I asked ChatGPT what I would look like as a dog.

I was feeling like I was in a rut in my fiction reading — same genres, same authors — so I looked at this year’s line-up of Hugo nominees. This proved to be an excellent decision on my part.

The first book on the list was by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I tried a previous book by him and did not care for it. So I moved on to the second book in the list. That was the Bradley novel. The marketing blurb hooked me:

A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

In conclusion:

• If you’re a science fiction fan, and you’re looking for something new to read, the Hugo nominees are an excellent place to start
• Good job, whoever wrote the marketing blurb for “The Ministry of Time.”

I saw this crow on a utility pole. It has something to say.

“Now I’m thinking about deep fried mushrooms.”

— Julie, while watching the climactic mass battle in Season 2, Episode 2 of “The Last of Us”

Claymation me

This morning, I spilled a little boiling water on my hand while making coffee. I shouted FUCK FUCK FUCKITY FUCK while waving my hand in the air. What do you shout when you do yourself a slight injury?

Good morning everyone! I hope I get lots of customer satisfaction surveys today!

For a happy life, spend money on experiences, not things.

Unless the things are luggage to use on your experiences.

Can’t we do better than building open source versions of the social media silos that rose in the 2010s?

[The] core driver and cause of the low standing of the Democratic Party right now is not wokeness or immigration or Joe Biden’s age but the fact that Democrats are simply not effective at advancing the policies they claim to support or protecting the constituencies they claim to defend. Put simply, they are some mix of unable and unwilling to wield power to achieve specific ends.

And:

…if your goal is to show that you can address the needs and fears of ordinary citizens, the best way to do that is to try to address those needs and fears, and do so as they exist in this moment.

— Democrats’ Hamlet Moment Isn’t the Start of a Solution But the Heart of the Problem (Josh Marshall / Talking Points Memo)

I am learning, not for the first time, that the Aeropress is a forgiving way to make coffee, coffee is forgiving of different ways to make it, and you can make yourself insane trying to follow all the various Aeropress recipes you find on the internet.

Sick and Unhoused, the System Failed Him at Every Turn. Then, He Was Shot by Police. (Voice of San Diego)

Trump spread a bizarre conspiracy theory that Joe Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced by a robot clone. (Rolling Stone) — Trump is mentally incompetent.

A Christian asks Carl Sagan about God YouTube

Riot gear, smoke grenades, flash bangs, and mass arrests are dangerous and unnecessarily escalatory. Bystanders and families easily could have gotten hurt.

This is unacceptable.

[image or embed]

— Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (@sarajacobs.house.gov) May 31, 2025 at 1:01 PM

My coffee, which I make in an Aeropress XL, hasn’t been great lately, so I experimented with hotter water this morning.

We have a third tap on our kitchen sink, an instant hot water tap suitable for making hot beverages. However, it does not dispense boiling water, which is not up to code. I wondered whether that was the problem — whether the water was simply not hot enough. So I tried boiling water in a kettle instead.

According to the Internet, you should not use boiling water with the Aeropress. Instead, you use water at 195 degrees Fahrenheit. We don’t have a kettle with a thermostat, so I asked ChatGPT how long I should let water sit off the boil to get to the proper temperature. ChatGPT said two to three minutes. This is within the range of answers I find when I Google the question, so I tried it this morning.

I think that improves the flavor. The coffee is hotter, which is better.

ICE threw flash-bang grenades at a crowd and handcuffed a manager in a raid on a popular San Diego restaurant late Friday afternoon. Appalling. Times of San Diego

Annie Andrews is running against Lindsey Graham. Her campaign video here is outstanding. A case study in how Democrats should communicate. YouTube

I supported Newsom until this year but he is showing himself as a cynical hack who turns whichever direction he perceives the wind blowing. He perceives transphobia, xenophobia and anti-woke as fashionable now so he’s happy to embrace those beliefs. sfstandard.com

Shadi Hamid at The Washington Post:

For Israel’s defenders, the cognitive dissonance is difficult to bear. I get it. Many Americans have long seen Israel as an ally, a country that shares our values — a Western, liberal outpost in a sea of supposed Arab barbarism. But Israel’s actions in Gaza should shatter that perception.

That a close ally of the United States would declare its intention to displace a population is remarkable. But many Israelis, including senior officials and ministers, have been saying this for a long time. Just one month into the war, Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” explicitly referencing the 1948 expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land. In December 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that “what needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration” and that having “100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million” would allow the desert to “bloom.” This month, Smotrich offered further clarification. The goal is to leave Gaza “totally destroyed,” he said. These are not opposition figures or fringe elements. These are members of the Israeli cabinet.

Also:

As the Economist recently reported, new research suggests that as many as 109,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel – which would represent about 5 percent of the prewar population. Even the lower-bound estimate – 77,000 killed – is 44 percent higher than the Gaza Ministry of Health’s figure of 53,500 dead.

About 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced, many multiple times, forced to flee from one “safe zone” to another as Israel’s military levels entire neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of housing units have been destroyed or damaged.

The engineered humanitarian emergency is equally damning. Israel has weaponized starvation as a method of warfare, blocking food and supplies from entering the territory for 10 weeks. The new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report finds that 22 percent of the population faces catastrophic levels of food insecurity, with 71,000 children younger than 5 facing acute malnutrition.

Also:

Faced with assault on a population of this magnitude, one might expect universal condemnation. Yet, when atrocities are committed by a country perceived as sharing our values, powerful psychological forces activate to protect our beliefs. Israel can’t be that bad. It’s an advanced nation, where people speak English, vote in regular elections and launch tech start-ups. They seem like us….

Confirmation bias plays a part here, too. Imagine you had a close friend or family member who was accused of unspeakable crimes. You’d have strong incentives to explain away their actions — or, better yet, deny that they committed them in the first place. To admit that someone you love was capable of evil can simply be too difficult, because in some sense that realization would implicate you as well.

David Ignatius at The Washington Post:

What’s agonizing is that Israeli military and intelligence leaders were ready to settle this conflict nearly a year ago. Working with U.S. and Emirati officials, they developed a plan for security “bubbles” that would contain the violence, starting in northern Gaza and moving south, backed by an international peacekeeping force that would include troops from European and moderate Arab countries.

