Sam Altman, Freed

To explain, OpenAI as you know it is actually three companies, and its mission is, and I quote, to “create a safe AGI that is broadly beneficial,” which can refer to everything from a totally sentient artificial intelligence to, per Sam Altman, the “equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker.” OpenAI, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Public Charity — a non-profit that owns and controls the managing entity, OpenAI GP LLC, which controls the holding company for the OpenAI nonprofit entity, which is the majority owner of OpenAI Global, LLC, which is the “capped” for-profit entity. It is the bizarre result of OpenAI’s 2019 move to a “capped” for-profit model — though one shouldn’t give them any credit, as investors are capped at one hundred times their initial investment.

While this may seem confusing, the ultimate result is that OpenAI is controlled at its heart not by its investors, but by a board of directors that doesn’t hold any equity

Sidenote: Currently, some in the valley are complaining about OpenAI’s board being “inexperienced,” as if tech’s boards of directors have traditionally done a good job. The same board that fired Steve Jobs was filled with prominent venture capitalists and executives, as was the board of WeWork, Theranos (which included military leaders and former secretaries of state), and Juicero. Jawbone, a company that went from a $3bn valuation to bankruptcy, had industry figureheads like Ben Horowitz, and doomed entertainment startup Quibi had the CEO of Condé Nast and the founding partner of top entertainment law firm Ziffren Brittenham LLP. In fact, I’d argue that the boards of major tech firms have overwhelmingly failed to police their companies, rarely, if ever, taking action against executives behaving badly.

Rosalynn Carter's Caregiver Legacy

https://www.southarkansasreckoning.com/p/rosalynn-carters-caregiver-legacy

You can also help caregivers. Text them. Take a plate of food to them. Offer to give them a break for an hour. Just say hello on the phone. A human voice goes a long way.

Caregivers are the strongest among us, but often forgotten. They can always use support and love, every day but especially around the holidays.

In Mrs. Carter’s memory this week be a bright torch for those caregivers who are weary and worried. Offer hope. Reach out to someone who may need a simple “How are you?” to keep hanging on another day.

And remember Mrs. Carter's words: 

“There are only four kinds of people in the world — those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.”

Why I Am a Liberal

2. [Liberalism] consists of a set of commitments in political theory and political philosophy, with concrete implications for politics and law. In North America, South America, Europe and elsewhere, those who consider themselves to be conservatives may or may not embrace liberal commitments. Those who consider themselves to be leftists may or may not qualify as liberals. You can be, at once, a liberal, as understood here, and a conservative; you can be a leftist and illiberal. There are illiberal conservatives and illiberal leftists. Historically, both Republicans and Democrats have been part of the liberal tradition. Right now, some Republicans are illiberal, and the same is true of some Democrats. [...]

20. Liberals think that on both left and right, many antiliberals and postliberals have manufactured an opponent and called it liberalism without sufficiently engaging with the liberal tradition or actual liberal thinkers. They think that some antiliberals wrongly conflate liberalism with enthusiasm for greed, for the pursuit of self-interest and for rejection of norms of self-restraint. They think that some antiliberals describe liberalism in a way that no liberal could endorse. Liberals agree with the Nobel economics laureate Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, who complained of those who try to refute a position by mischaracterizing it: “The refutation of a caricature can be no more than a caricature of refutation.”

On Tyranny

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558051/on-tyranny-by-timothy-snyder/

1. Do not obey in advance.

2. Defend Institutions

3. Beware the one-party state

4. Take responsibility for the face of the world

5. Remember professional ethics [...]

12. Make eye contact and small talk [...]

19. Be a patriot

20.  Be as courageous as you can

Tim Scott’s landmark July 2016 speech on racial profiling

https://time.com/4406540/senator-tim-scott-speech-transcript/

I also think about the experiences of my brother who became a command sergeant major in the United States Army, the highest rank for an enlisted soldier. He was driving from Texas to Charleston, pulled over by a law enforcement officer who wanted to know if he had stolen the car he was driving because it was a Volvo. I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell, no matter the profession, no matter their income, no matter their disposition in life. I also recall the story of one of my former staffers, a great guy, about 30 years old, who drove a Chrysler 300. A nice car, without any question, but not a Ferrari, not a super nice car. He was pulled over so many times here in D.C. for absolutely no reason other than for driving a nice car. He sold that car and bought a more obscure form of transportation. He was tired of being targeted.

A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/01/04/brian-wildsmith-birds-company-terms/

A great many of these company terms originate in one of the first books printed in English after the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the Boke of Seynt Albans [Book of Saint Albans], also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. Anonymously published in 1486 and written largely in verse, it was lauded as the work of “a gentleman of excellent gifts” — until it was discovered that the author was a woman named Juliana Barnes.

I looked through attacks in my access logs. Here's what I found

https://nishtahir.com/i-looked-through-attacks-in-my-access-logs-heres-what-i-found/

I've been self-hosting for over a decade. It's freeing because I own my data, and do not depend on any platform other than my cloud host, which I can easily switch off. Self-hosting gives much insight into what it takes to run a cloud service. Anyone who's had some practice doing this will likely tell you that the internet is a dangerous place.

Exposing any IP onto the public internet immediately invites a flood of malicious traffic[1]. While it's undesirable there's a lot to learn from this traffic so I poked through my access logs to see what sorts of attacks I've been hit with recently.

A Legal Expert Explains Why Alec Baldwin Was Indicted by a Grand Jury for the Rust Shooting

https://slate.com/culture/2024/01/alec-baldwin-indicted-charged-manslaughter-rust-shooting-gun-halyna-hutchins.html?via=rss

I talked to an entertainment lawyer about the first indictment, and he suggested that that’s not the understood standard on Hollywood sets. Around the time of the first indictment, almost everyone in Hollywood said that an actor’s job is not to be a firearms or weapons expert. Could Baldwin’s defense make the case that whatever understanding there is about who’s supposed to know what about firearms in other circumstances, there’s a different understanding on a movie set?

