An even-better-than-usual essay by the invaluable J. B. Crawford:
[Brigadier Martin Hotine’s] greatest memorial is an artifact of his work: squat concrete pillars surmounted by a triangular brass plate. Found atop mountains and hills throughout the United Kingdom, these "trig points," designed by Hotine himself, are the physical references of the Retriangulation of Great Britain. This effort, spanning from 1935 to 1962 with the interruption of WWII, revised an original triangulation (initiated in the 18th century) as the basis for British surveying. Through the course of this effort, Hotine developed methods that would revolutionize the field of geodesy. His collaboration with mapmakers from the United States, a continuation of his wartime surveying for the Allied Forces, set the stage for one of geodesy's most ambitious projects: a measurement taken across the Atlantic Ocean.
This is, I guess, the point in the column where I should call for everyone to abandon X. I have not posted regularly there in years, and I’d urge others to limit their use as well. Nor have I taken up BlueSky or Threads. I find that much time spent on any of these platforms shapes me in ways I don’t want to be shaped. All of these platforms create a feeling of being informed and connected that is fundamentally false. You learn too many of the wrong things and spend too much time in the company of the worst people. An hour spent with a newspaper, a magazine or a book, or in conversation with another human being or listening to people on a podcast, is far more valuable.
But I’ve never been comfortable calling for those kinds of all-or-nothing boycotts. If you think, for your reasons, you need to be on these platforms, or should be on them, or want to be on them, so be it. It’s not like Instagram or TikTok are spotless alternatives, and receding completely from the algorithmic sphere is often unrealistic. My approach to all these places is roughly Frodo’s approach to the Ring: I try to be there as little as possible, and recognize how badly I feel immediately afterward.
Unlike Ezra, I’m thoroughly comfortable with recommending complete abandonment of all the big social media platforms. They destroy tranquility, celebrate purely performative identity gestures, amplify rage, and habituate us to pointless fighting with strangers. If you believe that “receding completely from the algorithmic sphere is often unrealistic,” perhaps you need a conversation with yourself about the meaning of the word “unrealistic.”
Mark Helprin to the technocrats in 1996:
The revolution that you have made is indeed wonderful, powerful, and great, and it has hardly begun. But you have not brought to it the discipline, the anticipation, or the clarity of vision that it, like any vast augmentation in the potential of humankind, demands. You have been too enthusiastic in your welcome of it, and not wary enough. Some of you have become arrogant and careless, and, quite frankly, too many of you at the forefront of this revolution lack any guiding principles whatsoever or even the urge to seek them out. In this, of course, you are not alone. Nor are you the first. But you must fit this revolution to the needs and limitations of man, with his delicacy, dignity, and mortality always in mind. Having accelerated tranquility, you must now find a way to slow it down.
Update 2026: They didn’t. But we still can.
Indie Web Is Punk — I am putting a link to this manifesto on all my sites, trying to spread the good news: You don’t have to live on the big platforms, suffering their relentless enshittification. You have a better option. Remember also: the blog is a seasoned technology.
My colleagues Davide and Colleen Zori keep discovering intact Etruscan chamber tombs. Remarkable.
Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667):
It is true, [the dead in Christ] envy not, and they lie in a bosom where there can be no murmur; and they that are consigned to Kingdoms, and to the feast of the marriage-supper of the Lamb, the glorious and eternal Bridegroom of holy Souls, they cannot think our Marriages here, our lighter laughings and vain rejoicings, considerable as to them. And yet there is a relation continued still: Aristotle said, that to affirm the dead take no thought for the good of the living, is a disparagement to the laws of that friendship which in their state of separation they cannot be tempted to rescind. And the Church hath taught in general, that they pray for us, they recommend to God the state of all their Relatives, in the union of the intercession that our blessed Lord makes for them and us: and S. Ambrose gave some things in charge to his dying brother Satyrus, that he should do for him in the other world: he gave it him (I say) when he was dying, not when he was dead. And certain it is that though our dead friends’ affection to us is not to be estimated according to our low conceptions, yet it is not less, but much more than ever it was; it is greater in degree, and of another kind.
Mail time! — two forthcoming books. The paperback edition of The Shield of Achilles has (thanks to my learned friends Tim Larsen and Adam Roberts) a few important corrections — you should therefore buy it in preference to the hardcover, even though it’s not as beautiful. (Still pretty nice, though. Also, you could always buy both.) And I was honored to write a foreword for Bonnie’s fine book.
Fragment of wallpaper, unknown maker, about 1820, England. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
A sample of the work of the great watchmaker George Daniels (1926-2011). I never travel to London without visiting the Clockmaker’s Museum, though I sort of miss its old rather obscure location at Guildhall.