The way we live in the United States is not normal.

Kirsten Powers:

I began to notice a learned helplessness in the United States, where people don’t revolt at the notion of a college education costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wondered why so many people treat it as completely normal that we have GoFundMe campaigns to help people pay for life-saving medical care that their health insurance won’t cover.

I watched as people on social media claimed it was “pro-labor” to tip a person for ringing up your order at a food or coffee chain rather than demanding the multi-millionaire (or billionaire) owner of that company pay their employees a living wage (as is the norm in Europe, where tipping is not expected and the owners of the restaurants and stores are typically not among the uber-wealthy).

I realized there are other places in the world (not just Italy) where life isn’t about conspicuous consumption and ‘crushing’ and ‘killing’ your life goals, where people aren’t drowning in debt just to pay for basic life necessities. There are places where people have free time and where that free time is used to do things they love — not to start a side hustle.

Ends on a hopeful note. The United States can—and should—do better.

Raycast has a new feature where you can activate your Mac camera and look at yourself before jumping on a video call. I tried it out as soon as I got to my desk this morning, before having my first sip of coffee. That was a mistake.

So it begins. My Tumblr blog, formerly known as “Atomic Robot Live,” is now “Mitchipedia.” Now to discover the inevitable breakage! Let the wild rumpus of error messages begin!

Hollywood Goes Home: How Celebrity Endorsements Are Helping Dems Win Down Ballot. “In towns across the nation, there is _that _person — the kid who made it big, starred in some movies, became an action hero, maybe even won some awards. What if that person told you about an upcoming local election? Or a candidate who you should consider supporting? They are famous, sure, but they are more than that: They are _your town’s _famous person, someone with local credibility because they know what it’s like to grow up where you did. That’s the theory behind The Hometown Project, an progressive effort that looks to pair celebrities with candidates for state legislature, school board, or other local offices from the areas they grew up in.”

I will gladly endorse any Democrat running for office in my home town of East Northport, N.Y.

I’m having a couple of mandarin oranges with lunch. They’ve been sitting around the house a while. I think I will use the remaining fruits as billiard balls.

I recently discovered the power of not having opinions about things. Was Henry Kissinger a war criminal whose death we should celebrate? I don’t know. Maybe one day I’ll learn some things about him and come up with some conclusions. I have other things to do right now.

I registered the domain mitchipedia.org and now I love it so much I’m thinking about going to the hassle of changing alllllllll my social media accounts and my blog domain to that.

Before I upgraded to Sonoma I heard people saying the screensavers were great and I thought that was ridiculous. How great can screen savers be, I thought. But damn those are nice screensavers.

Thousands of papers seized from Spanish ships during the 18th Century are now online. The letters are from and to ordinary sailors, revealing details of daily life from that time.

The correspondence was seized by the British during wars in the 1700s, and is being published by British researchers.

“My dear beloved husband I will celebrate that this letter has reach[ed] your hands and finds you with the perfect health that I wish for myself," [writes Francisca Muñoz in Seville to her husband, Miguel Atocha, in Mexico on 22 January 1747/]. “I would like to know the reason why I did not receive any response to the 13 letters I sent to you; I would like to know if perhaps over there [there] is no paper or pen or ink not to have written even a letter…. “

Kvetch kvetch kvetch. But Francisca is just getting wound up.

Serious questions: At what point do rights of privacy end? If these people were alive, it would be a crime to publish their private letters. Do rights of privacy end at death? Even after 300 years, should these papers continue to be kept private?

Everybody who was Anybody had Dr. Feelgood and his Speed Shots on Speed Dial

Dr. Max Jacobson, aka “Dr. Feelgood,” injected amphetamine-based concoctions into the arms of celebrities and powerful people including JFK, Alfred Hitchcock, Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe and more.

Capote described the “vitamin shots” as “instant euphoria.”

Messy Nessy Chic quotes Capote:

You feel like Superman. You’re flying. Ideas come at the speed of light. You go seventy-two hours straight without so much as a coffee break. You don’t need sleep, you don’t need nourishment. If it’s sex you’re after, you go all night. Then you crash – it’s like falling down a well, like parachuting without a parachute. You want to hold onto something and there’s nothing out there but air.

