A short history of business cards, from the 17th Century to today. “Today, the format is functionally dead, displaced by email signatures, LinkedIn profiles, and QR codes (see also: the slow decline of paper menus, postcards, and real concert tickets). Without a practical reason to make one, the business card has become something of a fetish object. If one bothers to make one at all, it’s often letterpressed within an inch of its life and on paper thick enough to fix a wobbly table.”
What’s the Difference Between a Sport Coat, a Blazer and a Suit Coat? A sport coat is meant to be worn with pants that don’t have the same fabric or pattern. A blazer is a solid jacket with contrasting buttons, often metal. A suit coat has pants made from the same pattern and fabric as the coat.
Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses. The defining experience of fascism. By Hamilton Nolan
The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing. “Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their U.S. business. Now they’re the majority. ‘It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don’t need to be selling to schools,’ McDermott says. Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.”
AI psychosis and the warped mirror. Cory Doctorow: “While the internet makes it far easier to find a toxic community of similarly afflicted people struggling with your mental illness, an LLM eliminates the need to find that forum. The LLM can deliver all the reinforcement you demand, produced to order, at any hour, day or night. While posting about a new delusional belief to a forum won’t generate responses until other forum members see it and reply to it, an LLM can deliver a response in seconds.”
Netscape Navigator was released 30 years ago.. By Jamie Zawinski, one of the first Netscape employees.
UPDATED: My initial version of this post said 20 years, and I was sure that’s what the original said.
Read Whatever the Hell You Want charlotteclymer.substack.com/p/read-wh…
💯
You’re not going to believe the number of headphones I think you should have jasper.tandy.is/blogging/…
I admire the spirit of this article, though I stop at one headphones, the AirPods Pro 2. I am tempted by the AirPods Pro 3 but so far am not having trouble resisting.
Construction workers in Iowa rushed into a burning house to save a family, and used a backyard trampoline to save a boy trapped on the burning third floor. wsvn.com/news/us-w…
If Trump is concerned that 97% of the coverage about him is negative, maybe he should try doing something right more than 3% of the time.
Because if 3% of the news coverage of Trump is positive, they’re going easy on him.
Ocasio-Cortez Statement on Charlie Kirk Resolution and Trump Administration’s Assault on Free Speech ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/pre…
Petulant sexual predator and convicted felon Donald Trump “reiterated his claim that critical television coverage of him is ‘illegal’ and pushed back on criticisms that his administration was taking actions that chill free speech. ‘When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech,'” the orange manbaby said. www.politico.com/news/2025…
It’s so embarrassing being an American now.
Republican Ted Cruz says FCC chair’s threats about Kimmel are ‘dangerous.’ “That’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’" www.seattletimes.com/nation-wo…
I think a person can stay sufficiently well informed on five minutes of news consumption daily, 360 days of the year. That excludes professional news, news you legitimately enjoy consuming and news about events that directly affect your life, like natural disasters in your neighborhood. Spend as much time as you need or want to on those types of news
The other five days are days like early in the Covid pandemic or Jan. 6 2021, when you’ll feel the need to dig in. But even then an hour a day should be more than sufficient.
Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’ www.theguardian.com/society/n…
OpenAI released a report on who’s using ChatGPT and how. Most chats aren’t work-related, younger people are core users, most people use ChatGPT for writing, advice and information. www.theverge.com/news/7797…
Nobody knows what socialism means. Perhaps a better way to say this is that everyone who says “socialism” means something different. The worst person to ask about what socialism is is a Republican, who doesn’t know what socialism means, and will tell you that everything is socialism. The second worst person to ask is a leftist college professor, who knows exactly what socialism means, and will tell you that nothing qualifies as real socialism. Somewhere between these poles lies the elusive Practical Definition of Socialism, which nobody ever stops long enough to lay out before launching into their various tirades.
— Hamilton Nolan www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/new-yor…
New York Socialist City. Where taking care of everyone is common sense. “… what socialism really means in the context of US politics is public services for the public good. Using government to socialize the things that can help everyone, rather than allowing the private market to run everything in a way that preys on the public for private gain. As a practical matter, this is what most people trying to Do Socialism in American politics are trying to do. Full state control of the economy is not and has never been on the table.” www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/new-yor…
In retrospect it is obvious that drinking 48 ounces of cappuccino and Coke Zero in the two hours prior to my taking a window seat on a full three hour flight was not conducive to my comfort and would not endear me to the two other people seated in my row.
Balderdash
Like many people, I swear a lot, and I’m even a little proud of it. But I have resolved to reduce swearing to special occasions after reading this article in The New York Times: “Why Does Everybody Swear All The Time Now?". And that’s even though I disagree with the conclusions of the article.
Swearing has become meaningless noise, like saying “um” or “like.” It’s just something people say to convey unearned edginess or rebelliousness. Dropping “F” bombs doesn’t make me cowboy, it just makes me like millions of other people who also swear a lot.
As a writer, I am aware of economy of language and too often swearing serves no purpose. Save it for times when it really matters.
As for the Times article: It starts out well enough. Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, talks about the previous rules of decorum for when swearing was appropriate. “These days, curse words fill the air like angry drones – an ambient buzzing of bitter, nasty words,” he says, which is a nice turn of phrase. Also, this: “A sprinkle of salt gives your dinner savor; a handful kills it.”
But here’s the part where I disagree:
When you curse compulsively you produce a view of the world that’s smaller and meaner.
…
Omnipresent cursing, the programmatic reduction of nearly everything, pollutes our worldview. It makes it harder to see what is true and good and beautiful. We become blind to instances of courage and compassion. Our world shrinks. And we shrink along with it.
On the other hand, the willingness to use decent words suggests a decent heart and mind.
To that I say: Bulls—
I mean, nonsense.
I don’t think swearing makes us meaner people. Plenty of great people swear a lot, and plenty of awful people refrain from profanity. But swearing has become noise, and I’m aware it makes some people uncomfortable, so I’m just going to dial it back and save it for rare occasions.