The Breslin Era: The end of the big-city columnist.
Jimmy Breslin was and is one of my heroes.
Ross Barkan at The Point:
” J.B. Number One," as he affectionately called himself, never graduated college. Why bother with classrooms when the barrooms, pool halls, police precincts and political clubhouses had far more to teach? His father had abandoned the family and his mother was distant, rarely hugging young Jimmy. Once, he caught her holding a pistol to her head. Around age ten, he was publishing his own neighborhood newspaper, The Flash, and he had a headline ready: “Mother Tried Suicide.”
Breslin was one of an era of powerful big-city newspaper columnists that hardly exist anymore, including Mike Royko of Chicago, Herb Caen of San Francisco, Carl Hiaasen of Miami and Steve Lopez of Philadelphia and later Los Angeles. Today, we have a lot of pundits—everybody’s got an opinion—but few combine reporting with opinion as Breslin did, and nobody has his stature.
The death of Breslin’s kind of journalism is part of the death of local journalism.
Breslin was a liberal without being subsumed into the party structure; he didn’t canonize the people he wrote about even when he admired them.
I haven’t thought about Breslin in years. I need to re-read his work, and internalize it.
Glyph: A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle: — “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot repeat history exactly. However, I can rhyme with it.”
My hour of memoryless lucidity — For Eric Neyman, the hour after being sedated for oral surgery “turned out to be a fascinating experience because I was completely lucid but had almost zero short-term memory." He used the time to do simple experiments on the links between memory, consciousness and free will, with the aid of his girlfriend.
Conspiracy theories and the people who love them: What QAnon supporters, butthole sunners and New Age spiritualists have in common.
A 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 23% of Republicans believe that “the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles … 8% of self-identified Democrats and 14% of independents also agreed with that statement."
Those people are batshit crazy.
A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies [NYTimes] — Cindy Elgan has overseen elections in rural Nevada without incident for 20 years, but now even her neighbors wonder if she’s part of “the deep state cabal.”
Elgan is a Republican Trump supporter—or former Trump supporter—who flew a Trump campaign flag at her house in the 2020 election. The county went 85% for Trump. And yet Elgan’s MAGA neighbors, some of whom used to be her friends, are convinced she’s part of the Deep State conspiracy and are seeking to recall her.
There’s something deeper going on here than just “MAGAs be stupid.” Americans have lost faith in their institutions, because their institutions have betrayed them over and over, and so Americans lash out at the nearest target.
The Internet blew up the publishing industry. Content used to be expensive to create, but now it’s trivial to create and distribute, which gutted publishers, etc. AI will do the same for software.
Vogue wasn’t replaced by another fashion media company, it was replaced by 10,000 influencers. Salesforce will not be replaced by another monolithic CRM. It will be replaced by a constellation of things that dynamically serve the same intent and pain points. Software companies will be replaced the same way media companies were, giving rise to a new set of platforms that control distribution.
I think the unknown author here may be oversimplifying. The Internet alone doesn’t disrupt industries like publishing. Financialization and regulatory capture play major roles as well.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus Proposition Agenda Executive Summary. — Four pages, a quick read. Seven major points, all of which are agreeable to nearly all Americans.
Homeowners want housing prices to go up. This is ultimately the biggest hurdle for affordable housing policy. By David Dayen at The American Prospect.
J.K. Lund has a modest proposal for reforming American zoning and encouraging the growth of cities, because cities are great. “Cities are idea factories, furnaces of innovation, where wealth and human capability are forged.”
I use Instagram the way other people use TikTok (or how I assume they use TikTok—I’ve barely ever used TikTok myself).
Very few people I know seem to use Instagram anymore, so instead of a personal feed of photos, I just see a lot of short videos. Mainly cute animal videos; Insta’s algorithm has sussed out that I like those.
I see that Insta is now introducing unskippable ads in its feed, and if does that to me I’ll just stop using Instagram. I won’t be angry about it or even give it much thought. I’ll just stop. Cute animal videos aren’t hard to find elsewhere on the Internet.
Cisco: We were unprepared for the cloud. But we’re ready for AI — Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins admitted the company was unprepared for the cloud revolution. But Cisco is ready for AI, with plans to address the challenges of distributed networking, such as observability and security. New buzzword dropped: “Digital resilience.”
This is the latest Fierce Network Research Bulletin, by yrs truly. Also contained therein, a teaser for our upcoming webinar about network automation and AI on Tuesday, as well as a meme.
A neighbor is loudly playing and singing along to the greatest hits of the 70s and 80s. “I Will Survive.” “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” It’s like a 1983 Bat Mitzvah here in my home office.
We don’t need to burn down the planet for AI — AI is increasing data center energy consumption, which already accounts for 1-2% of global energy use. Cisco and Equinix are implementing energy-efficient technologies. Leaders of the two companies talked about their green energy strategies at Cisco Live this week. Ironically, the discussion of green energy happened in Las Vegas, which seems to be a horribly climate-unfriendly city (but maybe isn’t really). My latest on Fierce Network.
People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a “common purpose.” Because pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people, but I love individuals. Every person you look at, you can see the universe in their eyes if you’re really looking.
When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.
I increasingly agree with these two quotes by George Carlin.
Fredrik Flornes Ellertsen repairs a broken coffee mug using the Japanese art of kintsugi — I love that he’s gone to this extraordinary effort to repair what appears to be an ordinary, cheap coffee mug.
Dave Barry said he works hard 40 hours a week to make every column sound as if he tossed it off in 20 minutes after having four to six beers.
One of my favorite comments about writing.
Box CEO Aaron Levie: “The reason I’m insanely bullish on AI… “ AI provides the possibility of indexing and working with unstructured information, which is the vast majority of information in a business.
Not just in business. Everywhere, in everything.