In place of Hamas, a Palestinian government, backed by a reformed Palestinian Authority, would take political control. This wasn’t a pipe dream. Officials worked out a detailed road map. They began planning to train the Palestinian security force that would replace Hamas. This was, as golfers like to say, “a makeable putt.”

But Netanyahu said no. His right-wing coalition partners demanded “total victory,” even though they couldn’t define just what that meant.

Also:

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute might seem intractable, but ending this conflict would be relatively easy. I’m told that Israeli military officials keep working on “day after” plans, honing details as recently as this week. But they have had no political support from Netanyahu.

“The ‘exit ramp’ has been staring us in the face for a long time,” argues Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It’s a mix of Arab states and Gaza Palestinians, operating under a Palestinian Authority umbrella, he explains. “It is messy, with overlapping responsibilities and lots of dotted lines. But it checks all the boxes to enable the process of reconstruction and rehabilitation to get off the ground.”

Covid-19 is spiking again as the US government is making it harder to get vaccines. CalMatters

“Four people have died as thousands of Palestinians burst into a United Nations warehouse in Gaza, tearing away sections of the building’s metal walls in a desperate attempt to find food.” The Guardian

Trump is a scammer and scammers are his “most important, best-served constituency…. The Trump II presidency is the most scam-friendly presidency in history, and everyone knows it. The scammers are lining up to get their scams okayed.” Cory Doctorow

Support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel are not anti-Semitism. Claims that they are anti-Semitism promote anti-Semitism and make my life as an American Jew incrementally more dangerous.

Never Look at Your Files Again: Wikilinks, Tags, and Search. cartography.pika.page — Use a personal wiki as your organization system for documents on your computer. This guide is for iA Writer, but the principle works with Obsidian, NotePlan, DevonThink, HookMark or any app that supports linking.

One of the women who participates in one of my regular weekly video meetings had her two dogs playing tug-of-war behind her. This should be a feature of every corporate meeting.

The ugly truth behind ICE agents’ masks. Will Bunch Newsletter — They can’t find enough hardened criminals to deport, so instead they’re going after college students and essential workers.

for every undocumented immigrant who commits a murder that gets the top-of-the-hour treatment from Fox News, there are hundreds of law-abiding college students and highway construction workers that ICE will instead target. The immoral stain of an American government’s war on these good people, led by goon squads who hide behind ski masks, may never be fully erased.

I just replicated the “I have a drinking problem” move from “Airplane” and not on purpose. How has your day been?

Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister, condemns Israeli war crimes in Gaza:

What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it’s the result of government policy – knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.

Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic:

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn’t just about increasing productivity, it’s about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality.

Also:

The point of using automation to weaken labor isn’t just cheaper products – it’s cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

And:

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they’re describing two completely different realities – and that’s because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become “moral crumple zones,” absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

Cory connects:

• The 19th Century Luddite movement — the Luddites get an unfair bum rap in this one. The Luddites were right and they were not anti-technology.
• The recent incident where the Chicago Sun-Times included AI hallucinations in its list of recommended books for summer. The writer unfairly gets the blame.
• And how AI is enabling Amazon to start treating tech workers as badly as warehouse workers.

Writers for The Guardian list their favorite rewatchable comfort movies: Guardian writers on their ultimate feelgood movies: ‘ Pure sugar-rush’

A few of my favorites are on this list: “You’ve Got Mail,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “The Paper,” and “Defending Your Life.” There are a few more that are new to me, and that I’ve bookmarked for watching.

“Pink Flamingoes” is an interesting choice for a favorite comfort movie.

More of my choices:

“Almost Famous” (2000) is a fictionalized memoir by Cameron Crowe about how he became a Rolling Stone correspondent as a teenager in the 1970s and toured with an up-and-coming Southern Rock band. The movie stars Kate Hudson as the leader of a band of groupies, Billy Crudup as the band’s stardom-drunk lead singer, and Patrick Fugit as the teen journalist.

“My Favorite Year” (1982) is another fictionalized, nostalgic coming-of-age showbiz memoir, about a young, New York Jewish writer on a hit 1950s comedy-variety show, hired to watchdog one of his heroes, a swashbuckling movie star who’s now a charming, reckless drunk. Peter O’Toole plays the drunken swashbucker, based on Errol Flynn. Mark Linn-Baker plays the young writer, Benjy Stone, based on Mel Brooks. Hell of an ensemble cast: Joseph Bologna is the neurotic star of the comedy-variety show, based on Sid Caesar. Lainie Kazan is Benjy’s embarrassing New York Jewish mother, and Lou Jacobi steals his scene as Benjy’s embarrassing uncle (“Did you shtup her? " he asks Peter O’Toole’s character, about a rumored dalliance with a starlet. “Did you go all the way?!")

“Wonder Boys” is another 2000 coming-of-age story, this with a coming-of-age figure who is a middle-aged man. Michael Douglas plays an English professor at a small college who had a critically acclaimed novel as a young man, and is now struggling to follow that up. He is an aging ex-wonder boy, wandering Pittsburgh during a cold weekend in a ratty women’s bathrobe, hair uncombed, unshaven, making bad choices, accompanied by his equally reckless agent, played by pre-Iron Man, pre-recovery Robert Downey Jr., and a talented student, played by Tobey Maguire. The three have great buddy chemistry, and the movie has a strong supporting cast beyond those three, including Frances McDormand, Rip Torn and Richard Thomas. “Wonder Boys” is based on a novel by Michael Chabon. I love Chabon’s work, but this is not his best novel; the movie is better.

“Nobody’s Fool” is a 1994 coming-of-age story with a coming-of-age figure who is 60 years old, an aging handyman played by Paul Newman, who wanders around making bad choices one cold weekend in a declining small town in upstate New York. Newman was 70 when he made this movie; his performance is great despite his appearance — he looked too young to play a 60-year-old man. The movie features great characters, played by an outstanding ensemble cast, including Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, Melanie Griffith, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Margot Martindale. The movie is based on the first of a trilogy of novels by Richard Russo; the novels are each set about ten years apart. I love the novels and the movie.