A movie set is still governed by law of New Mexico, and there’s no exception to movie sets.

Free to be Muslim and an American & Responding to Current Events

https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/free-muslim-and-american/r243jCUp87NVaT5mJPBNEI/

For me, this moment isn’t just a celebration, but an opportunity to continue to heal the false conflict between America and Islam that Osama bin Laden has tried to create. Born to an American Catholic mother and a Lebanese Muslim father, I have struggled to understand what it means to be an American Muslim. That day in 2001 changed not only the world and the U.S., but also challenged an entire population to define itself. Bin Laden not only created the plot that hijacked those four planes, but he also hijacked the message of an entire religion. No one has been as troubled these past 10 years as those moderate Muslims who have had to repeatedly hear this man try to speak for us. An Egyptian man once said it perfectly in a State Department focus group: “In the Middle East, if you don’t define yourselves, they [extremists] will."

https://willslack.com/responding-to-current-events/

But regardless, let this not be a week about fireworks, politics or the celebration of a terrorist’s death. Let this be the week that we can be reminded which causes are worth dying and sacrificing for. We will not always uphold these values perfectly, but there are angels to guide us on our way.

He Died in a Tragic Accident. Why Did the Internet Say He Was Murdered?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/nyregion/obituary-pirates-matteo-sachman.html

In the hours after his death, friends and family scrambled to find out more about Mr. Sachman’s death. Few details were available — no obituary, no news stories.

But as people searched Google for information, someone on the other side of the world was searching for exactly the kinds of reverberations that Mr. Sachman’s death had caused.

Faisal Shah Khan, an internet marketer in India, knew nothing about Mr. Sachman. But suddenly, enough people were searching for “Matteo Sachman” to push his name up a list of trending Google search topics that Mr. Khan was monitoring as part of a digital moneymaking scheme.

To Mr. Khan, the rising interest meant that an audience for online content that did not yet exist was growing rapidly before his eyes. He was poised to deliver it.

Mr. Khan, 30, is part of a booming cottage industry online, in which enterprising people take advantage of the void of information in the wake of a sudden tragedy to drive web traffic to hastily assembled articles and YouTube videos.

George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior

https://customsitesmedia.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/370/2015/05/17225158/George-Washingtons-Rules.pdf

By age sixteen, George Washington had copied out by hand, 110 rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. They are based on a set of rules composed by French Jesuits in 1595....

38. In visiting the sick, do not presently play the physician if you do not know therein.

44. When a man does all he can though it succeeds not well blame not him that did it.

48. Wherein you reprove another be unblameable yourself; for example is more prevalent than precepts.

50. Be not hasty to believe flying reports to the disparagement of any.

73. Think before you speak pronounce not imperfectly nor bring out your words too hastily but orderly & distinctly.

110. Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

Thomas Friedman takes stock of the war, over 100 days in.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-tom-friedman.html?showTranscript=1

On Israel, the three thoughts are that Israel is an amazing place. What it’s built in 75 years is amazing by way of ingathering of exiles, of culture, of revival of literature, of science, technology, agriculture. Israel, it’s an amazing achievement, number one.

Number two, Israel does really bad stuff sometimes, particularly in the West Bank, steals Palestinians’ land, allows settlers to kill Palestinians with impunity, lets Israeli Arabs be treated as second-class citizens. And third, Israel lives in a crazy, dangerous neighborhood, and the weak don’t survive.

Now, the same, I believe, is true with Palestinians. Thought number one, Palestinians suffered a true what they call Nakba, a communal tragedy. Another people, an Indigenous people but another people, came back in large numbers to claim their historic homeland. And even if they were ready to share it, in the end, for Palestinians, it resulted in a mass refugee population being created of people who were driven out or left by fear.

And it was a real communal tragedy that no community should ever want to endure. And they’re calling it a Nakba. A great tragedy is not an exaggeration.

Number two is Palestinians do bad and stupid stuff. They missed enormous opportunities. They’ve fought each other. They’ve done vile things to Jews. They have had a government that tolerated too much corruption. They do bad stuff.

And third, Palestinians live in an incredibly dangerous neighborhood that has often exploited them. There’s a phrase in Arabic for many years from 1948 until the present. It said, no voice shall be louder than the battle. Every Arab dictator loved to use that quote, no voice shall be louder than the battle.

That was saying no voice should be louder than the battle for Palestine. Therefore, don’t pay attention to my autocracy and my corruption. Let’s just talk about Palestine. They were used by the neighborhood in ways that were unfair and deeply detrimental to their cause.

The Queue

 

A vent about what happens in a court of law when rape is tried

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/199a9mh/waited_5_years_for_a_trial_and_got_a_4_minute_not/

and it only took the jury 4 minutes to make a "not guilty" verdict.

what was the point of all this. I waited so long. he had lied to police authority multiple times saying he never even touched me and it's in the evidence, but im the one lying? well it's now public and he just walks out of the courtroom literally laughing out the door. and nothing happens except me being depressed and feeling stupid now.

i was told it wasn't an "innocent" verdict but what's that supposed to help? because 12 people thought it didn't happen, he just walks out there after fighting for 5 years.

State SNAP agencies are overloaded — what *actually* can be done?

https://daveguarino.substack.com/p/state-snap-agencies-are-overloaded

One of the primary things that jumps out from that thread to me is the systems nature of the problem. In a lot of ways, caseworkers and the clients they serve are not in drastically dissimilar situations. The effect of the system being overloaded is different on each side, but this is not some zero-sum game where either clients get the benefit or the workers do: interests are more aligned than not, even if sometimes clients don't perceive it as so.

But the question I wrestle with in this is — given things are so overloaded, what actual interventions can be feasibly made here?

