“In research,” said Tom Rivers, “you often need a person like [Harry] around, you know, someone … to encourage people to see what the grass is like on the other side. In other words, a catalyst. Harry Weaver performed that function beautifully.” ​ But it seems to me that we’d be doing a better job fighting COVID-19 if there were someone qualified who believed it was their job to solve it.

… “surreal.” It’s a word Americans often reach for when something destabilizes the ongoing-ness of daily life, when life seems “not itself.” This “life” almost always means “one’s role within the economy.” To be pushed into surreality in America is to suddenly notice the strangeness of one’s relationship to producing and consuming. One of surrealism’s clichés is that it is “the art of the dream.” It seems, now, as if a long dream has ended. Rather than pushed into the surreal, we have been for the first time in decades dislodged from the surreal.

Dropbox mirror of the illustrations: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pq4s6qrhtsqdua0/kettlebell_sh_images.zip?dl=0

“The most effective way to diffuse collective action — and the sweeping, systemic changes it can spark — has always been to turn those who are suffering against one another,” Petersen writes. That is also a concise way of explaining what Ring cameras accomplish: They reject the possibility of collective action and embed “every person for themselves” ​ With social media, the reasonable desires for social recognition and tailored information metastasized into addictive use patterns and “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” ​ while the app can continually foreground a sense of the world is fundamentally dangerous.

Suddenly being forced to stay still

There is no going back. The only way out is through—past a turbulent spring, across an unusual summer, and into an unsettled year beyond. ​ Stockdale’s strategy, instead, was to meld hope with realism—“the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail,” as he put it, with “the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are.” ​ They undoubtedly raise privacy concerns, but as my colleague Derek Thompson argues, “Compared with our present nightmare, strategically sacrificing our privacy might be the best way to protect other freedoms.”

But remote RC is working, and it includes most of the best parts of RC because it includes the most important part: kind, thoughtful, curious people who are committed to becoming better programmers together.

Conway was arguably an extreme point in the convex hull of all mathematicians.

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Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. ​ If you feel the worst image taking shape, make yourself think of the best image. We all get a little sick and the world continues. Not everyone I love dies. Maybe no one does because we’re all taking the right steps. Neither scenario should be ignored but neither should dominate either. ​ We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. ​ Emotions need motion.

Thinking about the future, at its best, is really just another way to process the present, and there’s never been a better time to do that. ​ but what’s increasingly obvious to me is how this crisis will decisively divide the world in two along many different axes. Some of those fault lines are obvious, and were already splitting open: at-risk or healthy; hourly or salaried; manual laborer or knowledge worker.

You can’t help but wonder: if we’re forced for an entire year to forego the in-person benefits of these practices, what happens when life returns to normal? ​ It’s basic human nature to pursue positional scarcity, and to do whatever it takes to compete for it. The virus won’t change that.

(When's the last time this many people were forced to think about the same thing, all at once?)

— crucial players keeping the engines of the city at a quiet hum.

kids just take it in stride. They’re constantly collecting new and surprising information, processing it, and promptly moving on with their new reality. ​ But being asked to explain each change to a 3 year old helps me feel ready to move on with each new reality.

I began 2020 without a home in New York.

footage from my Facebook Livestream on April 1st 2020 #stayhome #staysafe

But the things that make me me won’t change. I’m a Seattle guy who blogs and writes an open source RSS reader.

Listen here ▶️ http://prot.cl/keep-moving-rebootYo Dance music icons Sultan + Shepard celebrate the fifth anniversary of their hit "Keep Moving" with The Boxer Rebellion by releasing a reboot of the 2014's single. Classics fans have nothing to fear, as the original's heartfelt, cathartic vocals still shine amid soundscapes where delicate melodies concinnate with a muted progressive bassline. The original single amassed over 5M streams on Spotify, and the reboot does its justice for the modern era! Release Date: Dec 13 Sultan + Shepard http://instagram.com/sultanshepard http://twitter.com/sultanshepard http://facebook.com/sultanshepard Protocol Recordings http://protocolrecordings.com http://instagram.com/protocolrecordings http://facebook.com/protocolrecordings http://twitter.com/protocolrec http://prot.cl/spotify http://prot.cl/apple-music http://prot.cl/deezer

but then life happened as it tends to do but not quite in the way that any of us could expect–except bill gates? ​ now it’s a company that you can still enumerate with 2 hands but then have to reuse those same hands about 30 times.

People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. ​ Perhaps it will appreciate that health-care workers and public-health specialists compose America’s social immune system, ​ Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time. ​ We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.

The pandemic has fractured the discourse, exposing how many layers of assumptions formed the bedrock. ​ Under quarantine conditions, there is less opportunity to physically signal one’s participation in a culture, so clothing and conspicuous consumption matter less. ​ Knowledge tooling will be extremely important to this new set of online cultural formation. ​ We’ll see a dramatic acceleration of the exodus from clearnet that began a few years ago. ​ Cities will need to put incentives in place for small businesses to take over these spaces, and stem the blight of banks and pharmacies that have eaten ground floor retail, have genericized walkable cities in the last decade. ​ People who left the city due to safety concerns or simply for affordability reasons may not return. Combined with the increasing viability of remote work and zero-hour contracting, we may see further evacuation of the city and a new wave of suburbanization. ​ The increased availability of urban space relative to demand that results from this will create new opportunities for communities and cultural production to manifest themselves in the physical world. ​ in the second, that same realm is reinvigorated and returned to its true stakeholders, the people who live there. Breathe. Read the air. The real knowledge work begins

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

At least that's what I try to keep telling myself: If nothing is happening then you're lucky. If a day isn't dramatic, if your main problem is what to cook or watch or play, then that's amazing. Boredom and mundanity are blessings. If tomorrow is the same as today, even better.

I’m old enough to know my faults, if not yet old enough to fix them: I know that I have a tendency to compartmentalize, and to deal with things outside of my control by tunnel-visioning on the things I do. I’m saying that in times where you find yourself enchanted and disgusted by the spiral of things, you get to do whatever you can to grant yourself a bit of sanity.

Also, hello, I'm temporarily pausing book leave, and back to working full-time at the Atlantic to do pandemic reporting for the foreseeable.— Ed Yong is on sabbatical (@edyong209) March 16, 2020

all i can say is try, when you can, to be easy on yourself, and if that’s hard, think about what you would say to a friend. try to be your own friend right now.

It feels almost insensitive to focus on anything else right now, like bringing up celebrity gossip at a funeral. ​ This is that emergency episode that falls outside the overarching narrative continuity of our lives. ​ Living in a house where adults are screaming at each other in the next room from dusk until dawn chips away at the membrane of one’s inner peace. ​ More and more of the information is simply adding to the fog of war, and some shoddy graphs of all sorts of really varied data sets and cohorts aren’t helping. ​ For all the chaos on Twitter, some of the smarter voices there still strike me as the most sensible ones.

This is where we have no choice other than to trust the people whose job is to help with this stuff. The only thing we can do is stay inside, stay sane and be patient. ​ There are no quick fixes to this. No amount of shady scientific papers or tweet threads will change any of this. ​ We can find something new every minute of every one of these days, yet, none of it really makes a difference.