On the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast: While robots and self-driving cars get all the attention, four mundane technologies have the potential to change the future: Artificial wombs, smart toilets, new forms of public transportation and new cleaning machines.

… the Court felt that bringing the chicken into the courtroom to play tic-tac-toe would degrade the dignity of the Court. I thought that the dignity of the Court was degraded by executing a mentally-ill person.

— This American Life. Poultry Slam

The real AI fight

Last week’s spectacular OpenAI fight was reportedly a donnybrook between “Effective Altruism” and “Effective Accelarationism”—two schools of philosophy founded on the nonsensical faith, absent any evidence, that godlike artificial intelligence (AI) beings are imminent, and arguing over the best way to prepare for that day.

Cory Doctorow:

This “AI debate” is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we’ll get a locomotive….

But for people who don’t take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they’ve split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse….

Pluralistic: The real AI fight

Left out of this argument are the real abuses of artificial intelligence and automation today, which (Cory says, quoting Molly White) “is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI.”

AI and automation can be used for a great deal of good and a great deal of evil—and it already is being used for both, Cory says. We need to focus the discussion on that.

Like Cory, I think it’s entirely possible that we may achieve human-level AI one day, and that AI might become superintelligent. That might happen today, it might happen in a thousand years, it might never happen at all. The human race has other things to worry about now.

The Pneumatic Tube Mail System in New York City

… the first cylinder tube to travel through the New York City system contained “a Bible, a flag and a copy of the Constitution. The second contained an imitation peach in honor of Senator Chauncy Depew (He was fondly known as “The Peach”). A third carrier had a black cat in it, for reasons unknown.”

Residents of North Sentinel Island off India are one of the few surviving tribes that resist contact with the outside world. When a missionary successfully contacted them in 2018, in violation of international law, they killed him brutally.

Turns out they (or their neighbors) were in contact with the outside world previously—a Victorian English adventurer—and it went badly for them, tragically and unsurprisingly.

Why Uncontacted Tribes Want to Stay Uncontacted

Placebos are effective treatments for many conditions, such as chronic pain. They work even when the patient is aware they are receiving a placebo, according to a leading researcher in placebo studies.

In other news, “placebo studies” is a thing.

Microcelebrity in 2007

Writing in 2007, Clive Thompson describes the phenomenon of “microcelebrity”–how blogging, Facebook and Flickr makes people famous to a few fans. “Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and ‘message’ almost like a self-contained public relations department.” Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity: Why Everyone’s a Little Brad Pitt | WIRED

Microcelebrities were still uncommon back then, but now everybody who’s active on social media is a microcelebrity, even if it’s just posting family photos to instagram.

Thompson was writing then about blogging and Flickr. Facebook and Twitter were not yet mainstream (arguably, Twitter never was). Now it’s Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. More widespread but still the same phenomenon.

Problems vs. situations: When facing a problem, ask yourself “is it a problem or a situation? Problems, by definition, have solutions. You might not like the cost of the solution, the trade-offs it leads to, or the time and effort it takes, but problems have solutions. On the other hand, situations don’t. Situations are simply things we need to live with.” Excellent life advice from Seth Godin. Working with problems

Feynman stories, Richard Feynman and scientism

A “Feynman story” is “any anecdote that someone tells that is structured so that the teller comes off as a genius and everyone else in the story comes off as an idiot.

“[Many people] seemed to think Feynman was a great guy…. [many] other people didn’t think he was so great. So Feynman seems like a standard case of a guy who was nice to some people and a jerk to others.”

Also:

Feynman couldn’t see the value of something like sociology because intellectually he was prone to extreme scientism – to the view that forms of knowledge that can’t be pursued exclusively via the methods of the natural sciences aren’t real knowledge. The ironic paradox here is that someone who has any grasp of the sociology of knowledge would immediately recognize that this idea – a very common one in our contemporary intellectual culture – is false, and in a very socially pernicious way, as can be seen in contemporary attempts to defund the humanities and social sciences.

Richard Feynman was a brilliant physicist, raconteur, teacher and popularizer. But he was only human.

Lawyers, Guns & Money: Feynman, pedagogy, and the two cultures -

“Avoid situations that someone you love might later have to explain on a medical or government form.”

Merlin Mann has been collecting life lessons in a lengthy bullet list on GitHub.