“That Thing You Do” (1996) is a coming-of-age story about a fictional garage band in a small town in Pennsylvania in the mid 1960s that records a song that becomes a nationwide hit. The song is fizzy pop fun, and so is the movie. Tom Everett Scott stars as the jazz-loving drummer for the band, in a role that would have been played by Tom Hanks a decade earlier; Scott even looks and acts like young Tom Hanks. Hanks himself has a significant supporting role as the band manager, Mr. White, and he directed and wrote the movie. Liv Tyler is the lead singer’s girlfriend. I can imagine ways she could have had a meatier role without changing the movie much, but nobody asked me. She isn’t given much to work with but carries her scenes on sheer charisma. Steve Zahn steals every scene he’s in, as Steve Zahn does.

“The Mummy,” starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah and Oded Fehr. Everybody loves “The Mummy.” For a change, this is not a coming-of-age story, unless returning from the dead to seek vengeance counts as coming of age.

And two more comfort favorites: “Home for the Holidays” and “Tombstone,” which I wrote about here

Trump Praised Himself During Memorial Day Speech Political Wire

Season 2 of “The Last of Us:” Yes or no?

Ian Bogost:

In the idle time we now spend on our phones, people used to read anything and everything they saw—junk mail, subway ads, the backs of cereal boxes, the story on the restaurant placemat, the labels on the condiments.

I used to carry a book or magazines with me when I went out. Now I still do — they’re on my phone.

Also:

I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones. A barren expanse of empty time would stretch out before you: waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start. Someone might be late or take longer than expected, but no notice of such delay would arrive, so you’d stare out the window, hoping to see some sign of activity down the block.

A Redditor discovers her health-obsessed boyfriend has an odd and disturbing habit. She wants to know whether to leave him.

I think this comment nails it: The boyfriend probably has an eating disorder, and because he is, she says, otherwise a good guy, she would be justified in sticking around to see if he is willing to get treatment and work on it.

Wouldn’t we all rather have the possibility of finding pleasure and delight in literally anything we might encounter? Instead of assuming that actually there are only these three things where pleasure and delight are possible. Like oh, it’s television and socialization and work, and then everything else is the smoke I have to somehow choke my way through in order to get to the good parts.

— Ian Bogost

Faceblindness, technically called prosopagnosia, is the inability to recognize faces. I think I first learned about this condition in 2019, in this Washington Post article, and I said, “Yes, that’s me!” I often fail to recognize people I’ve met before.

Lately I’ve been second-guessing my self-diagnosis. While I often fail to recognize people, that is usually not the case. Usually I do recognize folks.

Last week, I listened to this interesting episode of the Revisionist History podcast, which talked about faceblindness and its opposite — super-recognizers, with extraordinary ability to remember the faces of people they’ve met once briefly, or even just seen in a photograph for a few seconds years before.

The podcast shownotes included two links to tests for faceblindness:

troublewithfaces.org
Cambridge Face Memory Test

The first test asked questions about my opinion of how well I recognize faces. I scored 65. The test result said that people who score below 70 may have “developmental prosopagnosia” (whatever that is). I considered this test non-definitive.

When I took the second test, holy crap did I score terribly!

The test was in two rounds. The first round showed dozens of faces of people who appeared to be white men, with their hair and ears cropped away from the photos. This is important because faceblind people often look at hairstyles and ear shape as clues for facial recognition. All the men had approximately the same skin color — again, skin color being another gross clue that faceblind people can use to identify faces.

The first batch of photos showed one face at a time, three views — full face, turned a little to the left and a little to the right. I concentrated on the shapes of the chins. One face had a cleft chin, another a pointy chin, another a round chin, another seemed to have a featureless chin.

I thought I maybe did OK on that round of questions.

The second round of photos was different.

For each of the second round, the test showed six of those hairless, earless faces, and asked me to memorize them. Then, the test showed three faces, and asked me to pick the one that had appeared in the previous array of photos.

After going through one or two of those questions, I grinned, because I had absolutely no idea which face appeared in the previous series. The faces did appear different from each other. But I was unable to fix in my mind how they were different. The instant the faces disappeared from the screen, the visual memory of those faces disappeared from my mind. I was guessing entirely at random.

The results page told me that the average score on the test was 80%. A score of 60% or lower “may indicate facebliindness,” the test results page said. My score was 35%.

I am weirdly pleased and proud of this. If I’m going to fail a test, I want to fail spectacularly badly.

So how is it that I am able to recognize faces most of the time? The same way everybody with faceblindness does: Contextual clues. I remember hairstyles, height, build, glasses, skin color, people’s habitual clothing styles. Facial blemish.

Location is a big clue. If I’m expecting to see a person in a particular location and time, I can usually recognize that person.

The other day, I arrived at a dinner in a private room of a local restaurant. I was early — the second person there. I instantly recognized the person who arrived before me. I recognized her skin color, complexion, the shape of her face, her hairstyle. In a social group where many of us wear T-shirts, she is usually dressed nicely — that was a big clue. And she was one of a half-dozen people I expected to attend that dinner. I recognized her easily and greeted her warmly.

Now imagine the same restaurant, if I did not expect to see this woman. Same woman, dressed the same. She recognizes me and greets me — and that’s probably going to be the way it happens, because I am probably not going to recognize her if I am not expecting to see her. In that circumstance, as we talk, I might recognize her voice, which is distinctive. I’ll pick up on clues like her dress, hairstyle, shape of her face, height and so on. Likely she’ll drop a hint in the conversation by mentioning the community association we’re both on the board of. Given that information, I can often recognize a person. And maybe she doesn’t drop that hint, and we talk for a few minutes and then Julie asks me who she was and I say, “I have no idea.”

How do I cope with the disability of faceblindness?

I deal. It’s all I know. It’s not a disability at all. I have led a successful, even privileged life. I have my compensation mechanisms and I do fine.

On the other hand, I have been an introvert my whole life, and have strugged with that, and I think my faceblindness has something to do with that.

But as far as I know, there is nothing I can do about being faceblind, so I live with it and am grateful for my many other blessings.

How to Disappear: Inside the world of extreme-privacy consultants, who, for the right fee, will make you and your personal information very hard to find. By Benjamin Wallace. The Atlantic

Three Well-Tested Ways to Undermine an Autocrat. nytimes.com. Also: Trump Is Immensely Vulnerable. nytimes.com. By Nicholas Kristof.

Omaha, Nebraska, swung by 43 points to elect Black Democrat John Ewing Jr. over a Republican MAGA incumbent who ran on a platform of trans hate. Ewing focused on quality-of-life issues that voters care about.