Kmart Elegy: A formerly dominant American retail chain nears extinction.

https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/kmart-elegy

A REMARKABLE FACT: Despite the former ubiquity of both Howard Johnson’s and Kmart—and notwithstanding the nostalgia of their small communities of fans—both chains have left hardly a trace in the popular culture. In business, as in life, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

The demise of Howard Johnson’s, and likewise that of Kmart, is a cautionary business tale. But it’s also a humbling and almost spooky story. The orange-roofed, sharply angled roadside structures you’ll still occasionally notice along the highway have become something like artifacts; those big empty stores, many of them too dated or distressed to ever be occupied again, are our moss-covered ruins. Their big empty parking lots testify to something that once was—something that drew people by the thousands.

Apart from historians of retail or of the culture of the twentieth-century American roadside, few will care about these chains or their stories. And why should they, really? Without the nostalgic ties of personal memories to create a context for these places, they’re just buildings in a sea of others like them. But I find they have an almost spiritual use as reminders that nothing is permanent and nothing is guaranteed.

An Idealistic Cop, a Forbidden Ticket and a Police Career on the Brink

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/nyregion/mathew-bianchi-nypd-traffic-tickets.html

The month after he stopped the Mazda, a high-ranking police union official, Albert Acierno, got in touch. He told Bianchi that the cards were inviolable. He then delivered what Bianchi came to think of as the “brother speech,” saying that cops are brothers and must help each other out. That the cards were symbols of the bonds between the police and their extended family and friends.

Bianchi was starting to view the cards as a different kind of symbol: of the impunity that came with knowing someone on the force, as if New York’s rules didn’t apply to those with connections. Over the next four years, he learned about the unwritten rules that have come to hold sway in the Police Department. 

Small Kindnesses - Danusha Laméris

https://grateful.org/resource/small-kindnesses/

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.....

u/MLeek on using "Karen" energy

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/191nv95/the_karen_phenomenon_has_silenced_me/kgwsmnz/

I just ask myself if I wielding my Karen energy for good or for evil. Because I inevitably have it. I'm a white woman of a certain age, with a certain level of education and entitlement. I can trip into it or access the Karen narrative the moment I express any criticism or anger in public.

Against a waiter or retail clerk? Absolutely not. Against a stranger just trying to live their damn life? No. Who needs that bullshit drama.

Against a cop or an older man, or another white lady, feeling a bit too comfy in their assumed authority? My 'Karen' voice is useful AF. 

Their Songs Were Stolen by Phantom Artists. They Couldn’t Get Them Back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/13/business/music-streaming-fraud-spotify.html

For all intents and purposes, Bad Dog’s music now belonged to someone else. Disc Makers wouldn’t press the discs until the band proved it owned the songs on “Jukebox.” Which meant the duo couldn’t even get a CD to hand out as a freebie.

“It felt like someone had broken into my house and stole my prize possessions,” said Mr. Blackwell. “And it’s not like I’m looking to make $10 from Spotify. It’s about attribution.”

Few in the business have ever heard of this kind of musical hijacking. That includes Bad Dog, which would spend weeks trying to reclaim its music, with little success. The fight was maddening even though it occurred on turf that both band members know well. Mr. Blackwell, 58, is a practicing lawyer who spends time on intellectual property rights. Mr. Post, 72, is a retired law professor who specialized in internet copyright.

When graphs are a matter of life and death

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/21/when-graphs-are-a-matter-of-life-and-death

This case study, based on real data, and devised by a pair of clever business professors, has been shown to students around the world for more than three decades. Most groups presented with the Carter Racing story look at the scattered dots on the graph and decide that the relationship between temperature and engine failure is inconclusive. Almost everyone chooses to race. Almost no one looks at that chart and asks to see the seventeen missing data points—the data from those races which did not end in engine failure.

William J. Crawford

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Crawford

Cadet James Moschgat "was reading a book about World War II and the tough Allied ground campaign in Italy," when he read an incredible story of a private William Crawford who was presumed killed in action and whose father received the Medal of Honor for his son. Unknown to the Army and his family, Crawford had been captured by German soldiers and held as a prisoner of war for nineteen months until the war ended. In that book was a picture of a man who resembled his squadron janitor. Moschgat shared this with the other cadets and confirmed the story with Crawford who replied similar to "Yep, that's me." When asked why he did not talk about it, Crawford said, "That was one day in my life and it happened a long time ago." The word spread with new formed respect for Crawford.^[7][8]

In time, Crawford told his story and things he had learned in life to each academy class. His example also taught them many lessons. These sometimes subtle lessons became of great importance to many of the cadets. Here was a man presumed dead, whose father had received the Medal of Honor for his son from an Army general, then who returned with honor and continued to serve his country and later served them.^[7][8]

After Crawford rejoined the military and throughout his career he reluctantly wore his medal. For over 40 years, Crawford never had a single ceremony or recognition regarding his Medal of Honor award. The cadets at the USAF Academy decided to change this. In 1984, Crawford was a guest of the graduating class. Many past graduates, generals and VIPs attended this graduation. President Ronald Reagan arrived and presented the Medal of Honor to Crawford and formally recognized Crawford's action. In his remarks, President Reagan cited a few leadership lessons they learned from their janitor. Later these lessons were formalized by a former cadet, now COL (Ret.) James E. Moschgat:^[8]

Bill Crawford, our janitor, taught me many valuable, unforgettable leadership lessons. Here are ten I'd like to share with you.^[7][8]

• 1. Be Cautious of Labels. Labels you place on people may define your relationship to them and bound their potential. Sadly, and for a long time, we labeled Bill as just a janitor, but he was so much more. Therefore, be cautious of a leader who callously says, "Hey, he's just an Airman". Likewise, don't tolerate the O-1, who says, "I can't do that, I'm just a lieutenant."
• 2. Everyone Deserves Respect. Because we hung the "janitor" label on Mr. Crawford, we often wrongly treated him with less respect than others around us. He deserved much more, and not just because he was a Medal of Honor winner. Bill deserved respect because he was a janitor, walked among us, and was a part of our team.
• 3. Courtesy Makes a Difference. Be courteous to all around you, regardless of rank or position. Military customs, as well as common courtesies, help bond a team. When our daily words to Mr. Crawford turned from perfunctory "hellos" to heartfelt greetings, his demeanor and personality outwardly changed. It made a difference for all of us.....

