mega-shelter in the city citing concerns about infectious diseases and conflicts. “The hard truth is that though life on the street can be dangerous and miserable, many who spoke with us would rather deal with the unforgiving nature of life outdoors than move into a 1,000-bed shelter.” By Emily Ito and Lisa Halverstadt. voiceofsandiego.org

Is linkblogging worthwhile anymore?

Dave discusses linkblogging on his podcast:

A 20-minute morning coffee notes rambler podcast, started with a narration of how we do linkblogging these days, mostly by hand, and how Bluesky is being hurt by not having a large-enough character limit. Another plea for textcasting, some standards for what we put on the wire over the social web.

I’ll be interested in hearing Dave’s perspective. I have used Dave’s linkblog as an inspiration for my own, but a few months ago, I began wondering if there’s any value in linkblogging.

I grab links from the same popular websites viewed by everyone with an interest in the news — NYTimes, Washington Post, Reddit, etc. Those websites have far bigger platforms than I do; I provide negligible amplification.

On the other hand, I do enjoy Dave’s links, and he reads those same platforms. So maybe there’s value after all.

I still share links when I want to respond to something (you’re reading an example right now!), or if I think an article might benefit from the boost I give it. Indeed, I drafted multiple link posts at lunch today.

Although I’ve been doing less linkblogging here, I share links most days on reddit.com/r/technology. I have professional motives for that.

“Always carry cash!”

The Crowdstrike fiasco is a lesson in the importance of building resilience — on a societal and individual level, Glenn Reynolds says.

On social media I see people stranded in Paris with no working credit cards and dead ATMs, and that leads to another important lesson: Always carry cash! When traveling, I generally carry enough cash to get me through at least a couple of days (often more) and even at home I keep some cash in case things don’t work right.

Back in the 2003 New York blackout, Amy Langfield wrote about the value of keeping a stash of small bills that she could use at the bodegas when the credit/debit card machines were down. The cashless society depends on the flawless functioning of networks that aren’t really secure or reliable. Cash carries its own information with it – a $20 bill is worth $20 – and you don’t need to know more to spend or accept it. That’s resilient. Likewise making sure you have plenty of cushion with regard to supplies of medication, food at home, and the like.

I think about preppers sometimes. They have a reputation as kooks. But natural disasters happen. Utility grids fail. It’s a good idea to have a few weeks’ supply of shelf-stable food, drinking water and meds on hand, as well as the means to bug out if you need to.

On Reddit: “My 3rd Great Grandpa, sometime in the late 1800s…. His name was Jeremiah Barnes, born 1841 in Pennsylvania. His style is cool to this day.”

The supermarket has redeemed itself by playing KC and the Sunshine Band. I am getting down.

The supermarket is playing XM Radio Worst of the 80s. Pat Benatar. Foreigner. Can Flock of Seagulls be far behind?

I am feeling very good about the presidential election and the direction of the US today.

The Democrats just have to not fuck this up now. Which is admittedly a bar that is usually too high for them to clear.

I’d like to live in precedented times for a while.

I’d like a few decades about which future history teachers say, “We’re not even going to talk about that period. It was boring.”

The 90s were like that. It was lovely. The big news was about a married guy who cheated on his wife with an intern.

I see the fascist New York Times is already going at Harris.

“It seems like there are two acceptable settings for female politicians: nurturing motherly matron or total bitch.”

My friend Meadhbh Hamrick sends a follow-up in email to my post comparing Kamala Harris to the fictional politiian Chrisjen Avasarala from “The Expanse,” a science fiction series set centuries in the future.

Avasarala is a beautiful Indian woman in her 60s, elegantly dressed in traditional styles from that country. Played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, Avasarala is intelligent, fierce, well-educated, honorable, honest, doesn’t suffer fools the least little bit, and swears like a longshoreman.

My friend Meadhbh Hamrick writes:

… women are often (always?) held to a double standard in politics. It seems like there are two acceptable settings for female politicians: nurturing motherly matron or total bitch. Men on the other hand can certainly be “nurturing dad/grand-dad” (Lloyd Benson or Joe Biden on a good day) or asshole (Ron DeSantis or Matt Gaetz), but they also have a third setting: just a guy doing politics.

….

I’ve been a Harris fan for a couple decades. In the late 90s I was randomly in a position to hear her talk to a gaggle of law students. She’s sharp. Some people in California don’t like her because she was so close to Willie Brown and… I get that. But there are a lot worse things you can say about modern politicians. Some people discounted her candidacy in the past because as California AG, she did her job and managed an organization which prosecuted people accused of violating the law. She also took heat for trying to move a capital murder case to life in prison. I’m actually okay with that and when the pundits talk about it, they keep saying it’s a negative.

And yes, she seems to be throwing down an Avasarala vibe, but I’ve been lucky enough to see her talk where she wasn’t campaigning and she did a good job with “option 3: just a person doing a job.”

AOC: Democratic leadership who want to replace Biden have no plan what to do next. None.

The Democratic leaders want to remove Harris as well as Biden, she says.

AOC is disgusted that the leadership is bringing this up now rather than months ago when we had a lot more options and time to plan.

independent.co.uk, thehill.com and newrepublic.com.

The only three Democratic leaders who make sense are AOC, Bernie Sanders, and my own Congressional Rep. Sara Jacobs. As a whole, the national Democratic Party is a bunch of idiots. The Republicans are even bigger idiots, and they’re Nazis too.

Today, I learned that Friday is POETS Day in England.

It stands for “Piss Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

en.wikipedia.org

On Reddit: “My grandma on Christmas day, 1952. She recently passed and we found this photo of her with a gun as a 17 year old. She was a classy lady so it’s fun to see her as a wild child.” reddit.com

A company that’s supposed to prevent outages caused a big one: A CrowdStrike update crashed Microsoft systems and took down a slew of businesses around the world, including airlines, banks and more. My colleague Diana Goovaerts reports. fierce-network.com

My husband was slowing down. He needed protecting. wapo.st A moving essay by Sally Quinn, widow of Ben Bradlee, about his final descent into dementia.

Occasionally, Bradlee would snap back to his old, fierce self. Is that what we’re seeing with Biden?

I’m regularly checking github for progress on @Mtt’s new Sumo theme for Micro.blog, about which I am absurdly excited.