Finished reading: Why Christians Should Be Leftists by Phil Christman — and I wrote a long rambly post about it here 📚
For those of you who aren’t on micro.blog … you should really consider it! It’s a great service, and its fearless leader, Manton Reece, is one of the truly Good Guys of the Internet. A while back I wrote about some of the hidden features here, and then about what I call the three paths of the service. And it has only improved since I wrote those posts. You can adapt it to so many different use cases: for instance, it’s a great way to keep a reading journal and an equally great way to make a photo blog. Please do explore it if you haven’t.
As Iistened to Ezra Klein’s interview with Brian Eno I felt that Ezra was doing 75% of the talking. He wasn’t, but he did talk way too much, especially when you consider that his guest is one of the most interesting people on the planet. I kept wanting the Ezra Klein Show Minus Ezra Klein, like Garfield Minus Garfield.
The wisdom of Bertie Wooster — whose intellectual acumen has finally been justly acknowledged.
I remember a couple of years ago at Laity Lodge hearing Claire work out this lovely song — so good to hear it in its completed version.
Most political writing is “Why My People Are Correct and Those Other People Are Wrong,” which is why I rarely link to political writing. There’s a shortage of good analysis. Noah Millman’s new post demonstrates why he’s one of the best political analysts around. So I’ll link to Noah!
From Julian Lucas’s long profile of Tim Berners-Lee:
In a forthcoming book, The Age of Extraction, Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor who coined the term “net neutrality,” identifies 2012 and 2013 as the years when “platform power” took hold. Since the nineties, it had been assumed that the web would democratize society, empowering bloggers to compete with media conglomerates, and small manufacturers to bypass big retailers. Some of that happened. But the web’s Davids had only traded one Goliath for another — corporate platforms that stood between them and their markets. As Wu writes, “Paeans to small-is-beautiful and the transformation of the human existence” soon gave way to “a strategy that extracted from dependent businesses and harvested the time and data of the masses.”
A true account — but some of us still hold to the small-is-beautiful ethos and are practicing a non-extractive life on the Web. The dream isn’t dead!