Merlin’s Wisdom Project

Some more gems:

  • Minimize the number of conversations you have through a closed bathroom door. Unless you’re outside the door and there’s a fire, or you’re inside the door and you’re out of toilet paper. Otherwise, have a little dignity, and wait for the door to open.
  • Your refrigerator is not a library or a hope chest. So, if you decide to save some leftovers, write the current day of the week on them. Then, when you rediscover your treat 3-5 weeks from now and wonder “Now, which Sunday was that?” Yeah. Time to deeply curate your odd little food museum.
  • Remember that, like babies and balls, you can bounce. The extent to which any given event—often an imagined event—might derail or even destroy you is, at least in small ways, still something that’s in your control. Especially when you remember that you can bounce.
  • As you get older, you will increasingly fear losing power, and you will become bitter, defensive, and angry about change. Curiosity, acceptance, and exposure to new people can help with this. But, man are you ever going to get weird about people with purple hair who are not afraid of you.
  • Related: almost no one has ever actually been afraid of you.
  • Relatedly related: the only people who were ever actually afraid of you were the handful of people who loved you and desperately wanted you to love them back.
  • If the soap in a guest bathroom is new and shaped like anything besides a bar of soap, do not use it. Also, do not eat it. Because I know you kinda want to. Especially those shiny little sea shells.
  • … if you really want to help someone, offer something extremely specific. “I’m here for you! 😬👍” is not nearly as cool as “Can I drop off a lasagna at 4?”
  • Whenever your first solution to a problem feels like it should involve buying something plastic at The Container Store, consider a second solution.
  • Try to save some parts of your life to be just for you. Including some special things that you’re happy about or are even a little proud of. If your only private things are shameful things, you will become very sad and will eventually despise your own company.
  • Maybe almost never say anything about how someone looks ever.
  • Related: if you are commenting on how someone looks, only ever compliment them on a thing that they have chosen.
  • Relatedly related: but, yeah, maybe still almost never say anything about how someone looks ever.
  • Never argue on the internet. No one will remember whether you won or lost the argument; they’ll just remember that you are the sort of person who argues on the internet.

Are Men Obsessed With the Roman Empire? “In posts shared on social media, women have been asking the men in their lives how often they think about ancient Rome. ‘Constantly,’ one husband responded. ‘Like, every day,’ said a boyfriend. As of Thursday night, a thread on X, formerly known as Twitter, went on like this for MDCLXXIX messages.”

Turn Off Push Notifications. App developers want to blast you with trivial notifications all day, every day. The best way to take your attention back is to get rid of notifications altogether (or nearly so).

I’m extremely online, but nearly all my mobile notifications are switched off. There’s nothing Facebook has to say to me that needs my immediate attention.

Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles

I read Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” when I was a teen-ager, and did not find it erotic, and didn’t realize it was intended to be erotic. The eroticism just went right over my head. I thought it was long-winded and Louis was a self-absorbed whiner. But I did finish the book.

When I was in my 20s, I read “The Vampire Lestat” and loved it. Again: If it was intended to be erotic, I didn’t realize it or even register it. I grooved on it as a science fiction nerd. It turned a science fiction cliche on its head—the belief that a person from the past, transported to the present, would have his brain fried by all the technology and science. Lestat tells us he grew up in the French Enlightenment—science, technology, sexual freedom and exalting the common people were all familiar to him.

I loved that the book “Interview With the Vampire” existed in the Vampire Chronicles universe, and Lestat felt about that book exactly as I did.

I loved the idea of vampires as heroes. Or at least protagonists.

And I loved the Deep Time history of it. You think events in the Enlightenment were long ago? How about Ancient Rome? OK, you think that’s old—how about ancient Egypt? I’m still a sucker for that kind of thing today. I’m currently reading Kage Baker’s series about the Company; she makes ancient Egypt look like current events.

I tried to draw a turkey in spray cheese for the dog’s Thanksgiving dinner last night.

Spray cheese is not my medium.

However, the dog was not unhappy with the outcome.

AI developers have turned science fiction stories about godlike supercomputers into a religion, leading to the current infighting at OpenAI. “The field of AI … is profoundly shaped by cultish debates among people with some very strange beliefs.” Crooked Timber: What OpenAI shares with Scientology

OpenAI’s alignment problem. The company’s board failed the institution. But did it have a point?

