Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a dire toll on American society. --- When so many people have long or unreliable work hours, or worse, long and unreliable work hours, the effects ripple far and wide. Families pay the steepest price. Erratic hours can push parents—usually mothers—out of the labor force. A body of research suggests that children whose parents work odd or long hours are more likely to evince behavioral or cognitive problems, or be obese. Even parents who can afford nannies or extended day care are hard-pressed to provide thoughtful attention to their kids when work keeps them at their desks well past the dinner hour. […] What makes the changing cadences of labor most nepreryvka-like, however, is that they divide us not just at the micro level, within families and friend groups, but at the macro level, as a polity. Staggered and marathon work hours arguably make the nation materially richer—economists debate the point—but they certainly deprive us of what the late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter described as a “cultural asset of importance”: an “atmosphere of entire community repose.” […] Even if you aren’t asked to pull a weekend shift, work intrudes upon those once-sacred hours. The previous week’s unfinished business beckons when you open your laptop; urgent emails from a colleague await you in your inbox. A low-level sense of guilt attaches to those stretches of time not spent working. […] Wall Street demands improved quarterly earnings and encourages the kind of short-term thinking that drives executives to cut their most expensive line item: labor. If we want to alter the cadences of collective time, we have to act collectively, an effort that is itself undermined by the American nepreryvka. A presidential-campaign field organizer in a caucus state told me she can’t get low-income workers to commit to coming to meetings or rallies, let alone a time-consuming caucus, because they don’t know their schedules in advance. Reform is possible, however. In Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco, “predictive scheduling” laws (also called “fair workweek” laws) require employers to give employees adequate notice of their schedules and to pay employees a penalty if they don’t. Then there’s “right to disconnect” legislation, which mandates that employers negotiate a specific period when workers don’t have to answer emails or texts off the clock. France and Italy have passed such laws. It’s a cliché among political philosophers that if you want to create the conditions for tyranny, you sever the bonds of intimate relationships and local community. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She focused on the role of terror in breaking down social and family ties in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. But we don’t need a secret police to turn us into atomized, isolated souls. All it takes is for us to stand by while unbridled capitalism rips apart the temporal preserves that used to let us cultivate the seeds of civil society and nurture the sadly fragile shoots of affection, affinity, and solidarity.

Cruelty has always been part of American policymaking. Sometimes it’s a corollary effect—somebody, somewhere, is doing something we don’t want them to be doing, and if we have to kill some people or destroy a few lives to make them stop, that’s just the price. But in recent years, there’s been a shift in how we approach immigration and the border. It’s a tired cliché by now, but that doesn’t make it any less true: the cruelty is the point. […] There’s no reason to tread lightly here—and why would we want to? This is a profoundly monstrous policy, designed by deeply broken people, which revels in the suffering and degradation of other human beings purely in service of crude racism. There’s no justifying it, not if compassion and decency are even tangential elements of how you experience the world. […] If civility means politely inoculating powerful people from even the mildest forms of accountability for their ugly decisions, who exactly does that kindness serve, and what’s the point of it? Ellen’s monologue was an example of what’s fast becoming a genre of finger-wagging sanctimony in America, deployed to discipline us into performing deference to power and training us into a caustic meekness. Vote, but don’t boo the President at a baseball game. Wave a sign, but don’t confront someone in a restaurant, even if their day job is tearing families apart. And of course, don’t make an unrepentant war criminal uncomfortable at a football game. There’s an unspoken ranking of value that the gatekeepers of civility are making when they serve us these lectures. The comfort of the VIPs they rub elbows with at gated cocktail parties and luxury boxes is explicitly more important than the lives of Iraqis or Central American asylum-seekers at our border. If we want to live in a “decent” society, we are told, we have to treat those who make us complicit in horror with genteel respect. […] The problem with America’s national character is not that we’re too rude to our leaders, it’s that we’re too deferential to them. Consider the vector of incivility both Ellen and Obama blamed for the bile-soaked discourse in American politics. Was it a catastrophic war whose aftershocks will long outlast every living being on this planet, or the mask-off cruelties being inflicted upon vulnerable people at the border? Nope. For two of the most successful Americans alive, both of whom built their brands on the mantle of activism, the source of our descent into disharmony is apparently mean tweets. It’s enough to make you wonder whether the two of them think that the protestors in Santiago, Hong Kong, Cairo and Baghdad are also being ‘unkind.’ […] These are not mundane disagreements we are having in America. They are about whether we can continue to institutionalize brutality. Calm down, we are being told. Try to change things if you want, so long as you don’t make anybody in charge feel uncomfortable or isolated. With all due respect, fuck that.

