I used GPT-4o to try to make a realistic version of Yukon Cornelius. First it gave me a very yassified version, but it accepted feedback to make him more canonically burly. Then I ran out of free generations.
"We feel obliged to do everything we can to protect ourselves against uncertainty, and wearing comfy clothes we like is one way of doing this."
— Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump
My dad’s parents emigrated from Ireland to the US as young adults. They kept it pretty low key, but on one day in March every year, my grandmother would blast Irish music as loud as she could from her front porch. That was March 19, St Joseph’s Day, specifically to piss off all her Polish neighbors
Some years ago, I was medically diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorder. Frankly, it was a relief, as my earlier attempts at self-diagnosis all found that I was “a stupid, lazy, whiny bitch about everything,” which is harder to treat
"For students to really feel the fire of math, they have to experience the gradient of confidence—the feeling of moving from something obvious to something not-obvious, pushed uphill by the motor of formal logic."
— From Shape, by Jordan Ellenberg
“If both the tortoise shells and stalks oppose the views of men, inactivity will be auspicious but active operations will be unlucky." A good rule from the I Ching
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Today I had occasion to reread Marc Andreessen's 2020 essay "It's Time To Build," and it's a sign of how quickly so many people in SV have gone full fascist that today it almost reads like a progressive manifesto (reader, five years ago, it certainly did not)
https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
It’s Time to Build
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political...
"It was O’Toole’s Hamlet which showed Stoppard what Shakespeare could be: that it was exciting, and that it made sense."
— Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life
A reader reminded me of an essay I wrote almost fifteen years ago for the short-lived pop up magazine Longshot. The theme was “comeback.” I wrote about Odysseus, Auerbach, and Jerry Lee Lewis. The shorter published version may be lost, but I posted my long first draft:
https://snarkmarket.com/2010/6242/
Hero's Welcome, The Big Hairy Edition
This is Alexis Madrigal talking to the Columbia Journalism Review about staying up all night editing the first issue of Longshot:
I slept on
kottke.org