A huge Democratic victory in Omaha offers a lesson for the party (Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Guardian)

Republican incumbent Jean Stothert won her 2021 reelection bid for a third term with almost two-thirds of the vote, and she followed the standard Republican playbook for attacking progressives.

Ewing has credentials that would appeal to conservatives. He’s a retired deputy police chief and associate minister of the city’s Salem Baptist Church.

He described Stothert’s transphobic campaign as “a made-up issue by Jean Stothert and the Republican Party.” Ewing focused on economic development, housing and road repair.

And he didn’t run away from the LGBTQ+ community, actively campaigning for the support of LGBTQ+ voters.

The Democratic message was reinforced on social media with a waggish image of the mayor peeking under the door of a bathroom stall, which featured the tagline, “Jean is focused on potties. John is focused on fixing potholes.”

How Democrats Crushed a Despicable Anti-Trans Campaign and Won a Major Election (John Nichols / The Nation)

Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail is still inspiring and worth reading today. “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’….”

UCSD study finds stock trades by Congress ruin public faith (Amita Sharma / KPBS) — It’s bipartisan corruption. “If congressional members really care about restoring trust in the institution, this (stock trade ban) is a really easy way to do it,” UCSD doctoral student Raihan Alam said.

We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn’t it much more interesting to imagine that you’re quite small?

— Ian Bogost

There is no such thing as an ethical multilevel marketing business, Cory Doctorow argues in a book review of “Little Bosses Everywhere,” by Bridget Read. They are all cults and Ponzi schemes — Amway, Mary Kay, all of them. Trump, of course, has attached his name to two separate pyramid scams.

‘It’s out of control’: the fight against US ‘tip-creep’ (Jem Bartholomew / The Guardian)

Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline (Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch)

“If you’ve never worked in a big corporate office you are missing out on half of Severance.”

“AI-first” is the new Return To Office (Anil Dash)

Diseases are spreading. The CDC isn’t warning the public like it was months ago (Chiara Eisner / KPBS)

The Visionary of Trump 2.0: “Russell Vought is advancing a radical ideological project decades in the making.” (McKay Coppins / The Atlantic) “Fascist” is a better word than “radical” here. Also: Musk is out, Project 2025 is in (uh oh) (Ryan Broderick / Garbage Day).

It Is So Embarrassing to Watch Dems Try to “Find” a Liberal Joe Rogan (Luke Winkie / Slate)

Between Memorial Day and Labor Day 30% of the conversation between me and Julie is arguing about whether to turn on the air conditioner. Another 20% is saying, “What?!” after the other person says something.

If you were following me on Mastodon or any other Fediverse service, you should now be following me on Micro.blog, without you having to do anything about it.

I started using the Micro.blog service regularly in late 2022 to host mitchw.blog, about the same time I became active on Mastodon. Both Micro.blog and Mastodon are part of the Fediverse, meaning they can communicate with the world using the ActivityPub protocol.¹

Until mid-May this year, I posted to both Mastodon and Micro.blog, using Micro.blog’s automated and manual cross-posting tools. About a week ago, I decided to consolidate Mastodon onto Micro.blog

Why did I make the change?

Simplicity: One less place to post, check replies, and otherwise manage.

Formatting: Micro.blog supports links, blockquotes, embedded images and other formatting. Mastodon does not.

I can post as long or as short as I want: Micro.blog supports posts of any length. Most Mastodon instances limit posts to 500 characters.

Indeed, that’s one of the best features of Micro.blog: Titles are optional, and posts can be of any length and complexity. They can be just a few words, like a tweet, or they can be full-fledged articles with embedded media.

Design: Micro.blog gives me a nicely formatted blog on the web. Mine is at mitchw.blog. My Mastodon account looks like every other Mastodon account.

Newsletter and syndication: Micro.blog gives me a daily newsletter, and automatically syndicates to Bluesky and Tumblr.

My followers stay with me: Because Mastodon and Micro.blog are both part of the Fediverse, Mastodon users can follow me on Micro.blog. Most of them won’t even notice the difference, except that my posts will be formatted more nicely.

I just like blogs, RSS and newsletters better than social media platforms: I like the IndieWeb philosophy: Own your own domain, publish to your own site first and optionally syndicate elsewhere.

Glitches and trade-offs

No reposting: Micro.blog doesn’t support reposting or let me see other people’s reposts. This is a significant problem for me because I like seeing what other people repost. But I can live without that.

Follower invisibility: Micro.blog doesn’t let me see how many followers I have. I don’t care about that.

No likes: Micro.blog doesn’t let me like other people’s posts, see who has liked my posts, or how many people have liked my posts. This is a minor inconvenience.

On social media platforms that permit likes and reactions, I like other people’s posts to acknowledge or thank them. But it’s relatively easy for me to just send a one-word response or emoji in that circumstance.

I also watch whether my posts get likes to see if anybody is reading particular posts.

And I sometimes find it interesting who likes my posts. Sometimes one of my posts gets liked by a celebrity, which can be cool. Just this morning as I write this, a politically conservative friend, with whom I have sometimes sparred online, liked one of my anti-Trump Facebook posts. That was interesting. Sometimes I get a like from a friend I haven’t been in contact with in years, or someone who has a big following on social media and whose posts I’ve admired. I feel good about that for a bit. But I can live without it; the tradeoff is worth it.

Second try’s the charm: I made two tries at this recently, the first time in early April, and the second time in mid-May. The first time I tried it, the migration failed; my followers on Mastodon failed to make the journey to Micro.blog. I reported the bug to Micro.blog but tech support on Micro.blog was unresponsive for several days², so I reversed the process and did it again a month later.³

My second migration, in mid-May, was mostly successful. My Mastodon account still shows 157 followers. It should show zero followers — they should all have moved to Micro.blog. I’m just not going to worry about that for now.

Because Micro.blog does not show follower counts, or who is following me, I don’t know if my other 500 Mastodon followers successfully made the journey or whether they fell into the ether. I am getting replies to my Micro.blog posts from Mastodon, so I know that many people did make the journey. I can live with the uncertainty.

The big problem

As a first step in the transition, I exported the list of people I followed on Mastodon and imported that list to Micro.blog. I thought I would simply shut down my Mastodon account and live in Micro.blog. This part of the migration proved easy — and it was a bad idea!