Casey Newton defends – or at least explains – the OpenAI board’s position. The company was supposed to be moving slowly and avoiding the harms of AI while harnessing good for humanity. Altman was running the company as a fast-track start up.

Whenever I see an Econoline van, I think of a short story that Joe Haldeman wrote about a man who sets off a series of nuclear bombs in cities. Econoline vans play a role in the conspiracy. I read that story 50 years ago, but I still think of that story every time I see one of those vans.

Recent college graduates are drinking less. It’s even a movement with a name, NoLo—no-alcohol, low-alcohol.

I’ve never been a heavy drinker, and over time I drink less and less. I rarely like the effect alcohol has on me.

But I do sometimes like a drink. I expect I’ll have one or two on Thanksgiving.

It’s time for Gen Z to lose the sobriety stigma

Search Engine: Why don't we eat people?

Today I learned that on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas, he encountered a friendly tribe, the Arawaks—“fitted to be ruled and to be set to work to cultivate the land and do all else that may be necessary”—that warned him about another tribe, the Caribs, that were vicious and ate their enemies. We get the word “cannibalism” from their name. Queen Isabella of Spain said it was OK to treat the Caribs harshly because of their vile barbaric practices.

Search Engine podcast host PJ Vogt and his guest, writer Kelefa Sanneh, note that the Spaniards themselves were practicing something vile and barbaric—slavery. Finding slaves was a primary purpose of Columbus’s mission.

Also, the Europeans were big hypocrites because they themselves practiced cannibalism—grinding up mummies and consuming the powder as medicine. When mummies from Egypt became hard to procure, Europeans figured out how to accelerate mummification in fresh human corpses.

Search Engine: Why don’t we eat people?

The likely GOP nominee is forgetting where he is, stumbling over words, and waxing full fascist…. the armchair gerontologists parsing every utterance from President Joe Biden, trying to distinguish his congenital stutter from his natural aging, should look at Trump, whose behavior has gone from bad to weird to bizarre.

— Has Trump Gone Even Crazier?

No, there isn’t a wave of TikTok teens supporting Osama bin Laden.

… everything we see about TikTok is just being filtered through a media and political apparatus that doesn’t know how it works and has no issue cherry-picking random nonsense out of the app to fit whatever agenda they subscribe to.

— Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day. TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden

For several months, I noticed that my MacBook Pro made weird hissing and clicking sounds in the morning. That’s bad, I thought, and I checked to be sure my backups were OK.

But other than that, I didn’t think about it. The sounds only lasted a second or two and only happened once or twice in the morning.

Recently, I realized the MacBook Pro wasn’t making the noise. It was my insulated coffee carafe, which rests next to the MBP when I’m having coffee at my desk in the morning.

I recently received this message in text spam:

Evelyn, it’s no sin to love each other and it’s not annoying.

Just that one single line of text. No greeting, no context, nothing else.

A+ for creativity. Genius.

I hate when blueberries get wrinkled. They’re like Oompa Loompa scrotums.

Interesting analysis on using social media to drive traffic by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day (one of my favorite newsletters). A couple of highlights:

  • Threads is driving the most traffic. He thinks that’s just a bait-and-switch by Meta but is happy to ride it out while the fun lasts. I agree on both counts.
  • He creates one-minute videos talking about what he’s written and posts them to various places.
  • He takes a screenshot of one good paragraph and posts to X, Threads, etc. Taylor Lorenz at the Washington Post and Casey Newton of Platformer seem to do the same.
  • Like me, he doesn’t have a lot of patience with posting in each place in its native format. To me, that’s too much like work. Like filling out expense reports.

Also:

… my main takeaway from these early days living out in the wilderness of the new internet is that everything is a big mess right now and you can kind of go and do whatever you want wherever you want. Which is, obviously, a little scary for folks who haven’t used their browser’s URL bar in a while, but four of the biggest platforms are all showing the same recycled video content and the smaller social networks that aren’t are, well, just social networks. Which means platforms don’t really matter anymore. We’re in a moment of possibility and, sure, I wish I could just write my little emails and call it a day, but exploring the web and figuring out what works for me isn’t the worst thing in the world either.