 

How Telling Stories to My Daughter Got Me Through the Darkest Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/opinion/brazil-daughter-stories.html

She intervened in everything — the plot, the genre, the dialogue, the characters. She demanded certain props and scenarios. “Now I want a sad story with Chico Bento,” she asked one day, referring to a character from a Brazilian comic strip. “And he sings!” Recurring cast members in her stories included Greta Thunberg, Oblomov, the sisters Bingo and Bluey (from the Australian animated series “Bluey”), Mario and Luigi (from the “Super Mario” franchise) and Luna (from the Brazilian animated series “Earth to Luna!”). [...]

She’s been teaching me how to finish a complex narrative when you are despairing and clueless about how to move on: She just appears, flying, as a plot resolution device. It’s called a Potato ex machina. It works every time.

The Man Who Captures Criminals for the D.E.A. by Playing Them

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/30/the-man-who-captures-criminals-for-the-dea-by-playing-them

When posing as a drug trafficker or a money launderer, Enotiades thinks of himself as a businessman. He told me that he draws upon his memories of accompanying his father, Harris, a pharmaceuticals distributor in Cyprus, to lunch meetings with company executives. “If you ask me to play the role of a street guy, I will fail,” he said. The key is to present his assumed identity as a self-evident truth. “If you were a drug dealer, you’d be sitting here because you believe that I can satisfy your needs,” he said. “If you don’t believe it, my attitude is, You can go the hell out of here and find someone else. I don’t need you. Who are you to doubt me? Why do I have to prove myself to you? Show me ten thousand kilos of coke right now if you are such a big shit. Where is it? Let’s go and see.” When he was younger, Enotiades sometimes had to raise his voice or slam his fist on the table to gain control of a meeting. “Now I say, ‘Please don’t make me angry,’ ” he said. “Instead of shouting, I lower my voice so that people have to bend over to hear what I’m saying. It has a stronger effect.”

The End of Snow

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/opinion/climate-angst.html

This past year was an Omaha year, and we arrived on the 22nd to find that the weather was very mild — almost 50 degrees — and there was no snow. More unusually, there had been no snow for the entire month of December. Aside from some brief and very sparse flurries, it hadn’t snowed in Brooklyn, either, in November or December. I’m an incorrigible heat seeker, and the phrase “wintry mix” fills me with despair. But even so, the lack of cold and ice in 2023 felt unsettling.

One reason is easy to quantify: Last year’s warmer temperatures happened globally, and they’re a reminder that without significant climate change interventions we could have a future in our lifetimes where higher temperatures are the norm. Another reason — a harder one on the psyche but increasingly omnipresent — is the sense that balmy holidays are a preview of something darker: bigger climate extremes, more natural disasters, the specter not of a world where humans suffer through these things and find ways to survive but where we’ve made the planet so uninhabitable that, in the longer run, the planet survives but we don’t.

A review of Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/building-apollo

Enthusiasm for the Apollo program tends to be focused on the astronauts who piloted the spacecraft, and on the NASA mission control staff that managed the flights from the ground. Comparatively less focus is placed on the actual construction of the Apollo spacecraft and the rockets that put them into orbit. Everyone knows who Neil Armstrong is, but almost no one knows who built the Eagle lander that carried him to the lunar surface (it was Grumman Aerospace). In fictional treatments like the movie First Man, the rocket is simply there, ready and waiting for the astronauts to take their historic flight.

But the astronauts, and NASA, were just the tip of an enormous iceberg of industrial infrastructure, made up of 400,000 workers and 20,000 individual contractors that designed and built the various rockets and spacecraft of the Apollo program.

Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon, by Mike Gray, is a book about one of these contractors, North American Aviation, and the man, Harrison Storms, in charge of the company’s Apollo efforts. It tells the story of what it took to get the rocket from design sketches to the launchpad, the blood and sweat required to build a spacecraft capable of traveling hundreds of thousands of miles through the vacuum of space, landing astronauts on the moon, and returning them safely to earth.

“No inventions; no innovations” A History of US Steel

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-innovations-a-history

Arguably, US Steel has been a disappointment since the day it was formed. It was created as a fundamentally conservative reaction to the vicissitudes of the steel industry, and this guided its early years and shaped its culture. The economies of scale it achieved were never passed on to the consumer, and instead it used its size to bully other steelmakers and extract money from consumers. When this stopped working, it used its political influence to prevent consumers from buying low-cost foreign steel. Improving the efficiency of its operations was something it did as a last resort when left with no other options.

The company’s large size made it unwieldy to manage, and it was late to every major advance in steelmaking technology of the last 100 years, from continuous rolling to the basic oxygen furnace to the minimill. When the company did try its hand at technology innovation, it reliably made missteps. 

Speak Softly and Carry a Long Roadmap

https://concrete.ghost.io/speak-softly-and-carry-a-long-roadmap/

Agencies need people who are in it for the long haul, who will take the time to learn the ins and outs of the architecture they're building on and the policy missions they're supporting. But every time an agency IT team attempts to hire great people, they end up reliving the same story: the applicants weren't good, or the application window wasn't open long enough, or the good candidates didn't make it past the first cut because the non-technical reviewer didn't know how to read a developer's résumé. So they cancel the posting and try it again.

The US Government needs a single recruiting team for digital: a single marketing budget, recruiters who know how to talk to the community, a single point of entry, and a delegated examining unit staffed with digital-savvy application evaluators. USDS's SME-QA project recognizes one aspect of the challenge, but it doesn't seem scalable. I'd rather have OPM post one cloud engineer position with hundreds of vacancies and share the cert USG-wide. I know USDS did a project with OPM in the past year or two, and that OPM recently created an office with a digital recruiting mission in mind. I hope this new outfit focuses on recruiting and hiring digital talent at scale, for the purpose of long-term placement within agencies. This is the long pole in the government IT tent, and it is a job that very few agency HR shops are succeeding at on their own. I'm optimistic about the U.S. Digital Corps, the newest USG-wide digital shop. It seems to have a model that resembles what I'm describing here.