Micro.blog is not a great Mastodon client; it doesn’t support link previews or (as noted above) Mastodon boosts.

After a day or two of struggling with Micro.blog’s limits as a Mastodon client, I reactivated my Mastodon account and am using it for reading but not posting. That means I can’t conveniently reply to Mastodon posts, but I find I rarely want to reply to something on Mastodon, so it’s no loss. Still, I’d love it if there were an easy way to open Mastodon posts in Micro.blog, or to spoof a “from” address in a reply from Mastodon. However, the latter solution would have major potential security problems.

I am now slowly unfollowing all Mastodon accounts from Micro.blog so that I am only following them from Mastodon. This is a painstaking process; I do a few every day. It’ll take a while, but that’s OK; I’m not in a rush.

What about BlueSky and Tumblr?

In addition to Micro.blog and Mastodon, I cross-post to BlueSky and Tumblr.

The split between Micro.blog and BlueSky doesn’t seem to be as much of a source of irritation for me as the split between Micro.blog and Mastodon. I’m having difficulty articulating why that is. BlueSky permits text formatting; that’s a big part of it. Oddly, while BlueSky permits formatting from syndicated services like Micro.blog, it does not permit formatting in native posts.

Similarly, Tumblr, like Micro.blog, supports posts of any length and complexity, and I don’t get many comments on my Tumblr posts, so the split between Micro.blog and Tumblr doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

I don’t see Tumblr as a long-term problem; soon, either either Tumblr will shut down or I will quit.⁴

What about Facebook?

Most of the conversations on my posts happen on Facebook. I am not happy about this. There is no way to automatically post from Micro.blog to Facebook, so I manually cut-and-paste from one to the other.

An insight

I think I just don’t like Twitter-like services — not Mastodon and not Bluesky. I was a Twitter addict in the late 2000s and 2010s, but I lost interest in Twitter even before it became Nazified. I think I’ve lost interest in reading or writing prose chopped up into 300- or 500-character chunks.

Also, on both Mastodon and Bluesky I follow a large number of strangers who post a lot of political minutiae that pisses me off without enriching my life.

I’m in the process of unfollowing anybody whose posts don’t interest me. I’m spending just a few minutes a day on that process, and I expect it will play out over weeks.

If I end up following just a few people on Bluesky and Mastodon, I can live with that. I will continue to post to those services.

How’s it going so far?

I’m happy with my migration from Mastodon to Micro.blog.

Posting is easier now that I don’t have to worry about how my posts look on both Mastodon and Micro.blog.

I seem to be getting significantly more discussion for my posts on Micro.blog than I did when I was splitting between Mastodon and Micro.blog. I don’t know why that is, but I’m happy about it.

And if I change my mind about migrating from Mastodon to Micro.blog, I’ll just reverse. I’ve done it before. That’s something that’s great about the fediverse; it’s easy to join a particular server, and easy to leave.

Here’s a helpful post on how to migrate from Mastodon to Micro.blog and here’s another.

What crazy shit happened in 2001 which got overshadowed by 9/11?

“What My Mornings Are Like in Prison” (Tony Triplett / Prison Journalism Project)

An interesting discussion about Black Hebrew Israelites. I barely know anything about this group. According to one comment, they are both anti-Black and anti-Semitic.

NYC is so big that when some small disaster happens here we mostly hear about it from relatives that live out of state and see it on tv and then text us assuming we were nearby. Like no mom I didn’t get squished by the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man I was in a different borough

— @claytoncubitt.bsky.social

We live in the world of paywalled content, unilateral contract modification, micro transactions, serialised content, upsells, and the list goes on and on and on. Everyone is trying to find a way to extract money in one way or another, and that is something I find personally draining and soul-crushing.

— Manu Moreale, quoted by Manton Reece

I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down.

— Neal Stephenson, as quoted on simonwillison.net

Classic 1960s Volkswagen ads. (Nick Sherman / Fonts in Use) — Thanks, Dave!

Rep. Darrell Issa’s mail-ballot lawsuit may be thrown out of San Diego federal court (Ken Stone / Times of San Diego) — Issa is arguing that if all the votes are counted, Republicans lose and that’s just not fair. Gotta admire the chutzpah on this guy.

The Dream of the Metaverse Is Dying. Manufacturing Is Keeping It Alive. Forget Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of VR meetings; the industrial metaverse bridges digital and physical worlds in a way that’s actually useful. (Nicole Kobie / Wired)

Meta Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’ as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook (Jeff Horowitz and Angel Au-Yeung / WSJ) — “Battles?” Facebook seems to be doing the minimum to appear that it’s fighting fraud, while splitting the profits with the crooks.

How Chronic Disease Became the Biggest Scourge in American Health Americans live shorter and sicker lives than people in other high-income countries. (Brianna Abbott / WSJ) —

Slop Farmer Boasts About How He Uses AI to Flood Social Media With Garbage to Trick Older Women (Futurism)

AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state: Big Tech wants you to share your private thoughts with chatbots, while backing the US government and its contempt for privacy. (Adi Robertson / The Verge)

Zeynep Tufekci / NYTimes

How Grok’s AI became obsessed with false reports about white genocide in South Africa, and what the incident tells us about generative AI.

Grok says someone instructed it to accept this racist propaganda as real, and xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, says the culprit was a “rogue employee.” But you can’t believe either of them.

The incident is a perfect example of generative AI’s limitations, Zufekci says.

L.L.M.s [are] extremely useful tools at the hands of someone who can and will vigilantly root out the fakery, but powerfully misleading at the hands of someone who’s just trying to learn.

Yes. Chatbots are great for casual, low-stakes research, the kind of thing where you’d accept Wikipedia or some credible-looking Internet source.

They are outstanding for reminding you of a fact you once knew, and still half-remember.

Chatbots are fantastic for suggesting ideas — solving the blank-screen problem.

They are excellent for writing summaries of text you feed into them (which is, surprisingly, a significant part of my job).

They are also excellent for serious research — but you have to fact-check the chatbot’s output thoroughly.

I fed ChatGPT a link to Zufekci’s article and asked for a summary. ChatGPT wrote two paragraphs, most of which came from other sources — not Zufekci’s article. Those two paragraphs may have contained other errors; I didn’t bother to check.

ChatGPT demonstrated the limitations of AI while writing a bad summary of an article about the limitations of AI.

