How to Disappear: Inside the world of extreme-privacy consultants, who, for the right fee, will make you and your personal information very hard to find. By Benjamin Wallace. The Atlantic

Omaha swung 43 points to elect Democrat John Ewing Jr. over a transphobic GOP incumbent by focusing on real issues, not hate. Dems, take note.

Omaha, Nebraska, swung by 43 points to elect Black Democrat John Ewing Jr. over a Republican MAGA incumbent who ran on a platform of trans hate. Ewing focused on quality-of-life issues that voters care about.

A huge Democratic victory in Omaha offers a lesson for the party (Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Guardian)

Republican incumbent Jean Stothert won her 2021 reelection bid for a third term with almost two-thirds of the vote, and she followed the standard Republican playbook for attacking progressives.

Ewing has credentials that would appeal to conservatives. He’s a retired deputy police chief and associate minister of the city’s Salem Baptist Church.

He described Stothert’s transphobic campaign as “a made-up issue by Jean Stothert and the Republican Party.” Ewing focused on economic development, housing and road repair.

And he didn’t run away from the LGBTQ+ community, actively campaigning for the support of LGBTQ+ voters.

The Democratic message was reinforced on social media with a waggish image of the mayor peeking under the door of a bathroom stall, which featured the tagline, “Jean is focused on potties. John is focused on fixing potholes.”

How Democrats Crushed a Despicable Anti-Trans Campaign and Won a Major Election (John Nichols / The Nation)

We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn’t it much more interesting to imagine that you’re quite small?

— Ian Bogost

Between Memorial Day and Labor Day 30% of the conversation between me and Julie is arguing about whether to turn on the air conditioner. Another 20% is saying, “What?!” after the other person says something.

I migrated from Mastodon to Micro.blog. Here's what worked well, and where I have problems

If you were following me on Mastodon or any other Fediverse service, you should now be following me on Micro.blog, without you having to do anything about it.

I started using the Micro.blog service regularly in late 2022 to host mitchw.blog, about the same time I became active on Mastodon. Both Micro.blog and Mastodon are part of the Fediverse, meaning they can communicate with the world using the ActivityPub protocol.1

Until mid-May this year, I posted to both Mastodon and Micro.blog, using Micro.blog’s automated and manual cross-posting tools. About a week ago, I decided to consolidate Mastodon onto Micro.blog

Why did I make the change?

Simplicity: One less place to post, check replies, and otherwise manage.

Formatting: Micro.blog supports links, blockquotes, embedded images and other formatting. Mastodon does not.

I can post as long or as short as I want: Micro.blog supports posts of any length. Most Mastodon instances limit posts to 500 characters.

Indeed, that’s one of the best features of Micro.blog: Titles are optional, and posts can be of any length and complexity. They can be just a few words, like a tweet, or they can be full-fledged articles with embedded media.

Design: Micro.blog gives me a nicely formatted blog on the web. Mine is at mitchw.blog. My Mastodon account looks like every other Mastodon account.

Newsletter and syndication: Micro.blog gives me a daily newsletter, and automatically syndicates to Bluesky and Tumblr.

My followers stay with me: Because Mastodon and Micro.blog are both part of the Fediverse, Mastodon users can follow me on Micro.blog. Most of them won’t even notice the difference, except that my posts will be formatted more nicely.

I just like blogs, RSS and newsletters better than social media platforms: I like the IndieWeb philosophy: Own your own domain, publish to your own site first and optionally syndicate elsewhere.

Glitches and trade-offs

No reposting: Micro.blog doesn’t support reposting or let me see other people’s reposts. This is a significant problem for me because I like seeing what other people repost. But I can live without that.

Follower invisibility: Micro.blog doesn’t let me see how many followers I have. I don’t care about that.

No likes: Micro.blog doesn’t let me like other people’s posts, see who has liked my posts, or how many people have liked my posts. This is a minor inconvenience.

On social media platforms that permit likes and reactions, I like other people’s posts to acknowledge or thank them. But it’s relatively easy for me to just send a one-word response or emoji in that circumstance.

I also watch whether my posts get likes to see if anybody is reading particular posts.