Recoding America: A Rallying Cry for the State Capacity Movement

https://modernpower.substack.com/p/recoding-america-a-rallying-cry-for#footnote-anchor-4-102168485

As a result of the distance between policymakers and on-the-ground problems, we have a lot of dysfunctional policies and processes. But in waterfall, the upward flow of information from “lower” levels of the system, which are more proximate to actual end users, isn’t prioritized for cultural and historical reasons we’ll get into later in the piece. 

The upshot is that when a process is not going to properly achieve an outcome, a government staffer can either (a) go along with the process, outcome be damned or (b) pursue the outcome, process be damned.

Jen shares a couple anecdotes where government staff take the former path — Paula, EDD’s leader during the pandemic, and Kevin, a senior IT leader at Veterans Affairs (VA).

In the VA story, Kevin has been handed down a set of requirements by policymakers that don’t make any sense and will definitely exacerbate the problem of getting veterans the mental health services they require. At the time, 16 veterans were committing suicide each day. 

“I’ve spent my entire career training my team not to have an opinion on business requirements,” [Kevin] told me. “If they ask us to build a concrete boat, we’ll build a concrete boat.” Why? I asked. “Because that way, when it goes wrong, it’s not our fault.”

The last thing he wanted was to have a seat at the table. Keeping his teams in order-taking mode didn’t make them immune from criticism—there were constant headlines about the VA backlogs and ongoing fury from administration officials who wanted veterans taken care of—but it had been a winning strategy for him personally. Like Paula, he’d been promoted countless times, rewarded by a rule-bound civil service regime that values years of experience and a clean record but has little ability to judge competencies, leadership acumen, or a track record of meaningful results. Like Paula, he saw withstanding the criticism as part of the deal. In the end, he could say he’d just been following the established process. He’d just been doing what he was told.

In defense of "The West Wing"

 https://www.slowboring.com/p/in-defense-of-the-west-wing

And something “The West Wing” deeply gets about politics is that there are a lot of people like that kicking around. Are there kooks and grifters and opportunists and criminals and morons? Sure.

But you genuinely can’t understand key developments in American political history — good ones like the Affordable Care Act or bad ones like the Dobbs decision — without understanding the large and often critical role played by earnest people who sincerely believe in what they are doing. Even a lot of the really bad characters in politics — Paul Ryan, for example — are extremely sincere. And when you look at someone who is both bad and also non-sincere like Donald Trump, you can’t understand Trump’s successes without understanding the sincerity of many of his collaborators. For better or worse, helping Trump beat Clinton seemed like a good way to try to advance the causes of making abortion illegal and taking health insurance away from poor people, and unless you grasp the sincerity with which lots of Republicans believe in those causes, you won’t be able to make sense of how he related to the party’s professionals.

Jerusalem is Israel’s future

https://unherd.com/2023/12/jerusalem-is-israels-future/

Night after night in the Old City, I came to see it differently. It wasn’t the theme park for which tourists mistook it. This place was a chessboard of control — a battlefield of scuffles and brawls, title-deeds and court cases — where the kippah-wearing boy handing out tea under a camp light on the road to the Damascus Gate all night long was really a look out; where the new mezuzah, affixed to the door post on another Palestinian house these groups had purchased, was another blue dot on the board “reclaimed” for Israel.

This speaks to a growing seam of fundamentalism in Judaism — yearning for the Temple Mount. In 1967, the nation’s Rabbinate reaffirmed an ancient ban on Jews ascending lest they desecrate the ruins of the temple and Jewish prayer was formally discouraged by officials. But this is no longer a liberal Zionist Jerusalem. Today, a growing number of Jews are now visiting and praying at the site.

As Jewish extremists have focused on the mount, so have Palestinians. Over the past few years, a pattern has emerged of Arab rioters, fearful of half-imagined Jewish plans to erect their Third Temple, barricading themself in the Al-Aqsa Mosque only to be stormed by Israeli police. This, for Hamas, is central. Al Aqsa is at the heart of their message, ambitions and ideology. The war launched on October 7 was launched in the name of saving it.

Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/bartlett_public_purpose/files/algorithmic_attention_rents-_a_theory_of_digital_platform_market_power_final.pdf

We outline a theory of algorithmic attention rents in digital aggregator platforms. We explore the way that as platforms grow, they become increasingly capable of extracting rents from a variety of actors in their ecosystems – users, suppliers, and advertisers – through their algorithmic control over user attention. We focus our analysis on advertising business models, in which attention harvested from users is monetized by reselling the attention to suppliers or other advertisers, though we believe the theory has relevance to other online business models as well. We argue that regulations should mandate the disclosure of the operating metrics that platforms use to allocate user attention and shape the “free” side of their marketplace, as well as details on how that attention is monetized.

Original Chex Mix Recipe

https://jawns.club/@bendystraw/111621044871558524

What makes a great manager.

https://emilyfreeman.io/blog

You can't hire for leadership and you can't hire for communication. And that's what distinguishes a great manager from a mediocre one. 

Leadership comes in a few shapes and sizes. There's not one prescription. But the result is loyalty and respect. And the gift of leadership is wrapped in the skill of communication — tailoring your words and message to your audience. 

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don't make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster.

Ukraine's real power broker

https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraines-real-power-broker-yermak-zelensky-russia-war-biden-2023-12

But the graft that has long contaminated the country's political system unsettles Ukrainians far from the circles of power. "Huge corruption" is Ukraine's biggest problem, an 18-year-old at a Kyiv café told me bluntly. "I love Ukraine," she said — but she hesitates to give money to the military for fear a dishonest official will steal her donation. Earlier this year, investigative journalists revealed that the prices at which suppliers promised to deliver basics like potatoes and cabbage to Ukrainian troops were inflated two to three times beyond the purchase price reported to government tax officials.