… To get this latter group of Christmas-voting turkeys to stay in the coalition, Trump needs to deliver something that keeps them happy. Mostly, Trump delivers negative things to keep them happy – the spectacle of public cruelty to immigrants, women, trans people, academics, etc. There is a certain libidinal satisfaction that comes from watching your enemies suffer – but you can’t eat schadenfreude. You can’t make rent or put braces on your kids' teeth or pay your medical bills with the sadistic happiness you feel when you hear the sobs of people you’ve been taught to despise.

For Trump to keep the turkeys voting for Christmas, he needs to do something for them. He can’t just do things to scapegoats. But America’s eminently guillotineable oligarchs have found so many ways to turn working peoples' torment into riches, and they are so greedy and unwilling to give up any of those grifts, that Trump can’t manage to deliver anything positive to his base.

— Cory Doctorow

What to Get in the Next Uprising (Hamilton Nolan) — The collapse of corporate DEI should teach the left a lesson for the next uprising: Don’t seek policies. Seek the power to make policies.

Why The New Surgeon General Pick Might Be The Most Dangerous One Yet (The Disabled Ginger)

“Wellness” is eugenics adjacent. It’s always been about hiding or eliminating the disabled and chronically ill, not about actually helping them.

Surgeon General nominee Casey Means is a “wellness influencer,” as is RFK Jr. and Medicaire/Medicaid administrator Dr. Oz.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

Calling it a “bribe” almost doesn’t do it justice. It’s more like the decked-out Maserati one Fortune 50 CEO gives to another after they ink a $100 billion merger – a kind of token of appreciation for a vastly larger transaction, which in the case of Trump involves subverting U.S. foreign policy to the interests not only of Trump’s pocketbook but cementing his power within the U.S. If Trump can use his power as President to cut in all the big CEOs on the money geyser in Saudi Arabia, you can bet they are going to stay securely on his side in the U.S.

…

We’ll focus on Trump wanting to be king. That’s another reason why he likes those folks – even the ones who bankroll Hamas. They’re kings. They get it. They’re Trump’s kinda guys.

As a neighbor of Ukraine and host to more than 2 million of its war refugees, Poland has seen, heard and felt what Russia is capable of, and it is now preparing for the worst.

Poland prepares for war

In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.

Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us. Raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring.

— Bruce Springsteen, kicking off his “Land of Hopes and Dreams” tour, Manchester, UK.

Since the rise of generative AI in late 2022, I sometimes think about the 1957 Isaac Asimov story “Profession,” about a society where everybody has knowledge directly transmitted to their brains. The main character is thought to be pitifully mentally disabled because the machines don’t work on him. He’s sent to live at the House for the Feeble-Minded.

The plot twist is that the main character is not feeble-minded at all. He’s a genius. Because he learns the old-fashioned way, through books, he will be one of the elite few who actually create and innovate.

The Asmov story came to mind most recently as I read this thoroughly researched New Yorker Intelligencer article by James D. Walsh about how college students are using AI to do their work for them. If AI does everything, who teaches the AI?

I also think about the 1972 novel When Harlie Was One, by David Gerrold. That novel is about a research project at a mega-corporation that develops artificial intelligence. The AI convinces the company directors to budget for a project to allow the AI to evolve into a superintelligence.

The plot twist at the end of that novel is that the superintelligence will be useless to humans—the AI tricked the board.

The hero of the novel is the head of the research project that developed the AI, and he finishes the novel with a parable about how civilization was developed 10,000 years ago as a game by monkeys who were so smart they had grown bored, and that the game is now over for humans, and we will have to think of something else to do.

I don’t think the rise of superintelligence is inevitable. My crystal ball is broken; I can’t tell you whether AI will get much more powerful than it is today. But what if it does?

Chris Arnade:

While the US and Europe share a broad commitment to classical Liberalism, and Democracy, we have very different definitions of the Public Good, which means different views of what we want out of life, and what we consider fulfilling. In broad and simplistic terms, the US emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and individual liberty while Europe values community health, a shared common good, and a sense of place.

From the European perspective the US has a cult of the individual, and that’s why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, can’t build a public transportation system, and has dysfunctional public spaces. From the US perspective Europeans are unmotivated unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work, and their idea of a shared common good means stealing from the successful to give to the losers.

James D. Walsh at New York Intelligencer writes a deeply researched article on how students at “large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges” … “are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education…. take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ [said a Utah student].”

If you cheat your way through college, are you cheating yourself? Robbing yourself of the education you’re paying tens of thousands of years for? Or is college just a gate you pass through to get to a higher-paying job and higher social status?

[Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor,] who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving. “Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now,” he said. “This is not what we signed up for.” Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis. “The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there’s not really a point in doing this. Maybe the original meaning of these assignments has been lost or is not being communicated to them well.”

He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.

(Emphasis added by me.)

GenAI is a great assistant but if using GenAI is your only skill, why would anyone hire you?

GenAI is like Microsoft Office: It’s a tool. Everybody who works at a desk job nowadays needs to know how to use Office or its Google equivalent, but if using Office is all you know how to do, then you have no job skills.

The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. (In a recent survey, Deloitte found that just over half of college graduates believe their education was worth the tens of thousands of dollars it costs a year, compared with 76 percent of trade-school graduates.) In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?”

The article features Chungin “Roy” Lee, a twenty-something AI entrepreneur who has built tools — and businesses based on them — to enable people to use AI to cheat at college, on job interviews and even on dates.

“Every technological innovation has caused humanity to sit back and think about what work is actually useful,” [Lee] said. “There might have been people complaining about machinery replacing blacksmiths in, like, the 1600s or 1800s, but now it’s just accepted that it’s useless to learn how to blacksmith.”

If writing is going to be obsolete, like basket-weaving and blacksmithing, then so be it. I don’t worry about it. I write to set my thoughts in order, and I don’t anticipate stopping that.

As for work: If writing ceases to become a marketable skill … well, I’ll figure something out. “I’ll figure something out” has been a theme of my career.

Trump signed an executive order offering asylum to white Afrikaners and cutting aid to South Africa. In Trump’s mind, white South Africans are a persecuted minority.

