3 of 5 stars to Later by Stephen King

5 of 5 stars to Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Starting The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins

4 of 5 stars to Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

3 of 5 stars to Old Bones by Douglas Preston

While the core technology of the web is decades old, the tools that help make it and run have been quietly evolving into something extraordinary in the last few years, too. There’s a flourishing of powerful new frameworks that make it simpler than ever to build flexible, responsive, useful sites. New hosting platforms let those sites be deployed and delivered faster and more reliably than ever. And you can build one of these sites in literally under a minute, then collaborate with people anywhere in the world to iterate on making the site better.

The idea that we can choose our experts based on what they’re saying and how palatable their message is to us — or worse, based on how well they already agree with our preconceptions — is a recipe for disaster. The one weapon we have against our own ignorance, and our own unwillingness to revise our previously held convictions, is scientific literacy: the ability to gather and assimilate information that itself lies beyond our own expertise to obtain for ourselves.

So many TV shows and movies now have a dull filter applied to every scene, one that cuts away vibrancy and trends toward a boring sameness. Every frame’s color scheme ends up feeling the same as every other frame. And when there are so many projects using similar techniques, you end up with a world of boring visuals that don’t stand out.

But the truth of the matter is that virtually all humans have, for virtually all of recorded history, faced daily risks of disease or violent death that are far greater than those that the residents of developed countries currently face. And despite the genuine horrors of the past 24 months, that holds true even now.

Is our drive to live life and socialize in the face of such dangers foolhardy? Or is it inspiring? I don’t know. But good or bad, it is unlikely to change. The determination to get on with our lives is deeply and perhaps unchangeably human.

In that sense, the spring of 2020 will be remembered as one of the most extraordinary periods in history—a time when people completely withdrew from social life to slow the spread of a dangerous pathogen. But what was possible for a few months has turned out to be unsustainable for years, let alone decades.

Dickinson expanded upon Emily’s legacy by focusing on her struggle to understand herself. Each season treated her personal dilemmas—whether she should be a poet, whether she should claim ownership of her art, what kind of impact she hoped her work would make—with the same importance as, say, the conflicts that come with running a country. And by taking care to incorporate history even as it toyed with time, the show grasped that although Emily Dickinson was ahead of her time, the time in which she lived informed who she became. Not once in Dickinson’s run does Emily break free from the constraints of the era except in her mind, and as playful as the series could be in showing off her limitless vision, it drew depth from that tension.

Now to the question that I actually asked that no one seems to want to answer. Why? Why is it this way? Why podcasting and not the other tech-based media. Why is podcasting still open after over 20 years? Drumroll please. The answer: there are enough users who understand how it is supposed to work. They expect to be able to listen to any podcast anywhere they want. Most probably don't understand why they have this ability, about the history and technology design that made it possible, but they understand that they have the ability. And it doesn't have to be all of them or even most of them, just enough of them, whatever that means. And for right now, at the end of 2021, there are enough. Podcasting has always been and remains an open platform. I can't say it will be for the future, but so far so good.

I learned this map as a kid, at least up to Ohio. I lived it, virtually, when we played Oregon Trail. In that ancient game you’d cross the frontier; fording rivers, hunting squirrels, dying of dysentery. Today I find the whole thing deeply unsettling.
This map is a map of colonialism. It’s a crime scene. It’s a crime against humanity.

For nearly 30 years, the American counterculture icon Robert Crumb has lived with his family in a remote French village. In an interview there, he talks about making the Bible a feminist text and his brushes with political correctness
Share in Facebook
Share in Twitter

Send in e-mailSend in e-mail
Go to comments
Print article

If you want to turn your device into the best iPhone or iPad for business, getting set up with a custom domain is a great way to give off a professional vibe. In addition, setting it up via iCloud.com means you still get to use Apple's underlying iCloud Mail infrastructure rather than relying on something like Gmail to do the same thing.

If you, like me, grew up in the United States of America, you’ve probably heard a story of the late 1970s and early 1980s that goes something like this: “In the 70s, Carter’s liberal big-government policies resulted in runaway inflation. Reagan came in and defeated inflation, and produced an economic boom with deregulation and tax cuts. Reagan also embarked on a massive defense spending binge which, although it increased the deficit a lot, forced the USSR to bankrupt itself trying to keep up, and thus won the Cold War.”