In polls taken last summer by the Kyiv-based Democratic Initiatives Foundation, Ukrainians listed corruption as the No. 1 obstacle to the development of entrepreneurship in the country — ahead of destruction caused by the war. And a majority of Ukrainians surveyed said it would be "appropriate" for foreign partners to provide military aid "only under the condition of an effective fight against corruption in Ukraine." On the most recent "corruption perception" index assembled by the watchdog group Transparency International, Ukraine ranked 116 out of 180 countries — not far in front of Russia, which clocked in at 137.

u/Normal-Flower4437 on context on disasters and Israel's ethnic cleansing in Gaza

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/18b4wzz/cmv_the_establishment_of_israel_is_one_of_the/kc2gych/?context=3

The very fact that it is repeatedly in the news decade-in and decade-out, all the while with the populations on both sides increasing by a few million, is proof that it is not one of the largest humanitarian disasters in history. Were it actually one of the largest humanitarian disasters in history, you would have maybe heard of it once and then never heard of it again. Because with huge humanitarian disasters, that’s what usually happens. A million people die somewhere in Asia, and no one speaks of it again.

Making a Whole of Shivering Fragments: A Florilegium

https://www.faspe-ethics.org/2022-journal-tara-deonauth/

As a hospital chaplain, my work also brings me into communion with people at the end of their lives, though lives affected by illness, not the US justice system. In many of these encounters, I facilitate a life review: reflecting on significant moments, exploring related emotions, and supporting meaning-making. Some of these life reviews uncover confessions of wrongdoings or hurtful actions, expressions of guilt, shame, or regret, and utter confusion about the meaning of these realities. Only through the practice of a ministry of presence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic attention, do I find that these conversations can deepen into spaces that allow such revisitation of past suffering (“past” insofar as it has happened, but by all other accounts, viscerally present in their emotional and spiritual toll). My patients—in ways not unlike death-row inmates—have difficulty accepting the possibility of compassion, often on account of a system that disallows expiation and forecloses forgiveness. As a result, I wonder what it might mean to encounter and treat them as capable and worthy of full redemption, or even as already fully redeemed—to witness attentively the being of another and experience the oneness that binds us.

Jessy Park, namesake of College’s mailroom, retires after 43 years

https://williamsrecord.com/465397/features/jessy-park-namesake-of-colleges-mailroom-retires-after-43-years/

“Jessy, when she was first diagnosed [with autism], was considered extremely high functioning,” Paul Park said. “But not now. Williams is full of people who have been diagnosed as autistic, but they’re college students, or even college professors. The scale of it has really changed.”

“My mother was very proud of the fact that Jessy had a job, and then she started doing these paintings,” he continued. The mother of four children, including Paul and Jessy Park, Clara Claiborne Park wrote two memoirs (The Siege in 1967 and Exiting Nirvana in 2001) about Jessy Park’s experience with autism, which are now widely recognized “as an important and pioneering source of insight for autism advocates, mental health professionals and educators,” according to the College’s obituary for Clara Claiborne Park.

Behind the Scenes at the Dismantling of Roe v. Wade

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/supreme-court-dobbs-roe-abortion.html

But as a professor in 2013, she had written a law review article laying out the kind of dilemma she faced in spring 2021. “If the court’s opinions change with its membership, public confidence in the court as an institution might decline,” she noted. “Its members might be seen as partisan rather than impartial and case law as fueled by power rather than reason.”

That July, with its audience before the court secure, Mississippi made the case more monumental, abruptly changing its strategy. “Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” the state’s main brief declared on its first page. It urged the justices to be bold. “The question becomes whether this court should overrule those decisions. It should.”

Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/opinion/long-covid-reporting-lessons.html

Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly buffeted by our culture, values and politics. As energy-depleting illnesses that disproportionately affect women, long Covid and M.E./C.F.S. are easily belittled by a sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and a capitalist one that values people according to their productivity. Societal dismissal leads to scientific neglect, and a lack of research becomes fodder for further skepticism. I understood these dynamics only after interviewing social scientists, disability scholars and patients themselves, whose voices are often absent or minimized in the media. Like the pandemic writ large, long Covid is not just a health problem. It is a social one, and must also be understood as such.

Dismissal and gaslighting — you’re just depressed, it’s in your head — are among the worst aspects of long Covid, and can be as crushing as the physical suffering. They’re hard to fight because the symptoms can be so beyond the realm of everyday experience as to seem unbelievable, and because those same symptoms can sap energy and occlude mental acuity. Journalism, then, can be a conduit for empathy, putting words to the indescribable and clarifying the unfathomable for people too sick to do it themselves.

Many long-haulers have told me that they’ve used my work to finally get through to skeptical loved ones, employers and doctors — a use that, naïvely, I didn’t previously consider. 

double spacing legal filing

66 pages of legal writing on the meaning of "double-spacing"

https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/D561FAQFBAakciPft4g/feedshare-document-pdf-analyzed/0/1700073478595?e=1701907200&v=beta&t=Ot6xpO_8WMEFo5yJH7BrcjBHaSIAg_BFfgV1OByaDS8

Henry Kissinger Is Dead at 100; Shaped the Nation’s Cold War History

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/us/henry-kissinger-dead.html

But before returning to the United States he visited Fürth, his hometown, and found that only 37 Jews remained. In a letter discovered by Niall Ferguson, his biographer, Mr. Kissinger wrote at 23 that his encounters with concentration camp survivors had taught him a key lesson about human nature.

“The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance,” the letter said. The survivors he met “had learned that looking back meant sorrow, that sorrow was weakness, and weakness synonymous with death.”