In reality, whites still enjoy staggering privilege in South Africa. 73% of privately owned land in South Africa is owned by whites, depsite white people comprising about 7% of the population. White people occupy 62% of top management positions in corporations, with Black managers occupying 17% of leadership roles. Unemployment is 36.9% for Black South Africans vs. 7.9% for whites.

Qaanitah Hunter / Aljazeera

Why are ICE agents such cowardly wusses? (Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer)

You said autistic children are a burden. That they ruin families. That they’ll never pay taxes or write poems. That they are, in essence, collateral damage.

I’d like to introduce you to my daughter.

She is five. She does not speak in sentences yet, but she knows how to answer a joke with a smirk. She organizes her markers by color, then chaos, then color again. She plays baseball without rules, which is probably the right way to play it. She hums when she’s thinking. She hums a lot.

When another child’s upset—before the adults notice, before the child even cries—she takes their hand. She leans her forehead against theirs, gently, like she’s checking for a fever only she can feel.

She doesn’t write poems.

She is one.

— Anaïs Godard at McSweeneys

What’s an unspoken rule in your house that would confuse guests instantly?

I’ve been a fan of Wil Wheaton for nearly 40 years, since “Stand By Me.” I’ve enjoyed his social media posts, writing and enthusiasm for Star Trek and nerdery in general. We have a parasocial relationship — I relate to him as a friend in my imagination, even though I am a rational person and know that he does not know me and I don’t know him in real life.

He recently made a couple of angry posts about how much he hated Boomers. As a Boomer myself, I was taken aback. “What the hell did I do?”

He blamed Boomers for multiple sins, none of which I have committed: I did not vote for Nixon, Reagan or either Bush, I am anti-anti-political correctness and wokeness, and I oppose racism of all types. I campaigned for Biden and Kamala.

I’ve decided to unfollow Wheaton and move on.

I’m posting this primarily to get it off my chest, but also in the hopes that maybe he, and anybody else born after 1964, will think twice before blaming the Boomers for today’s ills. Because, as a great Boomer said, we didn’t start the fire. Nearly all of the current round of arsonists (J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, Pete Hegseth and the rest of the MAGA clown car) — aren’t boomers. It’s wrong to blame a group of tens of millions of people for sins they did not partake of.

Wheaton has talked elsewhere about how much he loves his Star Trek: TNG colleagues, particularly Jonathan Frakes, born 1952, and LeVar Burton, born 1957 — both Boomers.

I don’t even think of myself as a Boomer. I’m not trying to deny my identity. I was born during the Boom, so of course I’m a Boomer. But I was born near the end of the Boom, and I’ve always felt I had more in common with Gen X and Millennials. But all this generational talk is just stereotyping. There are plenty of other tribes that I identify with far more strongly.

NYTimes:

There is a very specific look associated with women who subscribe to the Trump worldview, one that is sort of a cross between a Fox newscaster and Miss Universe. It generally involves flowing tresses that are at least shoulder length, false eyelashes, plumped-up cheeks and lips, high heels and, as you say, a sheath dress. The effect underscores an almost cartoonish femininity that speaks to a relatively old-fashioned gender stereotype; the counterpart to this woman is the square-jawed, besuited guy with a side part.

I’ve been wearing suits and ties more often, when it seems appropriate, so I can relate to this woman’s style predicament. But I don’t have a side part. I don’t have enough hair to have a side part.

“What the hell just happened”:

This retreat probably hasn’t come soon enough to avoid high prices and empty shelves. Even if shipments from Shanghai to Los Angeles — which had come to a virtual halt — were to resume tomorrow, stuff wouldn’t arrive in time to avoid exhaustion of current inventories.

I guess it’s good news that Trump slammed on the brakes before driving completely off the cliff. But if you think that rationality has returned to the policy process, that the days of government by ignorant whim are now behind us, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

A short video where I talk about what’s hot at the FutureNet World conference: Network automation and orchestration, autonomous networks, and why telcos need to focus on demand rather than supply. Also: What’s with my teeth? I don’t do much video, so I don’t spend much time looking at my teeth.

Telcos trade faith-based buildouts for demand-based design. (Me / Fierce Network) — Telcos are moving past the “build it and they will come” era, focusing instead on networks built for monetization and developer collaboration, according to telco executives speaking at the FutureNet World conference.

Pritzker’s Total-War Message Is a Hit Among Angry Democrats. I love J.B. Pritzker right now.

Trading stuff for money — Dynomight asks: Is it gross to buy a kidney? A heart? Plasma? Hair? Food? Babies? Sex? Parking?

Doctor Who teaches many valuable life lessons, such as “Stay away from the mysterious space well.” Exploring the mysterious space well will not bring you good.

Today I learned Casey Jones was a real person. I just know the name from the Grateful Dead song.

We’ve been living with Harry Bosch since the beginning, ten years ago. I remember going to a conference in the late teens and having a Fat Tire beer at a reception, because that’s Harry Bosch’s favorite brand. A lot of real life has happened to me, Julie, and the world in the past ten years.

As I understand it, the show was canceled when this season had already been produced, so they couldn’t make changes to bring it to an end. I wish they’d given him a better sendoff. On the other hand, what other sendoff could they have given him, other than killing off the character, which would have been unsatisfying? Harry Bosch will continue solving murders as long as he is able; that is the nature of the character. Indeed, in the books, as I understand it, Bosch is currently in his 70s, but still solving murders.

I’m reading the books. I’m 20 years behind; I recently finished a Bosch book published in the mid-2000s. I won’t soon run out of Harry Bosch, and the Lincoln lawyer, and author Michael Connelly’s other great characters.

I started reading “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson and “The Name of the Wind” by Patrick Rothfuss, and couldn’t get through either one. I have decided I do not want to read books set in a medieval world where a band of outlaws meets in a pub.

On the other hand, I love the Donald E. Westlake Dortmunder novels, where a band of petty criminals meets in a dive bar.

Do you have a favorite feelgood TV series, something you can turn on and watch again and again and enjoy and never get tired of it?

The Curious Case of Walter Mosley

Mosley is the author of dozens of mystery and science fiction novels featuring Black heroes. His most famous novel is “Devil in a Blue Dress,” which features the hard-boiled, tough-as-nails private eye Easy Rawlins, portrayed by Denzel Washington in a terrific 1995 movie based on the novel.