That might sound like a straw man, but the narratives we tell each other about the past often consist of exactly such straw men. And debunking those narratives might feel like shooting at easy targets, but it’s helpful for taking a closer look at history.

Anyway, the above narrative is almost entirely wrong. Carter was a deregulator who didn’t increase deficits much, and appointed the Fed chair who beat inflation. Reagan didn’t do much deregulating, nor did he increase defense spending much as a share of GDP — and the USSR didn’t fall because of the arms race. Let’s go through these points one by one.

The Tablet — The Original provides a unique experience unmatched by any other writing device. Prooved by thousands of years of usage, its natural materials, zero-latency stylus and 3D display are still unmatched in the 3rd millennium. It is the moral imperative to make wax tablets modern again.

This is what white evangelicals say every single time they get their families together to pose with their guns. They’re sending a very clear signal. They’re sending it out to other white evangelicals, that they have each other’s backs. They’re also sending it out as a threat to anyone who tries to oppose them. “Watch out. Don’t mess with us.”
It’s all intentional.
Let’s remember animal behavior for a moment. When other animals do anything that resembles smiling, they’re not conveying warmth and cheer. They’re baring their teeth.

When a bunch of techies are beavering away on a new tool, it can be tricky to figure out:
Is this a genuinely useful new thing? Or is it just some expensive prototype, a pipe dream that’ll never take off?

In the long run, Americans have always gotten behind protest movements that make the country more open, more decent, less divided. What today is called Woke does none of those things. It has no future in the home of the free.

“Why do people like South Korean stuff so much?” A lot of ink has been spilled over this, and I don’t really know enough to weigh in. But there is one interesting thing I’ve noticed, which is that South Korea is among the first countries — perhaps the first country — to become a modern cultural superpower without having had an empire in the last 500 years.

There are plenty of notions to go around about how time travel might work, with some holding more credibility than others. But something new has been discovered, which turns the conversation about time travel on its head.

Starting Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain

We couldn’t see the genius of the wheeled suitcase because it didn’t align with our prevailing views on masculinity. In hindsight, we find this bizarre. How could the predominant view on masculinity turn out to be more stubborn than the market’s desire to make money? How could the crude idea that men must carry heavy things prevent us from seeing the potential in a product that would come to transform an entire global industry?

4 of 5 stars to I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

The bad-faith “balance” game is used by fraudsters and crooks to sow doubt. It’s how homeopaths, anti-vaxers, eugenicists, raw milk pushers and other members of the Paltrow-Industrial Complex played the BBC and other sober-sided media outlets, demanding that they be given airtime to rebut scientists’ careful, empirical claims with junk they made up on the spot.

And that — the vague but calming sense that our own death is no longer imminent — is what is going to let each of us say, in our own moment of epiphany: “Hey — I suddenly feel like it’s over.”
And when enough of us do — it will be

Aldous Huxley (July, 26 1894–November 22, 1963) endures as one of the most visionary and unusual minds of the twentieth century — a man of strong convictions about drugs, democracy, and religion and immensely prescient ideas about the role of technology in human life; a prominent fixture of Carl Sagan’s reading list; and the author of a little-known allegorical children’s book.

Today’s vote confirmed that the leaders of the current Republican Party are willing to abandon democracy in order to save the country from what they call “socialism.”

But what Republicans mean when they say “socialism” is not the political system most countries recognize when they use that word: one in which the people, through their government, own the means of production. What Republicans mean comes from America’s peculiar history after the Civil War, when new national taxation coincided with the expansion of voting to include Black men.

If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others. We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary. Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing. We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.

Our mitigations would have been much more effective, sparing us a great deal of suffering and anxiety.

Since the pandemic is far from over, with countries like India facing devastating surges, we need to understand both why this took so long to come about and what it will mean.

SIXTY-SIX MILLION years ago, in one cataclysmic flash, the Earth changed forever. Without warning, a mountain-sized rock pierced through the 480 km of the atmosphere in an instant, and slammed into the deep bedrock of a shallow sea.

But that’s not the only theory. Many folks believe think it’s not the dietary components that matter, it’s how we take them in. Ultra-processed foods with enhanced flavors and salts and sugars overwhelm our senses and deliver calories in a dense form that basically leaves us in positive energy balance and we gain weight. That those ultra-processed foods are carb-heavy has nothing to do with it.
So the researchers decided to untie this knot.

