Writer, teacher, PhD student, former web developer and editor, jerk
They saw in the dim light, the headless figure facing them.
H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man
Your local library may have access to apps that carry audiobooks. The Invisible Man is an H.G. Wells scientific fantasy that I haven’t read yet and the audiobook is damn fun so far.
Like, an early subset of Twitter users are Something Awful forum goons — the most prominent of whom is Dril — and they love fucking with people.
Elizabeth Lopatto, “Elon Musk learns the hard way that being a Twitter troll is way more fun than being a mod” at The Verge
Did not think I was going to start my day thinking about the Something Awful forums or flashback to Worth 1000’s Photoshop tournament with them, but here I am.
This is classic economics-guy thing, where they act like the narratives that they map onto the data, are themselves just as infallible as the data…The idea that there is always something hidden, right, seems to be lurking here…
Peter Shamshiri, “Freakonomics,” If Books Could Kill
I’ve read enough college composition history to know that there is a long stretch of time in the academy where the English department wanted to be more quantifiable, like the sciences, to justify their importance. This quote reminds me that economics is a pseudoscience with a desire to do the type of interpretation with data that we usually reserve for fiction.
Also, great new podcast: If Books Could Kill podcast with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri
“…you round the argument off by yourself.”
Gorgias to Socrates, Gorgias by Plato, Oxford Edition translated by Robin Waterfield.
The winning haiku at the top of the article is a cold, hard comment on our current American political environment, yet Sanki’s poems, written on one year after the bombing in Hiroshima, produce a different, deeper chill.
Sanki was imprisoned by Japan’s Special Higher Police for writing haiku like the first one. The second was published in a magazine but was omitted from Sanki’s second collection for fear that the book would be censored by American Occupation officials, who suppressed information about the atomic bomb.
By Clark Strand, “Poems of Protest and Political Conscience”
Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff.
From Nilay Patel’s “Welcome to hell, Elon” at The Verge