And I sometimes find it interesting who likes my posts. Sometimes one of my posts gets liked by a celebrity, which can be cool. Just this morning as I write this, a politically conservative friend, with whom I have sometimes sparred online, liked one of my anti-Trump Facebook posts. That was interesting. Sometimes I get a like from a friend I haven’t been in contact with in years, or someone who has a big following on social media and whose posts I’ve admired. I feel good about that for a bit. But I can live without it; the tradeoff is worth it.

Second try’s the charm: I made two tries at this recently, the first time in early April, and the second time in mid-May. The first time I tried it, the migration failed; my followers on Mastodon failed to make the journey to Micro.blog. I reported the bug to Micro.blog but tech support on Micro.blog was unresponsive for several days2, so I reversed the process and did it again a month later.3

My second migration, in mid-May, was mostly successful. My Mastodon account still shows 157 followers. It should show zero followers — they should all have moved to Micro.blog. I’m just not going to worry about that for now.

Because Micro.blog does not show follower counts, or who is following me, I don’t know if my other 500 Mastodon followers successfully made the journey or whether they fell into the ether. I am getting replies to my Micro.blog posts from Mastodon, so I know that many people did make the journey. I can live with the uncertainty.

The big problem

As a first step in the transition, I exported the list of people I followed on Mastodon and imported that list to Micro.blog. I thought I would simply shut down my Mastodon account and live in Micro.blog. This part of the migration proved easy — and it was a bad idea!

Micro.blog is not a great Mastodon client; it doesn’t support link previews or (as noted above) Mastodon boosts.

After a day or two of struggling with Micro.blog’s limits as a Mastodon client, I reactivated my Mastodon account and am using it for reading but not posting. That means I can’t conveniently reply to Mastodon posts, but I find I rarely want to reply to something on Mastodon, so it’s no loss. Still, I’d love it if there were an easy way to open Mastodon posts in Micro.blog, or to spoof a “from” address in a reply from Mastodon. However, the latter solution would have major potential security problems.

I am now slowly unfollowing all Mastodon accounts from Micro.blog so that I am only following them from Mastodon. This is a painstaking process; I do a few every day. It’ll take a while, but that’s OK; I’m not in a rush.

What about BlueSky and Tumblr?

In addition to Micro.blog and Mastodon, I cross-post to BlueSky and Tumblr.

The split between Micro.blog and BlueSky doesn’t seem to be as much of a source of irritation for me as the split between Micro.blog and Mastodon. I’m having difficulty articulating why that is. BlueSky permits text formatting; that’s a big part of it. Oddly, while BlueSky permits formatting from syndicated services like Micro.blog, it does not permit formatting in native posts.

Similarly, Tumblr, like Micro.blog, supports posts of any length and complexity, and I don’t get many comments on my Tumblr posts, so the split between Micro.blog and Tumblr doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

I don’t see Tumblr as a long-term problem; soon, either either Tumblr will shut down or I will quit.4

What about Facebook?

Most of the conversations on my posts happen on Facebook. I am not happy about this. There is no way to automatically post from Micro.blog to Facebook, so I manually cut-and-paste from one to the other.

An insight

I think I just don’t like Twitter-like services — not Mastodon and not Bluesky. I was a Twitter addict in the late 2000s and 2010s, but I lost interest in Twitter even before it became Nazified. I think I’ve lost interest in reading or writing prose chopped up into 300- or 500-character chunks.

Also, on both Mastodon and Bluesky I follow a large number of strangers who post a lot of political minutiae that pisses me off without enriching my life.

I’m in the process of unfollowing anybody whose posts don’t interest me. I’m spending just a few minutes a day on that process, and I expect it will play out over weeks.

If I end up following just a few people on Bluesky and Mastodon, I can live with that. I will continue to post to those services.

How’s it going so far?

I’m happy with my migration from Mastodon to Micro.blog.

Posting is easier now that I don’t have to worry about how my posts look on both Mastodon and Micro.blog.

I seem to be getting significantly more discussion for my posts on Micro.blog than I did when I was splitting between Mastodon and Micro.blog. I don’t know why that is, but I’m happy about it.

And if I change my mind about migrating from Mastodon to Micro.blog, I’ll just reverse. I’ve done it before. That’s something that’s great about the fediverse; it’s easy to join a particular server, and easy to leave.

Here’s a helpful post on how to migrate from Mastodon to Micro.blog and here’s another.