A nurse and I were talking in an examining room recently, waiting for the doctor to come in. She asked me if I could have anything I wanted, what would it be?

I was surprised by how quickly I answered.

“I have everything I want,” I said.

She was young, and I saw that I had shocked her. “Oh,” she said, “I want a lot of things.”

Maybe, I thought to myself; she had the luxury of wanting things because she had so many years ahead of her.

Perhaps I don’t want things because I am closer to the end than the beginning. Maybe she just thought I was a crazy old man.

For three years, during the darkest days of Trump’s presidency and the COVID pandemic, during times of social unrest and violence and mass insanity, I took refuge in a Canadian sitcom called Kim’s Convenience. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it on Netflix. It’s a show about a family that owns a convenience store in Toronto. The parents are immigrants from Korea, their adult children Jung and Janet are trying to make their way in the world.

The fact that searches for alien intelligence have so far come up empty handed is almost meaningless. It means only that we have been looking for the wrong signs. Indeed, the right signs may be just in front of our noses, clear if only we could read them.

The feature works by comparing the data from your iOS device's gyroscope and accelerometer against the data from your ‌AirPods‌ Pro or ‌AirPods Max‌, ensuring that the sound field stays anchored to the device, even if you move your head.

Unsurprisingly, spatial audio isn't universally supported by third-party apps and services. To save you spending time wondering if a particular app works with the feature, we've put together a list below of all the apps that have officially been updated to support Spatial Audio, and some popular apps that have yet to add support.

The idea behind vTaiwan (virtual Taiwan) is that government needs to respond here and now when citizens express concern about a given issue by inviting them to set the agenda. To do so, information must be transparent and available to all. The government and its citizens must have the same information so that there is a trustworthy basis for a public conversation.

“You’re going to keep out a lot of the riffraff by making it harder to break iPhones. But the 1% of top hackers are going to find a way in and, once they’re inside, the impenetrable fortress of the iPhone protects them.”BILL MARCZAK, CITIZEN LAB

The green dots represent radio stations. Click on any one to hear the station.

An email tracker, read receipt and spy pixel blocker plugin for macOS Apple Mail.

And that’s likely why YouTube doesn’t make it easy to follow channels by RSS. They don’t offer any type of feed discovery on channel pages and the OPML download that used to be available from a difficult to find subscriptions page disappeared sometime last Fall. Each channel does still have an RSS feed, but you have to work a little bit to get it.

You can use this URL template for each feed:

Interactive map showing the age of every building in The Netherlands.

There are just times you have to get rid of a toxic person who can’t play nice with others. And sometimes those toxic people don’t have the spine to just walk away when they’re unhappy. So. Buh-bye. The old saying ‘be careful what you wish for’ has been around for a long time because it is true: sometimes we don’t know what we truly want until we get it.

It’s clear that we still have a long way to go when it comes to meaningfully acknowledging the intrinsic value of nature. There’s no doubt though that the Dasgupta Review poses an important and timely challenge to mainstream economics; we can only hope that through its influence, more and more people come to think of themselves as naturalists.

Eventually, your brain begins to associate that surge of dopamine with the checking behavior. “This is exactly why slot machines are so addictive. We’re inadvertently setting ourselves up to get addicted to checking the news through what is called intermittent reinforcement — a fancy term for getting random rewards,” Brewer writes.
Everyone’s media-checking behaviors have skyrocketed, their focus has flagged, and their once-natural ability to talk normally to people face-to-face has become a struggle.

In one form or another, C has influenced the shape of almost every programming language developed since the 1980s. Some languages like C++, C#, and objective C are intended to be direct successors to the language, while other languages have merely adopted and adapted C’s syntax. A programmer conversant in Java, PHP, Ruby, Python or Perl will have little difficulty understanding simple C programs, and in that sense, C may be thought of almost as a lingua franca among programmers.

But C did not emerge fully formed out of thin air as some programming monolith. The story of C begins in England, with a colleague of Alan Turing and a program that played checkers.

It would be one thing to decide that not only is it unacceptable to use a slur but it is also unacceptable to utter or mention in it any form. It is another thing to treat those two different actions as completely indistinguishable, as the Daily Beast appears to have done.