Mitch's Blog

“Short sleepers, who make up less than one per cent of the population, spend significantly less time snoozing without any apparent health consequences.” By Shayla Love at The New Yorker.

I envy these people — I need 8-9 hours. I get less than that most days, often as little as five, and that’s no fun.

Short sleepers are often lonesome, awake at night when there’s nobody around. Is that true for short sleepers who are also introverts? Or is that a combination that does not exist?

Maybe one day science will figure out a way to drastically reduce or even eliminate our need for sleep. But it’s a hairy problem — science doesn’t even know why we sleep, not really. So I’m not hopeful that’ll come in my lifetime.

Sure, I oppose Musk — but that’s not what keeps me off X.

I don’t see Zuck as being vastly superior to Musk. Paraphrasing Walter Sobchak from “The Big Lebowski” — Musk is a Nazi but Zuck is a nihilist who is happy to work with Nazis if there is profit in it.

And yet I’m active on Facebook and I regularly check Threads.

My primary reason for staying off X is that I haven’t heard any reason for me to be active there. If anything interesting is going on there, I hear about it through other channels. I’m already on too many social media platforms; I don’t want to add one more, and I certainly don’t want to add a siloed platform controlled by one guy. I was super-active on Twitter for a long time but was already losing interest when Musk took over, and I quit in a fit of pique soon after that.

Now, I keep an account on X because I do occasionally need to check something there for professional reasons. The account has no avatar, no bio and no followers and I only look at X every few months or so.

(This is in response to a post by @manton.)

Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club declared, and losing that administration would be a calamity, especially since, according to Republicans, Democrats were socialists and anarchists who wanted to destroy America. The Chicago Tribune told readers that a lower tariff would destroy industries and throw people out of work, but it seemed fine with the prospect: “The working classes of the country need such a lesson.

— Letters From an American

Not mentioned by Richardson in this article: An immigrant named Frederick Trump made a fortune during the Gold Rush running a restaurant and brothel for miners. His grandson is, of course, the President today.

Derek Thompson interviews Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.":

A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.

The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.

“Oh, she’s running,” writes Tressie McMillan Cottom at The New York Times. ⁠"Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down. Social scientists call it the glass cliff – the phenomenon in which women are recruited to lead failing companies.⁠⁠"

I first read this as Cottom saying the United States is failing, and I said to myself, no, not even close. We’re certainly declining but we are still strong in many ways, and the decline is reversible.

However, the Democratic Party is certainly in decline, with chickenshit leadership motivated by protecting billionaires and propping up institutions they cannot see are rotten.

The Republican Party is, of course, primarily concerned with protecting pedophiles and insurrectionists, avoiding Trump’s wrath, as well as bribery and ethnic cleansing. The Democratic Party must be reformed, but the Republican Party is beyond redemption.

kottke.org: Jamelle Bouie “chastises American political & cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on ‘wokeness’ instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump regime.”

MAGA is building concentration camps, purging Blacks from high levels of the military, taking billions of dollars in bribes, murdering protesters, protecting pedophiles, committing violent insurrection and protecting those insurrectionists, “imprisoning dissidents, dismantling public education and eroding democracy.

Meanwhile, pundits are concerned about pronouns.

Le Guin: “We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called ‘technology’ at all…. One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty ‘hi,’ is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one? Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for ‘low’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention.”