Understanding the True Nature of the Hamas-Israel War

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/opinion/israel-palestinians-war-iran.html

Hamas argues that this is an ethnic/religious war between primarily Muslim Palestinians and Jews, and its goal is an Islamic state in all of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. For Hamas, it’s winner take all.

There is a mirror image of Hamas’s extremist views on the Israeli side. The Jewish supremacist settlers represented in Netanyahu’s cabinet make no distinction between those Palestinians who have embraced Oslo and those who embrace Hamas. They see all  Palestinians as modern-day descendants of the Amalekites.  As Mosaic magazine explained, Amalekites were a tribe of desert raiders mentioned often in the Bible who inhabited today’s northern Negev, near the Gaza Strip, and lived by plunder.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that some Jewish settlers simply cannot stop talking about rebuilding settlements in Gaza. They want a Greater Israel from the river to the sea. Netanyahu embraced these far-right parties and their agenda to form his government and now cannot banish them without losing his grip on power.

Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/magazine/progressive-insurance-flo-stephanie-courtney.html

Subsequently pinning down the exact hows and whys of my consuming a profile subject’s forbidden caviar took either several lively discussions with my supervisor (my guess) or about “1.5 hours” of “company time” (his calculation). In his opinion, this act could be seen as at odds with my employer’s policy precluding reporters from accepting favors and gifts from their subjects — the worry being that I might feel obligated to repay Courtney for caviar by describing her favorably in this article. Let me be clear: If the kind of person who purchases caviar and offers to share it with a dining companion who has been tyrannically deprived of it sounds like someone you would not like, you would hate Stephanie Courtney. In any event, to bring this interaction into line with company policy, we later reimbursed her for the full price of the caviar ($85 plus tip), so now she is, technically, indebted to me.

They Thought They Were Free

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 is a 1955 nonfiction book written by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. It describes the thought process of ordinary citizens during Nazi Germany.

August Heckscher, the chief writer of editorials of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that the book "suggests how easy it is for human beings in any society to fall prey to a dynamic political movement, provided their lives are sufficiently insecure, frustrated or empty."^[1] He stated that the book is simultaneously a discussion on ethics, on "how political tyranny is established", and on issues in Germany and the "German mentality".^[1]

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

We hope that this cursory tour of some of Signal’s operations and costs helps provide a greater understanding of Signal’s unique place in the tech ecosystem, and of the tech ecosystem itself.

Our goal of developing an open source private messenger that is supported and sustained by small donations is both highly ambitious and, we believe, existentially important. The cost of most consumer technology is underwritten by surveillance, which has allowed people to assume that “free” is the default, and a handful of industry players have accrued eye-watering amounts of personal data and the unprecedented power to use that data in ways that are shaping our lives and institutions globally.

To put it another way, the social costs of normalized privacy invasion are staggeringly high, and maintaining and caring for alternative technology has never been more important.

Signal is working to show that a different approach is possible—an approach that puts privacy at the center, and where organizations are accountable to the people who use and rely on their services, not to investors, or to the endless pursuit of growth and profit.

Thank you for your support. It’s an honor and privilege to work on Signal every day, and we—very literally—couldn’t do it without you. Please consider donating to Signal via our website or learn how to give using the app. 

What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/israel-gaza-genocide-war.html

Still, the collective horror of what we are watching does not mean that a genocide, according to the international legal definition of the term, is already underway. Because genocide, sometimes called “the crime of all crimes,” is perceived by many to be the most extreme of all crimes, there is often an impulse to describe any instance of mass murder and massacre as genocide. But this urge to label all atrocious events as genocide tends to obfuscate reality rather than explain it. [...]

My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action. On Oct. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay a “huge price” for the actions of Hamas and that the Israel Defense Forces, or I.D.F., would turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble.” On Oct. 28, he added, citing Deuteronomy, “You must remember what Amalek did to you.” As many Israelis know, in revenge for the attack by Amalek, the Bible calls to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.”

 

Why Palestinians Feel They’ve Been ‘Duped’

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/podcasts/ezra-klein-interviews-amjad-iraqi.html

You have Fatah, which especially since the Oslo Accords and under Mahmoud Abbas’s reign has focused on leading the political struggle through diplomacy, through going to the U.N., going to the I.C.C., focusing on these international forums, all while still keeping to the provisions of the Oslo Accords, like security coordination with the Israeli military, keeping its end of the bargain by playing that game.

But what they’re finding is that even that is now being defined as diplomatic terrorism. That even the P.A.’s model is actually basically roundly dismissed, is roundly demonized, and you still have the same occupation — not even the same, it’s even an entrenching occupation. And that the P.A. has now become this convenient subcontractor to this regime in the West Bank.

And then you have, let’s say, a third model of Palestinian politics of like the boycott divestment and sanctions. Using literally the nonviolent methods that all of us were taught are the best way to go, are very moral and righteous, and that is coercion without the same kind of coercion of armed struggle. And what Palestinians are finding is that when you practice that, you’re demonized also as terrorists and demonized, even worse, as anti-Semites because you’re using a nonviolent method to try to achieve your rights and to try to weaken the structures that allow the Israeli occupation to take place.

What Israelis Fear the World Does Not Understand

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-yossi-klein-halevi.html?showTranscript=1

Yossi Klein Halevi:

Yeah, it’s interesting because my father raised me with the consciousness that the non-Jewish world is divided into two kinds of people. There are those who actively want to kill us and there are those who are glad that someone else is doing the job. And my maturation process was learning to break from that survivor mind-set that my father really tried to impose on me. And I understand why, given his experience.

But in the 1990s, parts of Israeli society were beginning to distance ourselves — and I was certainly very much part of that — from an excessive dependence on the Holocaust as a framing for Israeli and Jewish identity. And there was a very positive, a really healthy conversation that was beginning.

And then the second intifada happens. And all of the trauma returns. And the Jewish survival button was pushed. And that’s a very dangerous thing for the enemies of Israel to do because when that button is pushed, you can’t win.

