Mitch's Blog

Please enjoy this visual metaphor for the state of my resolution to stop doomscrolling.

Musk did a Nazi salute at a rally. Twice. And people are trying to explain away what they plainly saw.

I’ve seen headstrong winners of close elections high on their own supply before. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, all of this is meant to hit you with so much sensory stimulus that you become overwhelmed. But the images you see wrapped around you in an iMax theater aren’t real. It’s still a movie.

— A Moment of Calm

Marshall also notes a “for the ages” photo of the CEOs of Amazon, Meta, Google and Apple, “at an inaugural church service feting Donald Trump this morning at St. John’s church across the street from the White House.”

Marshall:

You may not have a billion dollars but your dignity is all yours. No one can take it from you. Compared to some you can already be ahead of the game.

One step at a time. They’re not as big as they look.

I’m doing a bit of volunteer work for our local Democratic club this morning.

I did not time the work to coincide with the inauguration — the work just needed doing today. Still, I’m glad it happened that way.

I can’t affect national politics but I can have a big effect locally. I’m focusing most of my efforts on that.

Why social platforms enshittify: Sure, social platforms value profit above everything — but they always have. What changed? Answer: The guardrails are off. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

Ezra Klein: Trump Barely Won the Election. Why Doesn’t It Feel That Way? The election was a squeaker — Trump won by just 1.5 percent of the vote, the smallest margin of any Presidential victory since 2000. Downballot performance was lackluster. But Trump and MAGA are riding the cultural vibe shift. However, governing is a lot harder than campaigning and posting. And vibes shift fast.

Martin Luther King Jr’s prescient criticism of technology and power:

Nothing in our glittering technology can raise man to new heights, because material growth has been made an end in itself, and, in the absence of moral purpose, man himself becomes smaller as the works of man become bigger.

Quoted by Brian Merchant in an essay on Blood in the Machine.

People “who are best at achieving their goals are the ones who purposefully form habits to automate some of the things that they do,” Benjamin Gardner, a psychologist of habitual behavior at the University of Surrey, told Shayla Love at The Atlantic. Gardner “recently enacted a flossing habit by flossing each day in the same environment (the bathroom), following the same contextual cues (brushing his teeth). ‘There are days when I think, I can’t remember if I flossed yesterday, but I just trust I definitely did, because it’s such a strong part of my routine,’ he said.”

People explain habitual behavior by tying them to their goals and desires, but research shows habits become self-sustaining. One study found that people who said they eat when they get emotional weren’t doing that; they just ate out of habit, regardless of how they felt. Similarly, people said they drank coffee when tired, but fatigue was only weakly correlated to coffee drinking.

Even habits you deliberately create are worth occasionally reevaluating to see if they still make sense, Love writes.

Habits “can persist even if their outcome stops being pleasing,” Love wrote. One study found that people with the habit of eating popcorn at the movies would keep going even when the popcorn was stale. “It’s not so terrible to endure some stale popcorn, but consider the consequences if more complex habitual actions–ones related to, say, work-life balance, relationships, or technology–hang around past their expiration date.”

I had bad health habits 25 years ago — diet, exercise, taking care of my teeth — and built habits to fix those. I think I actually went too far in my eating habits; I want to become more flexible about those.

Social media and following the news has become habitual to me, and those are habits I want to break. It’s a struggle. I don’t want to quit social media and following the news; but I want to do a lot less of it.

Priya Krishna writes in the New York Times about her 12 overnight hours at Kellogg’s Diner, a 24-hour diner in Brooklyn that opened in 1928 and recently re-opened under new management after a hiatus of several months. The article is beautifully illustrated with great photos.

You never know who you might meet in the wee, small hours of an all-night diner.

Here’s a Navy man celebrating his last night in New York City with friends before being deployed. Over there is a tipsy rock singer executing a perfect run-through of Michael Jackson’s dance moves to “Thriller.” And in comes a 60-year-old intensive-care-unit nurse and her wife, sitting down to a romantic dinner after a long night of clubbing.

There’s a chaotic cadence to the 24-hour diner — a refuge where patrons of all ages, backgrounds and tastes are welcome to bump elbows over patty melts and pancakes. Unlike the restaurant that keeps traditional business hours, the diner shape-shifts as the night wears on and different kinds of customers pour in. It can be whatever they need it to be — its menu, mood and playlist often changing from hour to hour.

I love diners, though I hardly ever go to them anymore. I have spent many of the best hours of my life between 2 am and 7 am at all-night diners in the New York metropolitan area, in my 20s and 30s. When we moved to San Diego more than 25 years ago, one of the first things I did was look up the location of 24-hour diners and cafes, but even then, I knew that part of my life was in the past.