The Problem with Travel
At Last Our Bodies Collide
Paying down debt (financial, technical, and otherwise)
The Magic of the Everybody Meeting
Instant Recall
“The process of remembering memories rewrites them, revises them, and this ability to re-envision ourselves is a central part of the creation of seemingly stable life narratives that allow for growth and change.” “As the work of memory keeping is offshored, Instagram by Instagram, to social media companies and cloud storage, we are giving up the work of remembering ourselves for the convenience of being reminded.” “McAdam’s life narrative is made up not so much of memories as it is by the active, personal, and performative act of remembering. The inputs into Facebook or Timehop are not bits of narrative. A Facebook Memory cannot be a narrative fragment because it is static. But to state the obvious, it is also not a memory: It is a socially contextualized performative expression. Facebook’s re-presentation of these “memories” strips them of context, recategorizing them as “events” or “moments.” They are both separate from their own context in time and, as memory objects, unavailable for the remembering and rewriting that would be necessary to interpolate them into a coherent personal narrative.” “These physical evocations age, and their value and veracity as objects of testimony ages with them and us. They date, they fade, they display their distance from the events they are connected to and their distance from us. Digital memory objects, on the other hand, although they might abruptly obsolesce, do not age in the same way. They remain flatly, shinily omni-accessible, represented to us cleanly both in the everlasting ret-conned context of their creation and consumption. The user interface of Facebook doesn’t time-machine itself to the design it had when you composed whatever memory it is showing you from 10 years ago. In the visual context presented, you could have written it yesterday.” “‘Inside Google Maps,’ she writes, ‘I live with you, and I live without you.’” “if living in one present moment is good, living in endlessly arrested presents must be even better. A continual living in the present means there is no space for reflection, for coherence-building. There is just the continual, lepidoptery-like collection of “moments.” Memories turned into mere mementos. Remembering turns into reminding.”
A divorce lawyer’s guide to staying together
“I think that’s how marriages end. Very slowly and then all at once. There are lots of little things that happen and then the flood comes, then the big things happen. The question is, can we stop the little things that take us further away from each other before it’s too late?” “At the risk of sounding unromantic, I think you have to look at a person and say, ‘Okay, is this a person who is going to make sense at all different phases of this journey? Because my life is going to change. I’m going to change. What’s important to me is going to change. Is this a person who can change with me so that we end up [moving] in the same direction? Or is this someone who makes sense for me at this chapter and may not in the future?’” “In the book, I urge people to just ‘hit send now,’ which means always call out those little things immediately in the moment, always address them right now. If you don’t do that, if you let the resentments grow, those raindrops become a flood and it’s too late to put everything back together again.” “It’s the same thing with love. I think you fall in love really fast, then fall out of love slowly. And if you want to keep your love alive, you have to be attentive to all the little things that go wrong along the way, and constantly course-correct. If you can do that, you’ll never set foot in my office.”
On Time and Parenting
Matt DesLauriers’ Generative Art
Generative art, limited edition pen plotter prints, and other work by Matt DesLauriers.
First You Were
Sharing a Brother’s Love
Learnings from Ketch (so far)
“thoughts from the past few weeks - think a lot of folks confuse the terms: social, messaging, communication, and consumer - you're stuck in blue bubble purgatory as friends until you have a synchronous convo 🗣 or IRL coffee - calendar battleship is a real drag for everyone”
All the Buildings of the Living
“And of all the things I did this year that I'm proud of — finding my dream job, running my first 10K, beginning to write poetry again — Buttondown's growth and success might be the biggest one.”
City
Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora
Forget about Quora's security breach. Their ongoing efforts to block access to their content, including a multi-year ban on the Internet Archive, are reason enough to never use them.
Betting on Slope
“That makes sense, except it doesn’t. Shouldn’t large organizations have more of a capacity for handling “m risk” and seek to leverage that to gain long term advantages?”
Midnight, Talking About Our Exes
Value Arcs
The more senior you are, the longer timescales you operate in. Weeks/months become year/5 years/+. And the feedback loops much longer as well (many years).That transition is tough, but what is most difficult is adapting your notion of patience and when to apply impatience.— Julia Grace (@jewelia) August 16, 2018
On Tumblr’s New Guidelines
iMessage Sticker Pack to Annotate Preview Cards
I literally made a sticker pack to help the recipient know you sent a tweet to them with multiple images or video https://t.co/BoIFaqwqB5— Trevor Kay (@trevormkay) September 26, 2018
#71: Cities Are Getting Smaller
“Places—individual stores, neighborhoods, and entire cities—are fragile, and the internet makes them more so.” “Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new medium contained another medium as its content: Speech, for example, became the content of writing, as writing became the content of print. Cities, which grew independently for so long, might now be the content of the internet.”
A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics
For the last four years I’ve been working on a book for programmers who want to learn mathematics. It’s finally done, and you can buy it today. The website for the book is pimbook.org, …
Roomba Naming
“I bought a roomba, please reply with a good name.”
I Sincerely Hope
Do you remember the very best meme of September?
Why September 21 is so much more than a random calendar date.
Infinite Sets that Admit Fast Exhaustive Search
Never
Making a claim that something will never be the case can feel like an invitation for the universe to prove otherwise. Fortunately for us, Swift lives up to this higher standard thanks to the unlikeliest of types.
Void
Void has no members: no methods, no values, not even a name. It’s a something more nothing than nil.
Small Fry
Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s memoir Small Fry is one of the best books I’ve read this year.
Hitting Resume
“(I am writing this across the room from an absolute unit of a black lab, whose name I imagine to be Bear or perhaps Winchester, whom I am summoning the energy and wherewithal to go up and pet.)”
The Many Sides of Friendship
Each quarter Chris Yeh and I convene about 20 of our friends on the peninsula and 20 of our friends in San Francisco for a conversation over lunch. Each lunch, called the Junto, has a theme. So far…