Blazing fast, zero configuration web application bundler.

The problem is that Facebook doesn’t offer free speech; it offers free amplification. No one would much care about anything you posted to Facebook, no matter how false or hateful, if people had to navigate to your particular page to read your rantings, as in the very early days of the site. But what people actually read on Facebook is what’s in their News Feed … and its contents, in turn, are determined not by giving everyone an equal voice, and not by a strict chronological timeline. What you read on Facebook is determined entirely by Facebook’s algorithm, which elides much — censors much, if you wrongly think the News Feed is free speech — and amplifies little. What is amplified? Two forms of content. For native content, the algorithm optimizes for engagement. This in turn means people spend more time on Facebook, and therefore more time in the company of that other form of content which is amplified: paid advertising.

Your unconscious mind, it turns out, does not care what label a piece of music comes out on. It doesn’t care much about the artistic ethics behind it, either. Which means that the artists having the most fun in this new playground, at least creatively speaking, are the ones like Charli and Vernon—the ones who make the most of collaborative possibilities and don’t ask anyone listening to make distinctions about where any of their influences came from. That may sound jarringly utopian for a mostly dystopic moment, but if there is one thing we still want from pop music, even if the lyrics are downcast, it is a sense of possibility, of endless horizons.

America has a long history of ignoring problems when they impact mostly poor people of color or other marginalized groups. According to Schmitt, the epidemic of traffic deaths to vulnerable people is just another example. She pointed out that black people and Native Americans are are two times and four-and-and-half times more likely to be killed while walking than white people are. Similar risks exist for people over 75 years old, who are twice as likely to die. Instead of blaming victims because they’d been drinking alcohol or because they live outside adjacent to dangerous streets, Schmitt says we should be doing more to keep these groups of people out of harm’s way. “We know they’re out there, but we’re not doing a good job protecting them.”

A clear acrylic DIY kit for housing a Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator. (I own one.)

There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling – apart from the sheer fact that it's Finland-related, I mean. One is how vividly it illustrates a critical insight about persistence: that in the first weeks or years of any worthwhile project, feedback – whether from your own emotions, or from other people – isn't a reliable indication of how you're doing. (This shouldn't be confused with the dodgy dictum that triggering hostile reactions means you must be doing the right thing; it just doesn't prove you're doing the wrong one.) The second point concerns the perils of a world that fetishises originality. A hundred self-help books urge you to have the guts to be "different": the kid who drops out of university to launch a crazy-sounding startup becomes a cultural hero… yet the Helsinki theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you'll never reach it. Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond. "Stay on the fucking bus": there are worse fridge-magnet slogans to live by.

When Hollywood turned to talkies, it created a not-quite-British, not-quite-American style of speaking that has all but disappeared.

Maria interviews Rafael Shimunov, the man who made a video in which scenes of the consequences of the Iraq war are shown behind Ellen Degeneres’ apology for being friends with noted genocidal war criminal George Bush. "So basically I just got really upset… I’d thought her response would be an apology. And then it occurred to me that she was standing in front of her set, in blue, like, a single color. Like a natural green screen, but just blue. So I could put any image behind her, to make the point. "So then I had to go through all of the Iraq War images, and choose, kind of… I still can’t get a lot of those images out of my head, images I’ve never seen before, that I was searching through but didn’t select, because they would just have been flagged as graphic. There was a lot of imagery that I couldn’t use. I had to censor myself, ironically, because if I’d chosen those images, they wouldn’t have been seen: Modern images of the aftereffects, of children being born today, with fatal deformities and things like that, because of the war."

