Alan Jacobs

Hire this man for the School for Scale!

Trying and failing to capture a beautiful crescent moon this pre-dawn I accidentally made an impressionist masterpiece. (No filter, no edits.)

Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.

— Stella (Thelma Ritter) in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954)

Ideas are stale things, so stale. The intellect is not too great a thing.

— Charlie Chaplin in an interview (1967)

Daring Fireball:

From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15’s tabs is a regression. Everything. It’s a tab design that can only please users who do not use tabs heavily; whereas the old tab design scaled gracefully from “I only open a few tabs at a time” all the way to “I have hundreds of tabs open across multiple windows”. That’s a disgrace. The Safari team literally invented the standard for how tabs work on MacOS. The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari’s tabs. Now, Apple has thrown away Safari’s tab design — a tab design that was not just best-of-platform, but arguably best-in-the-whole-damn-world — and replaced it with a design that is both inferior in the abstract, and utterly inconsistent with the standard tabs across the rest of MacOS.

The skin-deep “looks cool, ship it” nature of Safari 15’s tab design is like a fictional UI from a movie or TV show, like Westworld’s foldable tablets or Tony Stark’s systems from Iron Man, where looking cool is the entirety of the design spec. Something designed not by UI designers but by graphic designers, with no thought whatsoever to the affordances, consistencies, and visual hierarchies essential to actual usability. Just what looks cool. This new tab design shows a complete disregard for the familiarity users have with Safari’s existing tab design. Apple never has been and should not be a company that avoids change at all cost. But proper change — change that breaks users’ habits and expectations — is only justifiable when it’s an improvement. Change for change’s sake alone is masturbatory. That with Safari 15 it actually makes usability worse, solely for flamboyant cosmetic reasons, is downright perverse. 

Gruber is absolutely right about this, and right to be angry about it. It’s a frustrating time to be an Apple user, because while the company’s hardware is getting better and better its software is getting worse and worse. Indeed, the whole software side needs a fundamental reorganization and an even more fundamental rebooting of priorities. 

Apple's operating systems get more and more bells & whistles but have elementary functionality issues — for instance, Bluetooth has never worked reliably on MacOS; window management on iPadOS is an incoherent mess, though even so, it handles split-screening apps better than MacOS does. (I could extend that list for quite some time.) And Apple makes it very hard to sort out your sound inputs and outputs — which makes room for wonderful Mac apps like SoundSource, but come on: an easily-discoverable way of interacting with the computer’s sound should be built in to the system. (Because of the way that iOS and iPadOS are locked down, you can’t even have an app like SoundSource there. Your only option is to play search-and-guess in the Preferences app until, on a lucky day, you discover what you need.) 

Moreover, with just a few exceptions aside — Keynote for instance — Apple’s preinstalled apps are consistently bad. 

• Mail is feature-deficient and has been unstable and crash-prone for years. (I generally have a strong aversion to Microsoft software, but Outlook, though poorly integrated into MacOS, has the features I need and is rock-solid. So that’s what I use.)
• Calendar is likewise feature-limited, painfully tedious to enter data into, totally un-integrated with Reminders. (I use Fantastical instead.)
• Pages and Numbers are good apps, but the people who make them have never figured out how they are supposed to deal with the dominance of Word and Outlook (and their file types).
• Preview on the Mac is fine for what it does, but again it’s feature-limited; though not as limited as the barely-functional built-in PDF viewer on iOS and iPadOS. (I use PDF Expert instead, on all platforms.) 
• And then there are the places where Apple clearly is not even trying. I mean, TextEdit — are you kidding me?  

And so on. What makes this situation more alarming is the dysfunctional and sometimes abusive relationship Apple has with its best developers. Hey Apple: Those are the people who make your computers worth using.  

UPDATE: You know what doesn’t work on my Mac? Dark mode. I click to enable it — nothing happens. Hasn’t worked for months. You know what else doesn’t work? Using AirPlay to play music on HomePods. A song plays for five seconds and then falls silent for the remainder of the song. When a new song begins, it also plays for five seconds before falling silent. People have been reporting this problem on various support sites for two years, but no fixes yet. Here’s another thing: One more: clicking on an app in the Dock doesn’t open the app but rather opens a Finder window. It seems to me that with every release the OS gets buggier. 

The other day Teri and I were streaming an old movie and had to give up after half-an-hour or so. The print was indifferent and the sound both incomprehensibly muddy and out of sync with the video. If you’re watching older films — which we do a lot — when you’re streaming you never know what you’re going to get. 

This is why I adore the Criterion Collection. Recently I decided that I needed to have my own copy of The Magnificent Ambersons, so I ordered it from Criterion. I got a perfect print with perfect sound, and in this packaging: 

Welles’s preferred vision of the film is, famously, lost, which means that the film as he cut it has never been seen by the general public — so the presentation of the booklet as a stapled screenplay is sheer genius: 

And the essays — by Molly Haskell, Luc Sante, and Jonathan Lethem, no less — are simply brilliant, worth the price of admission in themselves. Ditto with the many documentaries, short and long, that accompany the movies available from the Criterion Channel. (Just this morning I watched a brief chronicle of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola reflecting on their relationship with Kurosawa.) 