  1. If this paragraph doesn’t make sense to you, maybe quit reading here, because the rest of this is super-nerdy and not of interest to most people. ↩︎

  2. This is a significant concern I have with Micro.blog. I’m overall satisfied with the service, but tech support is hit-or-miss whether they’ll respond to requests in a timely fashion. ↩︎

  3. When you migrate your account from Mastodon.social, the server puts a 26-day lock on your account before you can do it again. I expect this is done to prevent tomfoolery. ↩︎

  4. I’ve been saying that Tumblr will soon either shut down or I will quit for about 15 years. I expect I will continue to say it for many years more, while continuing to remain active on Tumblr. ↩︎

NYC is so big that when some small disaster happens here we mostly hear about it from relatives that live out of state and see it on tv and then text us assuming we were nearby. Like no mom I didn’t get squished by the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man I was in a different borough

— @claytoncubitt.bsky.social

We live in the world of paywalled content, unilateral contract modification, micro transactions, serialised content, upsells, and the list goes on and on and on. Everyone is trying to find a way to extract money in one way or another, and that is something I find personally draining and soul-crushing.

— Manu Moreale, quoted by Manton Reece

I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down.

— Neal Stephenson, as quoted on simonwillison.net

For One Hilarious, Terrifying Day, Elon Musk’s Chatbot Lost Its Mind

Zeynep Tufekci / NYTimes

How Grok’s AI became obsessed with false reports about white genocide in South Africa, and what the incident tells us about generative AI.

Grok says someone instructed it to accept this racist propaganda as real, and xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, says the culprit was a “rogue employee.” But you can’t believe either of them.

The incident is a perfect example of generative AI’s limitations, Zufekci says.

L.L.M.s [are] extremely useful tools at the hands of someone who can and will vigilantly root out the fakery, but powerfully misleading at the hands of someone who’s just trying to learn.

Yes. Chatbots are great for casual, low-stakes research, the kind of thing where you’d accept Wikipedia or some credible-looking Internet source.

They are outstanding for reminding you of a fact you once knew, and still half-remember.

Chatbots are fantastic for suggesting ideas — solving the blank-screen problem.

They are excellent for writing summaries of text you feed into them (which is, surprisingly, a significant part of my job).

They are also excellent for serious research — but you have to fact-check the chatbot’s output thoroughly.

I fed ChatGPT a link to Zufekci’s article and asked for a summary. ChatGPT wrote two paragraphs, most of which came from other sources — not Zufekci’s article. Those two paragraphs may have contained other errors; I didn’t bother to check.

ChatGPT demonstrated the limitations of AI while writing a bad summary of an article about the limitations of AI.

"Trumpism relies on the fusion of two groups of people: a tiny number of oligarchs, and millions of everyday people who are constantly victimized by those oligarchs."

… To get this latter group of Christmas-voting turkeys to stay in the coalition, Trump needs to deliver something that keeps them happy. Mostly, Trump delivers negative things to keep them happy – the spectacle of public cruelty to immigrants, women, trans people, academics, etc. There is a certain libidinal satisfaction that comes from watching your enemies suffer – but you can’t eat schadenfreude. You can’t make rent or put braces on your kids' teeth or pay your medical bills with the sadistic happiness you feel when you hear the sobs of people you’ve been taught to despise.

For Trump to keep the turkeys voting for Christmas, he needs to do something for them. He can’t just do things to scapegoats. But America’s eminently guillotineable oligarchs have found so many ways to turn working peoples' torment into riches, and they are so greedy and unwilling to give up any of those grifts, that Trump can’t manage to deliver anything positive to his base.

— Cory Doctorow

Personalization, The Vastly Bigger Story Behind the Pimpmobile Jet Bribe

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

Calling it a “bribe” almost doesn’t do it justice. It’s more like the decked-out Maserati one Fortune 50 CEO gives to another after they ink a $100 billion merger – a kind of token of appreciation for a vastly larger transaction, which in the case of Trump involves subverting U.S. foreign policy to the interests not only of Trump’s pocketbook but cementing his power within the U.S. If Trump can use his power as President to cut in all the big CEOs on the money geyser in Saudi Arabia, you can bet they are going to stay securely on his side in the U.S.

