Mitch Wagner

How ‘The Last of Us’ Cherishes a Bygone World. (By Shirley Li at The Atlantic)

The characters of “The Last of Us” are mourning for the world we live in, and the show helps us appreciate that we’re still living here.

You and I may think of shopping malls as suburban eyesores and monuments to kitsch, but that’s because we take them for granted.

Fans were over the moon for the third episode, featuring Nick Offerman. I thought it was good but not great. But this episode lived up to the hype.

The Case for a Primary Challenge to Joe Biden (By Mark Leibovich at The Atlantic)

Yes. Biden has been an excellent President—but that’s not good enough. The US needs better than excellence. We need a great President, a transformative President, a Roosevelt or Lincoln.

And Biden has failed in several ways as President. He has done a terrible job at Covid.

And has not done enough to break up the domination of big business in our national lives. Ask the people of East Palestine about that. Yeah, sure, Trump set the policy that allowed that disaster to happen—but the Biden administration has had plenty of time to fix that policy, and they didn’t. Indeed, during a showdown between labor and the railroad companies, Biden came down for the railroad companies.

And there’s the matter of his age. I’m staunchly anti-ageist—but Biden will be 82 when he’s sworn in for his next term. That’s old.

So let’s have a good primary competition and see if Biden is up for the rigors of a rough-and-tumble election, and his second term.

I’ll support whichever Democrat gets the nomination.

How old are you in your head?

According to research, most adults feel 20% younger than their actual age.

This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.

She is 76.

— The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are, by Jennifer Senior at The Atlantic.

I’m conflicted about the premise of this article. It makes sense, but it also seems possibly ageist. Like being old is bad so we are in denial about our age and think we’re younger than we really are.

I’m 61. I don’t have a precise number for how old I am in my head, but 80% of 61 is 48, and that feels about right. I feel like I’m somewhere in the 36-52-year-old range. It helps that I’m healthy and fit.¹

As a number, 61 seems elderly to me, but I think that’s just my internal conditioning growing up. Internalized ageism. Rather than think of myself as being younger than I am, I try to redefine what my age means. It means whatever I want it to mean, and whatever my mind and body are capable of making it mean.

But that will only work for a while. Twenty-five years ago, I was about the same as I am today, only with a crappier phone. In 25 years, I will be an old man, and no amount of positive thinking will change that.

That’s weird for me to say, because I used to be a fat, sedentary, junk-food-eating chainsmoker. I am not intending here to disparage fat, sedentary, junk-food-eating chainsmokers, except to say they tend not to be healthy when they are 61 years old. ↩︎

I’m trying to avoid having opinions about the Scott Adams news, or even thinking about it. I’m not doing too well with that.

The metaverse hype bubble popped. What now?

I wrote this:

By now, we were all expecting to be wearing Oculus headsets and piloting legless avatars floating in virtual worlds of dragons, robots, and spaceships. Instead, here we are in a new world of tech austerity, with massive layoffs sweeping the industry. So the metaverse is dead, right?

Wrong. The hype bubble has collapsed. But the metaverse is growing.

Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard.

— “The Courtyard,”, by Caleb Sasser

Get Me Risa Heller! (NYmag.com) If you’re Jeff Zucker or Mario Batali or Jared Kushner and you’re trying to survive a bout of very bad press, she’s who you call.

What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I.

“Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine,” published in 1958, was one of my favorite books when I was a little kid. I read and reread it many times.

It’s a book about a boy and his friends who teach a computer to do their homework. They read to the machine from their textbooks.

That’s not how computers actually worked …until recently, when voice recognition and machine learning has caught up to 65-year-old kiddie sci-fi.

I’ve been thinking about that book quite a bit recently. And so has David Owen at The New Yorker.

Pink Floyd songwriter Roger Waters is a loud and proud anti-Semite, and Frankfurt canceled his performance there.. (By Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing)

The latest historical American Girl doll is from the 90s and makes zines. It comes with a PC that makes dial-up noises.

jwz: The Dream of the Nineties is Still Alive

Every presidential administration wants to fix America’s ‘crumbling infrastructure’ until they discover the business interests profiting from disrepair.

— It Is Happening Again. By Erik Baker at n + 1

The South Has Got Something To Say (Dissent Magazine)

New books by Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Imani Perry explore the South from the Jim Crow era to today through memoir and interview.

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications is that it is almost exactly six months since the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble…. To me it looks very much as if the usual hucksters and grifters are now chasing the sweet VC/private equity money….

— Charles Stross, Place your bets

Jamelle Bouie: The Founders Were More Creative Than You Think

The Supreme Court’s originalism “rests on a cramped view of the framers of the Constitution and their ability to think and reason. In the hands of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and other conservatives on the Supreme Court, the founding fathers are small-minded and provincial, unable to think beyond the narrowest possible interpretation of the words they wrote.”

Putin and the Right’s Tough-Guy Problem. (Paul Krugman)

The right has an unhealthy fixation on men who swagger and act like tough guys.

The return of Flat Earth, the grandfather of conspiracy theories

Belief that the Earth is flat, not round, is having a moment.

It’s the uber conspiracy theory, and a new book goes inside the culture of Flat Earthers.

Diana Gitig at Ars Technica:

The underlying premise behind conspiracy theories is that “They” are hiding the truth for shady, nefarious purposes. But you—because you are so perspicacious, smart, special, or have access to privileged information—can see things as they really are. “They” can be the government, Russia, China, aliens, Democrats, Republicans, the CIA, the FBI, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and/or obviously, more often than not, the Jews. (Jewish Flat Earthers do not have it easy.) These entities actually have hidden the truth at times, which makes it that much tougher to argue with conspiracy theorists.

It bothers me slightly that the fundamental core of my political and economic beliefs soundslike a conspiracy theory when I speak it out loud: The world is run for the benefit of billionaires and centimillionaires. To the ruling class, the rest of us are simply livestock or prey.

I’m calling out the writer of this article on a careless error—a dangerous one in the current political climate: “the Jews” have never hidden the truth about anything.

Salary jobs with fake “manager” titles cost workers $4 billion in overtime.

Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles, study shows (CBS News)