My hope for the World Cup final: that it also ends 6-4, with four goals for Messi and goals by six different Spaniards. ⚽️ 🇦🇷 🇪🇸
Dear Me, England - by Ian Leslie:
To be a longstanding England supporter is to glimpse life inside Nietzche’s concept of eternal recurrence: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.”
The pattern with which we’re most familiar, having seen it in tournament after tournament, is the siege defence. It’s as if our players are unconsciously drawing on collective memories of Mafeking and Dunkirk; on stories of an island people repelling invaders. The wonder is that each generation of players seems to absorb the English script and to perform it convincingly.
About five years ago I stopped using Overcast as my podcast player because it would not play more than one show at a time. I could set up a queue, but it would not play the queue. (Many users were complaining about this at the time.) I just downloaded it again to give it a try and… It will only play one show at a time. (Many users are still complaining about this.) I really don’t want to use Apple Podcasts because it defaults to promoting crappy shows it likes rather than just letting me see my own library… but I may be stuck with it.
Revised this post to point out that the most crucial difference between Thomas Pynchon and Terrence Malick is that the former has been on The Simpsons while the latter hasn’t — but hey, Terry, it’s not too late!
WSJ:
Vibe slop happens when coders replace the hard work of designing and testing a system with the shortcut of prompting AI to whip it up … and the resulting software won’t stand the test of time. It’s become a big enough problem that the world’s main repository of open-source code — GitHub — has instituted new policies and features to combat it. […]
These systems are supposed to make senior engineers so productive that companies can lay off junior engineers, but in reality, many companies are trading near-term productivity for long-term woes. Not only does the pipeline of junior talent dry up, but residual effects include buggy software, service outages, security vulnerabilities and mounting technical debt.
Finished reading (for the first time in 30 years): Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee. If you’re new to McPhee, this might be the ideal place to start. It’s the book in which he perfects the narrative method he would follow for the rest of his career, and the first one in which he explores the geological themes that would later become his obsession. Nobody is better than McPhee at illuminating difficult questions by showing how real peropla engage those questions, and engage each other. 📚
“Minerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them. A mine cannot move. It is fixed by nature. So it has to take precedence over any other use. If there were a copper deposit in Yellowstone Park, I’d recommend mining it. Proper use of minerals is essential. You have to go get them where they are. Our standard of living is based on this.”
“For a fifty-year cycle, yes. But for the long term, no. We have to drop our standard of living, so that people a thousand years from now can have any standard of living at all.”
A breeze coming off the nearby acres of snow felt cool but not chilling in the sunshine, and rumpled the white hair of the two men.
“I am not for penalizing people today for the sake of future generations,” Park said.
“I really am,” said Brower. “That’s where we differ.”
— John McPhee, from Encounters with the Archdruid (1971). Think how often this debate has been repeated, and in how many different cultural and economic contexts, in the decades since this conversation took place.
The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory:
This article presents this phenomenon of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis by surveying several social contexts wherein that crisis hinders people’s ability to educate themselves and freely participate in public life. To fortify our shared knowledge against that epistemic threat, the article reintroduces the background and substance of the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online (2024), which came to inspire the Our Future Memory campaign’s growing global coalition. That framework asserts that memory institutions must have practical options and legal protections to undertake four basic practices with digital materials that they were previously allowed to do with physical ones: (1) collection, (2) preservation, (3) access, and (4) collaboration.
Watched: Lumière, Le Cinéma! What an absolute delight: a series of more than 100 early (1890s) films by the Lumière brothers — each 50 seconds long — beautifully restored and commented on. Louis Lumière was an absolute genius of composition, and I could watch his tiny movies all day. 🍿