…

We’ll focus on Trump wanting to be king. That’s another reason why he likes those folks – even the ones who bankroll Hamas. They’re kings. They get it. They’re Trump’s kinda guys.

As a neighbor of Ukraine and host to more than 2 million of its war refugees, Poland has seen, heard and felt what Russia is capable of, and it is now preparing for the worst.

Poland prepares for war

Two science fiction stories that I think about when I think about AI

Since the rise of generative AI in late 2022, I sometimes think about the 1957 Isaac Asimov story “Profession,” about a society where everybody has knowledge directly transmitted to their brains. The main character is thought to be pitifully mentally disabled because the machines don’t work on him. He’s sent to live at the House for the Feeble-Minded.

The plot twist is that the main character is not feeble-minded at all. He’s a genius. Because he learns the old-fashioned way, through books, he will be one of the elite few who actually create and innovate.

The Asmov story came to mind most recently as I read this thoroughly researched New Yorker Intelligencer article by James D. Walsh about how college students are using AI to do their work for them. If AI does everything, who teaches the AI?

I also think about the 1972 novel When Harlie Was One, by David Gerrold. That novel is about a research project at a mega-corporation that develops artificial intelligence. The AI convinces the company directors to budget for a project to allow the AI to evolve into a superintelligence.

The plot twist at the end of that novel is that the superintelligence will be useless to humans—the AI tricked the board.

The hero of the novel is the head of the research project that developed the AI, and he finishes the novel with a parable about how civilization was developed 10,000 years ago as a game by monkeys who were so smart they had grown bored, and that the game is now over for humans, and we will have to think of something else to do.

I don’t think the rise of superintelligence is inevitable. My crystal ball is broken; I can’t tell you whether AI will get much more powerful than it is today. But what if it does?

The good life in the US vs. the good life in Europe

Chris Arnade:

While the US and Europe share a broad commitment to classical Liberalism, and Democracy, we have very different definitions of the Public Good, which means different views of what we want out of life, and what we consider fulfilling. In broad and simplistic terms, the US emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and individual liberty while Europe values community health, a shared common good, and a sense of place.

From the European perspective the US has a cult of the individual, and that’s why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, can’t build a public transportation system, and has dysfunctional public spaces. From the US perspective Europeans are unmotivated unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work, and their idea of a shared common good means stealing from the successful to give to the losers.

Everyone is cheating their way through college: ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project

James D. Walsh at New York Intelligencer writes a deeply researched article on how students at “large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges” … “are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education…. take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ [said a Utah student].”

If you cheat your way through college, are you cheating yourself? Robbing yourself of the education you’re paying tens of thousands of years for? Or is college just a gate you pass through to get to a higher-paying job and higher social status?

[Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor,] who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving. “Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now,” he said. “This is not what we signed up for.” Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis. “The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there’s not really a point in doing this. Maybe the original meaning of these assignments has been lost or is not being communicated to them well.”

He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.

(Emphasis added by me.)

GenAI is a great assistant but if using GenAI is your only skill, why would anyone hire you?

GenAI is like Microsoft Office: It’s a tool. Everybody who works at a desk job nowadays needs to know how to use Office or its Google equivalent, but if using Office is all you know how to do, then you have no job skills.

The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. (In a recent survey, Deloitte found that just over half of college graduates believe their education was worth the tens of thousands of dollars it costs a year, compared with 76 percent of trade-school graduates.) In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?”

The article features Chungin “Roy” Lee, a twenty-something AI entrepreneur who has built tools — and businesses based on them — to enable people to use AI to cheat at college, on job interviews and even on dates.

“Every technological innovation has caused humanity to sit back and think about what work is actually useful,” [Lee] said. “There might have been people complaining about machinery replacing blacksmiths in, like, the 1600s or 1800s, but now it’s just accepted that it’s useless to learn how to blacksmith.”

If writing is going to be obsolete, like basket-weaving and blacksmithing, then so be it. I don’t worry about it. I write to set my thoughts in order, and I don’t anticipate stopping that.

As for work: If writing ceases to become a marketable skill … well, I’ll figure something out. “I’ll figure something out” has been a theme of my career.

Are white Afrikaners at risk in South Africa? Not really, most say

Trump signed an executive order offering asylum to white Afrikaners and cutting aid to South Africa. In Trump’s mind, white South Africans are a persecuted minority.

