Alan Jacobs

A more peaceful image from the same room

Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2016)

Hard to imagine a more damning chart. But what we will never be able to decide is who, primarily, deserves the blame: Federal government, state government, local government, … or an ungovernable people.

I use Safari as my default browser on the Mac, and the feature I am most thankful for is Reader View. We all have the experience, probably every single day, of opening a webpage only to have the text we want to read obscured by popover ads, which we dismiss only to be assaulted by autoplaying videos and blinking ads. All that represents a money-making strategy I just don’t understand: yes, I know sites need to run ads, but ads that make it literally impossible to read their content? How can that be good? I just don’t get it. 

So day after day I scramble to hit the Reader View button, and then set the browser to always open pages from that domain in Reader View. Then, finally, I can read the article … which, four times our of five, turns out not to be worth reading. 

So let us now praise TidBITS, the venerable Applecentric website. Take a look at this article. What a clean, readable design! Nothing to interfere with my reading the article — and wow, what a fine article! Informative, clearly written, just the right level of detail. (I knew it would be good before I read a word because of Glenn Fleishman’s name on the byline — everything he writes is worth reading.) 

Why can’t more of the internet be like this? 

In gratitude, I went right to the Membership page and put my money where my typing fingers are. I would suggest you do the same for any websites that give you the same feeling. 

First tomatoes from the garden, full-size + cherry.

Not just reading David French’s newsletter, I’m annotating it.

Here in America, it’s a news week like any other.

• The President retweets, for political effect, a doctored video.
• Tucker Carlson says that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is “a special carve-out Google has received from the United States Congress,” even though, as Senator Mike Lee points out, Section 230 was passed by Congress in 1996, two years before Google was founded.
• The ACLU says that “The death penalty evolved from lynching.” Yes, really. Read the tweet and see.

I could go on. And on, and on. And there will be more of the same next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, ad infinitum and especially nauseam.

Here’s what I’m trying to do, and what I would encourage you all to do the same: First, take note of the people, like the ones listed above, who do not care whether what they say is true, but only about whether it serves their preferred narrative.

Second, look for people — politicians, journalists, academics — who do care whether what they say is true.

Third, studiously ignore the people in the first group and pay close attention to the people in the second one.

It won’t be easy to find those truth-concerned people. Sometimes you’ll feel like Diogenes with his lantern. But it must be done, for the sake of our collective sanity.

Vieux Carré