After years of unpredictable development and support, it seemed the Edit Flow plugin had finally given up the ghost last week when an Automattic support representative confirmed that it is no longer being actively developed and recommended users switch to an alternative. […] In support of smaller WordPress-powered publications that have an immediate need for editorial tools, we have compiled a list of alternatives that offer more frequent maintenance and support. Edit Flow’s primary features include a calendar, custom statuses, editorial comments, editorial metadata, notifications, story budget, and user groups. One of the alternatives below may be a suitable replacement, depending on which features are most important to your editorial workflow.

But you can also sense some of the same problems that afflicted post-punk four decades ago, especially in its later years, when it reached an impasse. With conceptronica, there can be a feeling, at times, of being lectured. There’s the perennial doubt about the efficacy of preaching to the converted. That in turn points to a disquieting discrepancy between the anti-elitist left politics and the material realities of conceptronica as both a cultural economy and a demographic—the fact that it is so entwined with and dependent on higher education and arts institutions.

As some of the pro-user-centric arguments hint, which option you prefer is partly a decision about cultural values, not economic cost. When you buy an album, no matter how many times you play it, you are making a conscious choice that it’s worth your hard-earned cash. With the existing streaming model, your money is not a direct investment—it is at the mercy of collective listening habits. Whether we want a system that rewards the conscious choices of individuals—versus, say, algorithms piping in modern-day muzak 24/7—is a question about more than dollars and (fractions of) cents.

An essential greatest hits album, one that brought ABBA indefinite fame.

The trick is to apply a class that universally shuts off all the transitions and animations. Now we have a resize-animation-stopper class on the that can force disable any transition or animation while the window is being resized, and goes away after the timeout clears.

Make the type huge, make the badge big, don't let it flip over, include a list of interests, make the logo small, and make them comfortable.

The cubital tunnel is located in the elbow and encases the ulnar nerve. Compression of this nerve can cause pain, but certain exercises can help.

In 1993, Portland was the first city in the US to create a climate action plan, yet we still don’t consistently report our results. This lack of basic accounting allows government agencies to control the progress narrative and doesn’t allow for the honest reckoning this issue demands. This lapse in basic accountability begs us to ask whether the city’s Bureau of Planning & Sustainability (BPS, who compiles the report) or the Mayor who oversees them, is either not competent enough to monitor the biggest crisis of our generation, is trying to spin the truth, or simply doesn’t care enough to prioritize it.

Legalizing apartments is not a panacea. But it is a precursor to other solutions. If there are no apartments, there are no homeless shelters, no student housing, no senior housing, and no Section 8. That’s why California’s zoning override bill, the More HOMES Act, was endorsed by Habitat for Humanity and the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, a coalition of 750 affordable-housing groups. More apartments would allow people to live closer to jobs, schools, and amenities, making transit more viable and reducing commute distances, which is good for the environment. Shorter, more-reliable commutes are also associated with greater economic mobility. Most importantly, by upzoning entire cities and states at a time, these efforts could help make sure that it isn’t only low-income neighborhoods of color—the places vulnerable to gentrification and displacement—that become hot spots for development in cities that need more housing. Whiter, richer neighborhoods that have aggressively opposed any attempts to build more housing will finally have to bear their share of the supply. […] In other words, that the burden of development is often borne by centrally located, formerly redlined communities of color is a product of the current system, in which social capital and political connections determine who gets to keep their neighborhood the same. Black, brown, and poor neighborhoods have emerged as the weakest links against enormous pent-up demand for housing, and planners (“a caretaker profession—reactive rather than proactive,” as the planner Thomas Campanella caustically put it) go with the flow. “It’s almost certainly true that more development happens in lower-income or minority communities because you can’t build any new housing—and certainly not apartments—in wealthy, white communities,” says Jenny Schuetz, a housing expert at the Brookings Institute. “Whether the rezoning changes that depends on how much opposition is straightforward zoning, and how much is the process of development.” In other words, city- and statewide rezoning might reverse the status quo, if governments succeed in stripping wealthy white neighborhoods of their powerful place in the local control system. But governments need to make sure the new rules don’t replicate the power imbalance that permeates development permitting now.

Like superheroes, each pain reliever has its own set of strengths and weaknesses.