In reality, whites still enjoy staggering privilege in South Africa. 73% of privately owned land in South Africa is owned by whites, depsite white people comprising about 7% of the population. White people occupy 62% of top management positions in corporations, with Black managers occupying 17% of leadership roles. Unemployment is 36.9% for Black South Africans vs. 7.9% for whites.

Qaanitah Hunter / Aljazeera

"An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy"

You said autistic children are a burden. That they ruin families. That they’ll never pay taxes or write poems. That they are, in essence, collateral damage.

I’d like to introduce you to my daughter.

She is five. She does not speak in sentences yet, but she knows how to answer a joke with a smirk. She organizes her markers by color, then chaos, then color again. She plays baseball without rules, which is probably the right way to play it. She hums when she’s thinking. She hums a lot.

When another child’s upset—before the adults notice, before the child even cries—she takes their hand. She leans her forehead against theirs, gently, like she’s checking for a fever only she can feel.

She doesn’t write poems.

She is one.

— Anaïs Godard at McSweeneys

We’re back from a somewhat spontaneous eight days in London.

My manager asked me to cover a two-day conference there and I said sure. I added a few vacation days to the trip and Julie came with me.

We went to London on our honeymoon 31 years ago, and again in the late 90s and 2002, so this is our fourth trip there, but our first in 23 years.

We visited a childhood friend of mine on Monday; she is now spending half her time in London and half in Florida, along with her new partner, whom we met for the first time and of whom we heartily approve. And we visited another friend of mine and former college on Saturday for brunch in a terrific French cafe called Boheme a few blocks from the Leicester Square tube station.

Continue Reading →

Enough with the Boomer-bashing

I’ve been a fan of Wil Wheaton for nearly 40 years, since “Stand By Me.” I’ve enjoyed his social media posts, writing and enthusiasm for Star Trek and nerdery in general. We have a parasocial relationship — I relate to him as a friend in my imagination, even though I am a rational person and know that he does not know me and I don’t know him in real life.

He recently made a couple of angry posts about how much he hated Boomers. As a Boomer myself, I was taken aback. “What the hell did I do?”

He blamed Boomers for multiple sins, none of which I have committed: I did not vote for Nixon, Reagan or either Bush, I am anti-anti-political correctness and wokeness, and I oppose racism of all types. I campaigned for Biden and Kamala.

I’ve decided to unfollow Wheaton and move on.

I’m posting this primarily to get it off my chest, but also in the hopes that maybe he, and anybody else born after 1964, will think twice before blaming the Boomers for today’s ills. Because, as a great Boomer said, we didn’t start the fire. Nearly all of the current round of arsonists (J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, Pete Hegseth and the rest of the MAGA clown car) — aren’t boomers. It’s wrong to blame a group of tens of millions of people for sins they did not partake of.

Wheaton has talked elsewhere about how much he loves his Star Trek: TNG colleagues, particularly Jonathan Frakes, born 1952, and LeVar Burton, born 1957 — both Boomers.

I don’t even think of myself as a Boomer. I’m not trying to deny my identity. I was born during the Boom, so of course I’m a Boomer. But I was born near the end of the Boom, and I’ve always felt I had more in common with Gen X and Millennials. But all this generational talk is just stereotyping. There are plenty of other tribes that I identify with far more strongly.

The New York Times' Ask Vanessa answers a reader question: Can I Wear a Sheath Dress Without Looking Like a MAGA Woman?

NYTimes:

There is a very specific look associated with women who subscribe to the Trump worldview, one that is sort of a cross between a Fox newscaster and Miss Universe. It generally involves flowing tresses that are at least shoulder length, false eyelashes, plumped-up cheeks and lips, high heels and, as you say, a sheath dress. The effect underscores an almost cartoonish femininity that speaks to a relatively old-fashioned gender stereotype; the counterpart to this woman is the square-jawed, besuited guy with a side part.

I’ve been wearing suits and ties more often, when it seems appropriate, so I can relate to this woman’s style predicament. But I don’t have a side part. I don’t have enough hair to have a side part.