The video idea is intriguing. And the audio could run as a podcast, too! On the other hand, I go weeks now where all the work I’m doing is marketing writing, which I’m still figuring out how to promote—much of that doesn’t have my byline. Nearly ALL of it, actually. How do I promote that kind of thing? And yet, some of my favorite podcasts come out on an intermittent schedule.

It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:

To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word.

Tomasky says Trump is “not going to be throwing anybody in the gas chamber,” but:

The Nazis did a lot of things from 1933 to 1941 (when the Final Solution commenced) that would shock Americans today, and Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them: shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service….

Many Americans would not be shocked by those measures. Many would cheer—until the Republican Gestapo came for them.. And don’t be sure that Trump isn’t going to throw anybody in the gas chamber. Trump is already talking openly about building concentration camps.

Trump invoked “vermin” on the very day that The New York Times broke yet another harrowing story about his second term plans, this time having to do with immigration. “He plans,” the Times reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” And he wants to build huge—yes—detention camps. There’s much more. And all of this, by the way, appears to have been fed to the paper by his own people, who are obviously proud of it. They want America to know. And just before this, remember, Trump told Univision that he would use the Justice Department and the FBI to go after his political enemies.

Plans to add ActivityPub support for Tumblr are likely dead. I can’t see that as a priority given Tumblr’s recent drastic staff cutbacks.

Rodrigo Ghedin: Automattic’s Tumblr/ActivityPub integration reportedly shelved.

Laurens Hof: ActivityPub support was a “hasty announcement” by CEO Matt Mullenweg, followed by “quick quiet shelving of the project only a few days later.” Tumblr is supported by ads and subscriptions, and interoperability undermines both those business models.

Hof: Tumblr and interoperability, revised

Trump thinks Veterans Day is the day we salute veterans of the Nazi Wehrmacht.

The documentary “Sly” reveals depths to Sylvester Stallone.

What emerges isn’t the superstar who turned Rocky and Rambo into American icons as much as a thoughtful, surprisingly self-aware artist, who happens to be much smarter, more sensitive and steeped in cinematic history than even his biggest fans might have known.

Both Bruce Springsteen and Stallone “have channeled their inner selves through art to create a third identity, one that exists somewhere between truth and fiction, that has become a potent avatar, especially for their male fans.”

We’ve been getting Sylvester Stallone all wrong

A researcher identified the man on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV, 50 years after the album’s release. The man was a thatcher named Lot Long, and the album cover is based on a found photograph from the Victorian era. The photographer was named Ernest Farmer, now the subject of an English museum exhibition. Long lived 1823-1893. Researcher Brian Edwards, who discovered the photo, has been listening to the album since it came out more than 50 years ago.

In the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” a character recommends a specific track from Led Zeppelin IV as make-out music, but when the big make-out scene comes around, the music on the soundtrack is Kashmir, from another Zeppelin album.

When they wear the hats it’s in a dramatic scene and rather than focusing on the emotional action and dialogue I’m just thinking what is that on their head?

Marvel TV shows and movies need to get rid of the ridiculous headgear. The costumes are fine but the silly hats have got to go.

Tonight‘s TV choices: Season finale of “Loki,” season debut of “For all Mankind,” final two episodes of the season of “Bosch” and a new episode of “Lessons in Chemistry.” Tough decision!

I’m grateful to the Automattic team for keeping Tumblr running and being good custodians of the community. Today’s announcement is sad news, but I’m hopeful Tumblr will succeed many years with its new, more focused mission.

No, Grammarly, “fertile AI” is not a better way to say “generative AI.”

I would not say I have “sensory processing issues” (autism, PTSD—I probably do have ADHD) but yesterday I was at the supermarket and the ambient music was annoying. Also, I hate that waiting rooms now have TVs playing at all times. So Walmart’s sensory-friendly hours sound good to me.

I just did a rough tally of our monthly streaming video and cable bill.

Scrooge McDuck diving into a pool of gold and jewels

Minnie wants you to know you’re awesome and she hopes you’re as comfortable as she is.

A medium-sized dog looking very comfortable and relaxed, sprawled three-quarters on her back on a chair with her legs splayed.

I have seen no policy or legislative proposals from No Labels. It’s all a bunch of handwaving about centrism and bipartisanship.