The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.
— Grover Cleveland, as quoted by Heather Cox Richardson in a brief history of the first Labor Day.
Spoiler: Labor Day was founded as a sop to labor after business interests defeated the labor movement.
I enjoyed chick lit and my dick didn't fall off
“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration–watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling in a big straw hat.
— Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies, by Jia Tolentino
I dismissed Gilbert as trivial until I heard her interviewed on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast a few years ago and was impressed. Gilbert was promoting her novel, “City of Girls,” and I read that and loved it.
Debbie has exposed me to a couple of books I would normally have dismissed as women’s literature, written by women whom I previously dismissed as frivolous, and I have been surprised to find I loved the interviews and the books and that the authors were formidable. The other one was Susanna Hoffs, lead singer of the 80s group the Bangles and author of the novel “This Bird Has Flown."
Debbie and I were friends when we were teenagers, and I still think of her as a friend, even though we haven’t spoken in more than 35 years. I’ve followed her career from afar with great interest, happiness and respect.
Enshittification reaches beyond the grave
They’re giving interviews advocating for tougher gun laws, such as when the family of Joaquin Oliver, a victim of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, created a beanie-wearing AI avatar of him and had it speak with journalist Jim Acosta in July. “This is just another advocacy tool to create that urgency of making things change,” Manuel Oliver, Joaquin’s father, told NPR.
And in May, a bearded AI avatar of Chris Pelkey, the deceased victim of a road rage incident in Arizona, gave a video impact statement at the sentencing of the man who fatally shot Pelkey. Pelkey’s family created the deadbot. “I feel that that was genuine,” said Judge Todd Lang after hearing the AI generated impact statement. He then handed down the maximum sentence.
Eventually, maybe you’ll be having a nice chat with your dead grandma, and she’ll try to convince you to buy crypto.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order requiring law enforcement, including feds, to wear masks and ID and activate body cameras when operating in the city. The order is almost certainly symbolic because Johnson lacks federal jurisdiction.
Asked about how effective his order is going to be given that federal agents don’t take orders from him, Johnson shot back: “Yeah, and I don’t take orders from the federal government. Thank you all very much.”
How To Argue With An AI Booster. By the indomitable Edward Zitron.
I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently for Long Island, where I grew up. This Reddit thread is gratifying: What things represent Long Island?. Top comment: “A large paper bag filled with an assortment of fresh bagels” Followed by: “A hot salt bagel that you eat in the car on the way home because it’s a sin not to eat a hot bagel.”
The capitalism of fools: Trump’s mirror-world New Deal.
Cory Doctorow: Trump’s tariffs, demands of government stakes in companies and selective antitrust enforcement superficially echo left‑leaning industrial policy. But Trump’s policies aren’t thought out; they’re just performative chaos. Trump is part of a right-wing mirror world of imagined conspiracies that superficially resemble real problems. One danger is that when Trump is gone, America will desperately need robust state action, but Trump’s bad example will convince America that all state action is reckless.
The problem isn’t that tariffs are always bad, nor is it that demanding state ownership stakes in structurally important companies that depend on public funds is bad policy. The problem is that Trump’s version of these policies sucks, because everything Trump touches dies, and because he governs solely on vibes, half-remembered wisdom imparted by the last person who spoke to him, and the dying phantoms of old memories as they vanish beneath a thick bark of amyloid plaque.
Heather Cox Richardson shares a brief history of the Chicano movement of the 1960s. She uses the 1970 police killing of journalist Rubén Salazar as a launch point.
… in the 1960s, young Mexican Americans, most of whom had been born in the U.S., began to reimagine their community and its position in the United States. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” they called for a new identity based in the understanding that they were not outsiders at all, but rather natives of the northern region of old Mexico, a region that did not become part of the United States until long after the Chicano people–Indigenous Americans mixed with the descendents of Spanish invaders–had settled there.
Chicanos noted that they had not moved into the United States, but rather the United States border had moved over them. The U.S. had taken over the land on which they lived in 1848 after the U.S.-Mexico War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had established the new boundary between the two countries far to the south of where it had been before, was supposed to guarantee the land titles of those Mexican landowners over whom the border had moved. But U.S. courts had disregarded the terms of the treaty and refused to recognize the rights of Mexicans, most of whom lost their land.
I knew that the US took the land I live on from Mexico in 1848. We learned about that in public school in New York, where I grew up. But until now I did not make the connection that many of my Latino neighbors have ancestry in America far longer than my own.
Threads is testing a way to share long-form text on the platform.
I’d love to see Mastodon and Bluesky do the same. I am not a fan of microblogging with hard character limits, but I do it because that’s where people are.
Manton is concerned that Threads “would centralized blog-like content that should be on someone’s own site.” That ship is called Facebook and it has already sailed.
I resumed using Obsidian for note-taking and writing a few days ago. The two can be complementary. We’ll see how that goes.
Qualified people get fired or leave. Sycophants, stooges, frauds, charlatans, lackeys, lickspittles, bootlickers, and phonies take over. And this prescription is being filled across all of government, making the prognosis for the country’s health, both now and into the future, increasingly bleak.
The latest government cut made by the Trump administration is a single consonant. But it’s a pretty important one. At this point, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) might as well be renamed the CD, as RFK Jr’s quackery-based attacks on facts and science are squeezing out the experts who know something about the control and prevention part of the job.
I’m back to Obsidian after 10 months in the wilderness
I was an Obsidian addict for years until October 2024, when I decided to use DevonThink for a while. But this week I listened to the Verge’s interview with Obsidian CEO Steph “kepano” Ango and decided to take another look at Obsidian. And I like it. I think I’ll stick with it.
So what are the major advances in Obsidian since October? I know about Bases, and am looking forward to learning about that. What else?
What am I likely to have forgotten in my 10 months wandering in exile?
Yes, I know I can answer these questions by exploring the documentation, forums and various communities. And I plan to do that. But I also think it might be fun to have this discussion here. Those of you who are bothered by my request can feel free to ignore this topic and enjoy this video instead.
“‘I luxuriate in the weird details’: why Highlander is my feelgood movie” www.theguardian.com/film/2025…
How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO. An interview with Steph “kepano” Ango. I am a recovering Obsidian addict, considering a relapse. www.theverge.com/decoder-p…