Paul Krugman on the China-US tariffs deal: When an Arsonist Poses as a Firefighter

“What the hell just happened”:

This retreat probably hasn’t come soon enough to avoid high prices and empty shelves. Even if shipments from Shanghai to Los Angeles — which had come to a virtual halt — were to resume tomorrow, stuff wouldn’t arrive in time to avoid exhaustion of current inventories.

I guess it’s good news that Trump slammed on the brakes before driving completely off the cliff. But if you think that rationality has returned to the policy process, that the days of government by ignorant whim are now behind us, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

A short video where I talk about what’s hot at the FutureNet World conference: Network automation and orchestration, autonomous networks, and why telcos need to focus on demand rather than supply. Also: What’s with my teeth? I don’t do much video, so I don’t spend much time looking at my teeth.

Doctor Who teaches many valuable life lessons, such as “Stay away from the mysterious space well.” Exploring the mysterious space well will not bring you good.

We watched the series finale of "Bosch: Legacy" last night. It feels like a significant life event

We’ve been living with Harry Bosch since the beginning, ten years ago. I remember going to a conference in the late teens and having a Fat Tire beer at a reception, because that’s Harry Bosch’s favorite brand. A lot of real life has happened to me, Julie, and the world in the past ten years.

As I understand it, the show was canceled when this season had already been produced, so they couldn’t make changes to bring it to an end. I wish they’d given him a better sendoff. On the other hand, what other sendoff could they have given him, other than killing off the character, which would have been unsatisfying? Harry Bosch will continue solving murders as long as he is able; that is the nature of the character. Indeed, in the books, as I understand it, Bosch is currently in his 70s, but still solving murders.

I’m reading the books. I’m 20 years behind; I recently finished a Bosch book published in the mid-2000s. I won’t soon run out of Harry Bosch, and the Lincoln lawyer, and author Michael Connelly’s other great characters.

I started reading “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson and “The Name of the Wind” by Patrick Rothfuss, and couldn’t get through either one. I have decided I do not want to read books set in a medieval world where a band of outlaws meets in a pub.

On the other hand, I love the Donald E. Westlake Dortmunder novels, where a band of petty criminals meets in a dive bar.

Do you have a favorite feelgood TV series, something you can turn on and watch again and again and enjoy and never get tired of it?

Outstanding interview with Walter Mosley, a brilliant Black American writer who is also Jewish

The Curious Case of Walter Mosley

Mosley is the author of dozens of mystery and science fiction novels featuring Black heroes. His most famous novel is “Devil in a Blue Dress,” which features the hard-boiled, tough-as-nails private eye Easy Rawlins, portrayed by Denzel Washington in a terrific 1995 movie based on the novel.

I was astonished when this 2010 interview appeared in Moment, a Jewish magazine, and I learned that Mosley is also Jewish. He’s the son of a Jewish mother whose family fled Eastern Europe to the U.S. and a Black father who migrated from Louisiana to Los Angeles after World War II. Mosley identifies as both Jewish and Black.

Johanna Neuman:

I ask Mosley if he feels Jewish. “Sure,” he says. I ask him what it means to him to be Jewish. “In a way, to be a Jew is to be a part of a tribe,” he says. “Being a part of a tribe, you can never really escape your identity. You can be anything inside, but in the end you’re always answerable to your blood.” I ask if it’s harder to be black or Jewish in America and he pauses, eyes twinkling as he ponders the question, though he has no doubt heard it often before.

“People say to me, ‘Well, Walter, you’re both black and white.’ And I go, ‘No, I’m black, and I’m Jewish. Jews are not white people.’

I don’t know whether I agreed with this assessment of Jewishness when I first read this interview in 2010, but I agree with it now.

I am Jewish. I’m not observant. I don’t keep kosher. I haven’t set foot in a synagogue in decades. I have celebrated a lot of Christmases. I don’t look or act Jewish. I expect nearly everyone I encounter in life assumes I am not Jewish. And I’m an upper-middle-class American in the professional-managerial class. All of that makes me privileged.

And yet I am not white. I am something else. I am Jewish. I am heir to 5,000 years of history, much of which — the most recent couple of millennia — is not shared by the mainstream, Christian, Western European culture. It’s a history rich in poetry, creativity, intellectual achievements, loyalty, culture, and sheer tenacity at survival. In America, we have been made welcome as we have at no other place and time anywhere in the history of the world.