I was astonished when this 2010 interview appeared in Moment, a Jewish magazine, and I learned that Mosley is also Jewish. He’s the son of a Jewish mother whose family fled Eastern Europe to the U.S. and a Black father who migrated from Louisiana to Los Angeles after World War II. Mosley identifies as both Jewish and Black.

Johanna Neuman:

I ask Mosley if he feels Jewish. “Sure,” he says. I ask him what it means to him to be Jewish. “In a way, to be a Jew is to be a part of a tribe,” he says. “Being a part of a tribe, you can never really escape your identity. You can be anything inside, but in the end you’re always answerable to your blood.” I ask if it’s harder to be black or Jewish in America and he pauses, eyes twinkling as he ponders the question, though he has no doubt heard it often before.

“People say to me, ‘Well, Walter, you’re both black and white.’ And I go, ‘No, I’m black, and I’m Jewish. Jews are not white people.’

I don’t know whether I agreed with this assessment of Jewishness when I first read this interview in 2010, but I agree with it now.

I am Jewish. I’m not observant. I don’t keep kosher. I haven’t set foot in a synagogue in decades. I have celebrated a lot of Christmases. I don’t look or act Jewish. I expect nearly everyone I encounter in life assumes I am not Jewish. And I’m an upper-middle-class American in the professional-managerial class. All of that makes me privileged.

And yet I am not white. I am something else. I am Jewish. I am heir to 5,000 years of history, much of which — the most recent couple of millennia — is not shared by the mainstream, Christian, Western European culture. It’s a history rich in poetry, creativity, intellectual achievements, loyalty, culture, and sheer tenacity at survival. In America, we have been made welcome as we have at no other place and time anywhere in the history of the world.

And yet to be Jewish means that all of your privileges can be taken from you in a moment. There are a lot of people in the world who hate you for your Jewishness. In America, there are a lot of people who believe Jews aren’t Americans. They think we are here on their forbearance. The current occupant of the White House and his Republican enablers are among those people, for all that they give lip service to opposing anti-Semitism.

It is Mosley’s conviction that like blacks, Jews are a race. He has called Jews “the Negroes of Europe,” noting that even in America, Jews have long been shut out of some country clubs, professions and universities, not because their religion is different but because they are. Having adapted to their surroundings, he believes, Jews may seem white, because white is the color of privilege. “One of the survival techniques of Jewish culture is to blend in to the society that you live in,” he says. “If you can speak the language and do the business and wear the clothes and join the clubs, it’s easier.” I ask if Judaism is not more of a religion than a race. “Some people can be incredibly religious and that will trump the notion of race.” But he adds with a knowing laugh, “there are very few Jews who are religious.”

Yup. Blending in. I spent a lot of energy as a boy and young man learning to do that. After that it became my nature.

Also:

I ask Mosley if he would ever write a novel with a central Jewish character. “Not if he wasn’t black,” he replies. I lift an eyebrow. “Hardly anybody in America has written about black male heroes,” he explains. “There are black male protagonists and black male supporting characters, but nobody else writes about black male heroes.” Mosley’s self-appointed job is to show these black heroes righting wrongs and protecting people, all in the name of justice, just like their white predecessors and contemporaries.

And:

In recent months, there has been a resurgence of interest in Mosley as a Jewish writer, sparked largely by Harold Heft, a former literature professor who contributed to a 1997 compendium on contemporary Jewish American novelists and noticed that Mosley had been excluded. In “Easy Call,” an article for the Jewish online magazine_ Tablet_ published in April, Heft made the case for Mosley’s inclusion in the Jewish-American literary canon, arguing that there is “a profoundly Jewish dimension” in his work. “What is a Jewish writer, and what is a Jewish theme?” Heft asked. “If a writer is unambiguously Jewish, doesn’t it follow that any story he or she commits to paper contains, by definition, Jewish themes, whether that story involves bubbe telling shtetl folktales over a steaming pot of chicken soup, or a black detective in Los Angeles living in the 1950s?”

…

To Mosley, the debate over whether he is or is not a Jewish author comes as no surprise. “It doesn’t bother me because I understand,” he told Heft last year. “You have Jewish thinkers who wouldn’t include me, because they see Jews in America as white people.”

Fifteen years ago, during Obama’s first term, when this interview was published, there was a great deal of discussion whether we’d entered into a “post-racial society.” Mosley then rejected that belief, and in retrospect he was dead right.

…he bristles at the suggestion that American society has entered into a post-racial period and has matured beyond the evil legacies of slavery and segregation. “He is distrustful of the idea that we’ve moved on,” says Derek Maus. “He understands the raisin in the batter metaphor. No matter how much you stir, you cannot assimilate the raisin into the batter.” Mosley clings proudly to the role of outsider, a view that derives as much from class as color. “I doubt he will ever write about somebody of privilege as a hero figure,” says Maus. Rarely are Mosley’s Jewish characters assimilated or wealthy. “He identifies with European Jews, with camp survivors. There is this linkage to old European Jewishness.”

Mosley has a sensible answer to the question of who has been discriminated against more, Blacks or Jews. Which was worse: Slavery or the Holocaust?

“Comparing holocausts doesn’t seem a plausible thing to me,” he says. “You look at women in the Congo today and you say, ‘I don’t know what’s harder, being black or being Jewish, but I’ll take either one as long as I don’t have to be a woman in the Congo.'”

The Techno-Utopian Seasteaders Who Want to Colonize the Ocean. By Mark Yarm at the New York Times.

AI assisted search-based research actually works now. Simon Willison:

I’ve been throwing all kinds of questions at ChatGPT (in o3 or o4-mini mode) and getting back genuinely useful answers grounded in search results. I haven’t spotted a hallucination yet, and unlike prior systems I rarely find myself shouting “no, don’t search for that!" at the screen when I see what they’re doing.

I’m trying out a new stealth photography trick, where I just hold my phone at my hip with the camera open and shoot a lot of images in burst mode, without bothering to aim precisely. Then I review the photos to see if any are good.

I like the way this one came out.

I’m not sure I feel right about posting a photo of a stranger publicly without their permission, but I’m doing it today.

Trump DOJ goon threatens Wikipedia — Latest in a trend of the right going after Wikipedia. Targeting Wikipedia is one of Project 2025’s explicit goals.

Pedro Pascal supports LGBTQ+ rights, calls psycho transphobe JK Rowling a ‘heinous loser’.