My change of circumstance made me hyperaware of what I wanted everyone to see: a woman in charge of herself. A Strong Woman Doing Well On Her Own. A woman (I’m sorry) thriving. The logic was this: if I looked good I was doing well, in a way that anyone could see before I opened my mouth. I was tired of the gentle arm squeezes and soft-eyed how-you-holding-ups, of people checking in to make sure I was “taking care of myself”. I figured that becoming inarguably, conventionally attractive would cut them off at the pass, giving them a narrative they understood (“glow up” is a universal language) and saving myself the trouble of figuring out what I actually felt. I was comforted by the cut-throat simplicity of it: to be hot was to be doing well. Better than before, better than him. Better than other, weaker people who are broken by something as small as grief. I didn’t pause for a minute to consider how unhealthy it was to look on a breakup as a competition. I just knew that I did not want to be a loser. I wanted to be the winner, and very hot. […] It became clear that my post-breakup plans were unlikely to materialise: I would glow laterally at best. But I kept going, no longer in service of being seen, but to luxuriate in not being so. I know many if not most people attend Spin class because it makes their butts look good. But I’m sure there are others, like me, who are there because it makes them feel like their butt, and the rest of them, have dissolved into a fine mist.

In today’s typical scenario, where the average website ships 500KB of gzipped JavaScript and 1.5MB of images, running on a midrange Android device via 3G with a 400ms round trip time, CSS selector performance is the least of our problems. […] To sum it up, you shouldn’t worry about selector performance, unless you really go overboard. While the topic was all the rage in 2012, browsers have gotten a lot faster and smarter since. Even Google doesn’t worry about it anymore. If you check out Google’s Page Speed Insights page, you won’t see the rule “Use efficient CSS selectors” which was removed in 2013. Instead, focus on making your CSS maintainable and readable. Your colleagues and your future self will thank you for it. Try to optimize the CSS delivery by including only the used styles. And after that, get to know the rendering pipeline. Unlike selectors, styles themselves can be expensive, and the difference between a janky site and a smooth one can often be found in how the CSS is implemented.

The sample clearance expert behind albums by the Avalanches, the Beastie Boys and more on the creative power of sampling.

Support tables for HTML and CSS in emails.

The city flag of Portland, Oregon, consists of a green field on which is placed a white four-pointed star (a truncated hypocycloid) from which radiate blue stripes, each bordered by L-shaped yellow elements. Narrow white fimbriations separate the blue and yellow elements from each other and from the green background. The official ordinance specifies a height of 3 feet and a length of 5 feet. City ordinance 176874, adopted September 4, 2002, designates the design and its symbolism. Green stands for "the forests and our green City"; yellow for "agriculture and commerce"; blue for "our rivers".

In the course of our conversations, he and I discussed various theories about his writing—about what, in general, his project might be. At lunch, he proffered one theory—that his stories were an attempt to resist “the identification of materialism with nihilism.”

Because a fig is actually a ball of flowers, it requires pollination to reproduce, but, because the flowers are sealed, not just any bug can crawl inside. That task belongs to a minuscule insect known as the fig wasp, whose life cycle is intertwined with the fig’s. Mother wasps lay their eggs in an unripe fig. After their offspring hatch and mature, the males mate and then chew a tunnel to the surface, dying when their task is complete. The females follow and take flight, riding the winds until they smell another fig tree. […] There are more than seven hundred species of fig, and each one has its own species of wasp. When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing wasp mummies, too. […] Our pre-human ancestors probably filled up on figs, too. The plants are what is known as a keystone species: yank them from the jungle and the whole ecosystem would collapse. Figs’ popularity means they can play a central role in bringing deforested land back to life. The plants grow quickly in inhospitable places and, thanks to the endurance of the fig wasps, can survive at low densities.

Steve Jobs was, in short, too much a plutocrat and too little an artist or craftsman to produce an ultimately satisfying appropriation of the warmer, more humane minimalism of the mid-20th century, which had been rooted in a vision of a more egalitarian and fairer world. To what degree do “good design,” or “taste,” depend on human values?

Ultimately, the problem at hand is greater than the risk of lost royalties. The prevalence of leaks on established streaming services has a significant impact on an artist’s sense of ownership over their life’s work. The lines become blurred as to whether something actually “exists” in an artist’s canon if they never gave permission for it to be released. So while diehards might feel a thrill, circumventing the system and listening to unreleased songs by their favorite musicians, the leaks ultimately hurt those same artists.

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