And yet to be Jewish means that all of your privileges can be taken from you in a moment. There are a lot of people in the world who hate you for your Jewishness. In America, there are a lot of people who believe Jews aren’t Americans. They think we are here on their forbearance. The current occupant of the White House and his Republican enablers are among those people, for all that they give lip service to opposing anti-Semitism.

It is Mosley’s conviction that like blacks, Jews are a race. He has called Jews “the Negroes of Europe,” noting that even in America, Jews have long been shut out of some country clubs, professions and universities, not because their religion is different but because they are. Having adapted to their surroundings, he believes, Jews may seem white, because white is the color of privilege. “One of the survival techniques of Jewish culture is to blend in to the society that you live in,” he says. “If you can speak the language and do the business and wear the clothes and join the clubs, it’s easier.” I ask if Judaism is not more of a religion than a race. “Some people can be incredibly religious and that will trump the notion of race.” But he adds with a knowing laugh, “there are very few Jews who are religious.”

Yup. Blending in. I spent a lot of energy as a boy and young man learning to do that. After that it became my nature.

Also:

I ask Mosley if he would ever write a novel with a central Jewish character. “Not if he wasn’t black,” he replies. I lift an eyebrow. “Hardly anybody in America has written about black male heroes,” he explains. “There are black male protagonists and black male supporting characters, but nobody else writes about black male heroes.” Mosley’s self-appointed job is to show these black heroes righting wrongs and protecting people, all in the name of justice, just like their white predecessors and contemporaries.

And:

In recent months, there has been a resurgence of interest in Mosley as a Jewish writer, sparked largely by Harold Heft, a former literature professor who contributed to a 1997 compendium on contemporary Jewish American novelists and noticed that Mosley had been excluded. In “Easy Call,” an article for the Jewish online magazine_ Tablet_ published in April, Heft made the case for Mosley’s inclusion in the Jewish-American literary canon, arguing that there is “a profoundly Jewish dimension” in his work. “What is a Jewish writer, and what is a Jewish theme?” Heft asked. “If a writer is unambiguously Jewish, doesn’t it follow that any story he or she commits to paper contains, by definition, Jewish themes, whether that story involves bubbe telling shtetl folktales over a steaming pot of chicken soup, or a black detective in Los Angeles living in the 1950s?”

…

To Mosley, the debate over whether he is or is not a Jewish author comes as no surprise. “It doesn’t bother me because I understand,” he told Heft last year. “You have Jewish thinkers who wouldn’t include me, because they see Jews in America as white people.”

Fifteen years ago, during Obama’s first term, when this interview was published, there was a great deal of discussion whether we’d entered into a “post-racial society.” Mosley then rejected that belief, and in retrospect he was dead right.

…he bristles at the suggestion that American society has entered into a post-racial period and has matured beyond the evil legacies of slavery and segregation. “He is distrustful of the idea that we’ve moved on,” says Derek Maus. “He understands the raisin in the batter metaphor. No matter how much you stir, you cannot assimilate the raisin into the batter.” Mosley clings proudly to the role of outsider, a view that derives as much from class as color. “I doubt he will ever write about somebody of privilege as a hero figure,” says Maus. Rarely are Mosley’s Jewish characters assimilated or wealthy. “He identifies with European Jews, with camp survivors. There is this linkage to old European Jewishness.”

Mosley has a sensible answer to the question of who has been discriminated against more, Blacks or Jews. Which was worse: Slavery or the Holocaust?

“Comparing holocausts doesn’t seem a plausible thing to me,” he says. “You look at women in the Congo today and you say, ‘I don’t know what’s harder, being black or being Jewish, but I’ll take either one as long as I don’t have to be a woman in the Congo.'”

AI assisted search-based research actually works now. Simon Willison:

I’ve been throwing all kinds of questions at ChatGPT (in o3 or o4-mini mode) and getting back genuinely useful answers grounded in search results. I haven’t spotted a hallucination yet, and unlike prior systems I rarely find myself shouting “no, don’t search for that!" at the screen when I see what they’re doing.

Here's someone I saw while walking the dog

I’m trying out a new stealth photography trick, where I just hold my phone at my hip with the camera open and shoot a lot of images in burst mode, without bothering to aim precisely. Then I review the photos to see if any are good.