There’s just so much crap being offered for sale or rent today — so much that we’re expected to spend money on and like even though it’s incompetently or carelessly made. In such an environment a company like Criterion seems like a miracle. I’m so grateful for the thought and care they put into everything they do. 

(A closely related concluding point: I may be the only person in America who would gladly have a significantly thicker, heavier Mac laptop if I could have one with a Blu-Ray/DVD/CD drive.) 

Matthew Loftus:

Christians must develop and encourage practices of suffering that accompany those in pain, like Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross during Christ’s passion. The ethical imperatives of the Church are only intelligible to a watching world to the degree that Christians are willing to walk alongside those who suffer and bear their pain with them. Without these practices of accompaniment, Christian moral teaching about issues like abortion or assisted reproductive technology is a cold set of rules enforced by people who have the privilege of not having to bear their cost. It is through these experiences — and not just experiences with those who forsake an accessible but immoral technological intervention, but also accompaniment with the poor, the imprisoned, and those whose suffering cannot be relieved by any human means — that Christians are able to experience growth through suffering and acquire the perspective from below that shapes their advocacy for those who need the work-towards-shalom the most. 

A powerful essay. 

The themes of that essay do not immediately seem directly related to the themes of this interview with Loftus, but I think they are. Responding to claims by some doctors that we should ration Covid care to favor the vaccinated and disfavor the unvaccinated, Loftus, himself a physician, says, 

I think it is a matter of justice not to ration care away from the unvaccinated, because to do so, I think, is to pass a judgment on someone's other personal health decisions that we would never apply in any other case. All health care is a mixture of trying to provide justice while also being merciful to others. It's impossible to be a good health-care worker and not be willing to be merciful with people who, quite frankly, got themselves into the trouble that they're in and had many opportunities not to do so. But it's also a matter of justice in giving that person what they need to survive or, if not to survive, to die in a way that honors the person they are. 

Loftus is pointing here to a version of what Scott Alexander, in one of the more useful ethical essays I have read in the past decade, calls “isolated demands for rigor.” When doctors treat people for health problems that arise from obesity, they don’t withhold care until they learn whether those people have some kind of genetic predisposition to obesity or are fat because they eat at McDonald’s every day — they just treat the patients. Oncologists don’t give better treatment to lung cancer patients who smoke less or don’t smoke at all. We only think to subject the unvaccinated-against-Covid to that kind of strict scrutiny because the discourse around Covid has become so pathologically tribalized and moralized. 

But Christians in particular have a very strong reason not to employ such strict scrutiny: We believe in a God who sought out and saved “people who, quite frankly, got themselves into the trouble that they're in.” In an earlier reflection on this general subject, I mentioned Eve Tushnet's wise comment that “mercy to the guilty is the only kind of mercy there is.” The rationing of medical care away from the unvaccinated is structural mercilessness. It is anti-shalom. 

Paul Kingsnorth:

This process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”. The more we are pulled, or pushed, away from our cultures, traditions and places — if we had them in the first place — the more we take that restlessness out with us into the world. If you have ever wondered why it is de rigueur amongst Western cultural elites to demonise roots and glorify movement, to downplay cohesion and talk up diversity, to deny links with the past and strike out instead for a future that never quite arrives, consider this: they are the children of globalised capitalism, and the inheritors of the unsettling of the West, and they have transformed that rootlessness into an ideology. They — we — are both perpetrators and victims of a Great Unsettling.

This is not to say that “Western” people alone are responsible for the rolling destruction of culture and nature that is overwhelming the world. We may have set the ball rolling, but the culture of uprooting is global now, and was when Weil was writing. You can see it everywhere you care to look. India has been uprooting its adivasi (tribal) people systemically since independence; its government is currently trying to undermine the power and agency of the peasant farmers of the Punjab, and have triggered a rural rebellion by doing so. The Chinese state is increasingly looking like the most efficient machine ever invented for uprooting, resettling and controlling mass populations. The Indonesian state is systematically unsettling the tribal people of West Papua, in cahoots with a cluster of multinational corporations. African governments are corralling the last of the San people. This is what states do, all over the world. It’s the ancient human game of power and control, turbo-charged with fossil fuels and digital surveillance technology.

End titles for A Hard Day’s Night

Here

Giorgio Agamben:

It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion, the thing which people believe that they believe in. Three systems of beliefs have co-existed, and in some ways still co-exist today, in the modern West: Christianity, capitalism, and science. In the history of modernity these three “religions” often and unavoidably intersected, each time clashing with one another and then reconciling until they gradually reached a sort of peaceful, articulated cohabitation (if not a true collaboration, in the name of a common interest). What is new is that, without us noticing, a subterranean and implacable conflict between science and the other two religions has ignited. Science’s triumphs appear today before our very eyes, and they determine in an unprecedented way every aspect of our existence. This conflict does not pertain, as it did in the past, to general theories and principles but, so to speak, to cultic praxis. No less than any other religion, science organizes and arranges its own structure through different forms and ranks. To its elaboration of a subtle and rigorous dogmatics corresponds, in praxis, a vast and intricate cultic sphere that coincides with what we call “technology.” It is not surprising that the protagonist of this new religious war is the very branch of science whose dogmatics is less rigorous and whose pragmatic aspect is stronger: that is, medicine, whose object is the living human body.