Favorites May 24th 2022

April 2019

George Henderson @puddleg

Is Everything Political? A very fine essay, plus a heart-warming post-script in which philosopher Justin E H Smith finally tracks down the source of the autotune pop music that has been driving him insane.

justinehsmith.substack.comIs Everything Political?Are your reading skills getting rusty? Listen to the audio version instead! 1. My cover story, “Permanent Pandemic”, is now out in the June issue of Harper’s. Go read it, and be sure also to subscribe to that venerable publication. I also recorded a

I actually listened to the audio version of this article. To shorten it to a bumper sticker in exactly the way he'd dislike, I enjoyed the part about nuance in philosophical / moral beliefs.

Saahil Desai @Saahil_Desai

🔥 🔥🔥theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

NIMBYs and anti-population-growth folks have a lot in common, this article attacking both is right up my alley.

Bob Wachter @Bob_Wachter

Asymptomatic test pos. rate @UCSFHospitals now 6.2%. That's 1-in-16 w/ no symptoms of Covid who test positive. In a crowd of 150 folks (ie, plane @sfo), there's a 99.993% chance at least 1 person has Covid. Might⬆masking if flight attendant showed a sign saying that at boarding.

Wow! And the wastewater data implies an even higher infection rate!

Reza Zadeh @Reza_Zadeh

Pong on Atari had no code and was entirely a gate arrangement in a schematic diagram 🤯 arcade-museum.com/manuals-videog…

It's not even that many gates! I wonder if many other games were built this way.

Kevin Collier @kevincollier

Six writer bylines and the strong implication the IDF assassinated a journalist: I guarantee you this story has been vetted to hell and back by CNN's legal team.

cnn.com‘They were shooting directly at the journalists’: New evidence suggests Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in targeted attack by Israeli forces |…Witness testimony and videos obtained by CNN reveal how the veteran Palestinian-American journalist was shot dead in a targeted attack in the West Bank, while she was covering an Israeli raid with a group of other reporters.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say killing journalists is bad.

Threads

• I’m not sure I found anything really insightful about the recent shooting in Texas, besides this thread discussing whether the way news media avoids showing video of these attacks is a good idea anymore. It’s available online for copycats who want to see it, so it’s unclear what we accomplish besides making it all more forgettable.

• Short thread summarizing the BBC article about the recent leaks from Xinjiang camps. From this same data dump is evidence of "Xi Jinping’s informed and active role in directing mass detentions in Xinjiang".