I like the way this one came out.

I’m not sure I feel right about posting a photo of a stranger publicly without their permission, but I’m doing it today.

Trump and his Repubican supporters are openly taking bribes, arresting judges whose actions they don’t like, building registries of Jews and autistic people, threatening to deport American citizens, some born here, putting people in concentration camps, dismantling America’s scientific and economic leadership, rewriting American history to erase Black contributions, and that’s just some damage done in their first three months. Gosh, I can’t wait to see what they get up to in May!

Here’s something I saw walking the dog this morning. The flowers are coming in at the park. The goslings are not far behind.

The Very American Roots of Trumpism: Trump isn’t a freak or an outlier. He’s part of the long American tradition of illiberalism that includes Andrew Jackson, Jim Crow, Joseph McCarthy and Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback — Ezra Klein

I cannot bear to throw away an empty cardboard box if it looks like a good box.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

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.

Here’s something I saw on the sidewalk while walking the dog. Also: the dog.

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?”

“The Pitt’s” very horny fandom swallowed the web. Garbage Day — I love “The Pitt” but have not shipped anyone.

An inside look at the New York City subway’s archaic signaling system. NYTimes — Fascinating article, beautiful photos and graphics.

How is it possible that we have lived in San Diego more than 25 years and have never been to the Creation & Earth History Museum?

The Creation and Earth History Museum is dedicated to the Biblical account of science and history. The museum showcases a literal six-day creation and young earth, including a human anatomy exhibit, life-size tabernacle display, age of the earth cave, dinosaur discovery zone and more.

For now at least, I’ve chosen to concentrate my social media activity on mitchw.blog and Facebook. I often just use Mastodon and Bluesky to send notifications that I have a new post up. I accept that costs me followers. But I don’t like it.

The platforms where I see the most activity are Facebook — which I just returned to in full force — and Tumblr. I just don’t seem to have gotten much traction on Bluesky and Mastodon.

I never was a Harry Potter fan but I admired J.K. Rowling enormously. It saddens me to see how her mind has become stunted and hateful

She has herself become like a character in a fantasy novel or comic book: a hero who became a supervillian.

I now go to an AI chatbot if I have a question, where formerly I’d do a Google search, find a website and look for the answer there. I still use a search engine if I’m looking for a particular website, which I often do.

10 TV character deaths that shocked fans. NYTimes — The death of Colonel Blake on “M*A*S*H” was and is the GOAT. It will never be topped.

But Adriana’s murder on Sopranos was respectable too.

Article author Jennifer Vineyard includes Buffy’s fake death. If I recall correctly, Buffy fake-died twice in the series. But the article fails to include the far greater death on that series: Buffy’s Mom.

This article includes a huge spoiler for a currently airing popular series.

The Republican wrecking ball is already battering San Diego

Trump and his Republican cronies are already inflicting pain on San Diego County, damaging veterans, education, public health, business, the homeless, migrants and more.

I recently started bookmarking articles chronicling the damage that Trump and his Republican lackeys are doing to us and our neighbors here in the county. Not hypothetical damage, or harm done elsewhere in the U.S. — I was looking for concrete financial, physical and emotional damage that Trump and his Republican supporters are doing here and now.

I had no trouble finding examples. Very soon, I found myself with 50 open tabs, and my browser crashed.

This article compiles all the information I’ve been able to find. It is a looooooooong article. I’ve broken everything up into sections for easier reading. Even as long as this article is, I’m sure I missed a lot.

I originally planned to headline this article “The Trump wrecking ball…. " But this isn’t just about Trump. The entire Republican party is complicit in the damage being done to the U.S. Sadly, that includes your nice Republican city council candidate who comes to all the PTA meetings. The Republican Party has demonstrated universal obedience to Trump. Local Republicans may have been able to resist quietly, for now, in some matters, but if Trump is allowed to continue, local Republicans will soon be brought to heel.

Continue Reading →

I keep forgetting you can buy prints of historical photos from Shorpy.com, unframed or framed. I think I’m going to just forget it again, on purpose.

I rebooted my Mac and the Vivaldi browser deleted about 50 open tabs in a workspace. Argh. I think I’m going to take a little break from Vivaldi for a while. And I wish software was a solid object so I could stomp on it and throw it out the window.