Far from Gaza, the war between Israel and Hamas upends lives

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632899/west-bank-olive-harvest

KELLY: In Hebrew, they yell that we need to leave - that we have crossed a barrier. For the record, there is no barrier, no signage. They tell us, this is a time of war.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIER #1: (Yelling in Hebrew).

ABUHEJLEH: (Non-English language spoken).

KELLY: And then they separate Ayoub from our group, tell us they need to question him. We say we don't want to leave without him.

SHARON: Is it possible for someone to stay here with him?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: So he - they said no one will stay. They're going to be...

KELLY: The soldiers refuse. A gun lifts - points straight at us. So we back off.

Six Members of My Family Are Hostages in Gaza. Does Anyone Care?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/opinion/israel-palestinians-hostage-silence.html

Again and again I hear that Israel is a country of white colonizers and oppressors. So some of my bewilderment is in my very skin. My maternal grandparents, Avraham and Sara, grew up in a tiny rural village in central Yemen. Like other Jews in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemenite Jews were persecuted as second-class citizens through what are known as dhimmi laws — the denigration of non-Muslims before the law. In 1949, after pogroms against Jews in Yemen, my grandparents set out by foot and donkey on an arduous journey to the capital, Sana. From there, they were airlifted during Operation Magic Carpet to the newly formed state of Israel. As refugees fleeing oppression in their birth country, they began their lives in Israel in poverty. Slowly they built a humble but comfortable life and raised five children, among them my mother.

So maybe you can imagine my surprise the first time I heard my Israeli family called “white colonizers.” When did we become white? And how could a family fleeing persecution be perceived as colonizers? I have heard this description for years; perhaps I shrugged it off too easily. 

How we got here. Some inside scoops from Microsoft on handling early days of pandemic to cutting over 20K folks in 2023

https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-we-got-here-Some-inside-scoops-from-Microsoft-on-handling-early-days-of-pandemic-to-cutting-over-20K-folks-in-2023-7ndQwLAU

2. Hiring boom of 2021 and early 2022.

Sales of our products and services skyrocketed during the pandemic just like it did for the industry as a whole.

Org leaders and finance departments were making rosy projections for growth. It quickly turned into a monkey see monkey do business in entire software industry. Everyone was making rosy projections for growth. Insane numbers like 30%-40% growth for certain businesses and orgs for years to come.

This was a critical moment. There were some leaders who had the foresight to see these growth numbers are not sustainable. There was also a slow but steadily growing belief that the demand was only brought forward and will quickly revert on the other end of the curve. Sadly the voices expressing skepticism were few and drowned out in the loud noise of empire building org leaders and SLT members drooling over the implications for their stock awards.

Everyone in the industry (except apple) was doing it so nobody wanted to go against the wisdom of the collective. Raising debt to finance things was really cheap (especially for Microsoft given our bond rating) so everyone in the industry began hiring and collecting employees like Pokémon cards.

SLT and the board did discuss the possibility of these forecasts not coming true. The overwhelming consensus was that there is a lot to be lost if it did come true and we were not prepared and resourced well to capture the opportunity. They thought the demand will last much longer and the tapering will be gradual. Similar discussions were taking place in corporate board rooms across large tech.

The scene was set. The dream castles of rosy projections for revenues were built on faulty assumptions. The dissenting voices were lost in the collective chorus of greedy leaders dreaming about lofty future stock valuations.

I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/opinion/desires-good-person.html

I’m increasingly seeing this in my work as a therapist in New York City. So are my colleagues. One said to me recently that he was tired of listening to his patients talk about the impossible advice inhaled on Instagram and TikTok — to say nothing of the self-help industry. “Doesn’t anyone come asking to be more free?” he exclaimed. “They don’t,” I said pessimistically. “Everyone wants to make the right decisions.” The problem is it’s very hard to tell someone that pursuing the abstract question of “right and wrong” ways to live will lead you into a cul-de-sac. It avoids the deeper question of desire, and desire is a compass.

The promised image of goodness skirts pleasures that — for obscure reasons — you aren’t sure you can want. I see patients grow fearful when they can’t tell if what they desire is compulsive — just another rote, maybe addictive, behavior, or a real attempt to test the boundaries they live under. How do you locate free will in a world this compulsory? Unsettling desires challenge our perception of who we are and what life might look like. This boundary, the testing of it, takes time and care. Importantly, you come to see that limits cannot be held or crossed under compulsion. They must be approached freely. 

To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/opinion/marriage-happiness-career.html

As Wilcox writes in his vitally important forthcoming book, “Get Married”: “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America. Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared with peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages.”

“When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.”

The economists Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell studied two groups of adults over time, some who married and some who didn’t. They found that marriage caused higher levels of life satisfaction, especially in middle age, when adults’ average level of satisfaction tends to be at its lowest. It wasn’t only the traits people brought into the marriage; marriage itself had positive effects.

CLASSICAL MUSIC IS FOR EVERYONE

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/08/classical-music-is-for-everyone

I host the mid-morning program “Classical Café.” I always enjoy the mix of works we have scheduled, but I especially enjoy Fridays, when the playlist is comprised of pieces that listeners have asked to hear. Their choices tell me a lot about why people love classical music.

Music can put a smile on your face and leave you humming a melody. Once one of the requested works was Bach’s Italian Concerto. After I played it, a listener called in to say, “If that doesn’t make you happy, I don’t know what would.” Yes, and I’d say the same about Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet.

Conversely, some works speak to feelings of loss and grief. Great music can heighten those emotions. Two pieces that listeners sometimes choose to dedicate to loved ones are Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei. 

'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Nobel Prize-winning researcher Katalin Karikó

https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/10/penn-katalin-kariko-university-relationship-mistreatment

Scales also said that Penn's approach of giving minimal funds to Karikó followed a similar model to most peer institutions. He said many research institutions provide some degree of startup funds, and the expectation is for researchers to acquire external grants otherwise.

All of those interviewed commended Karikó for winning the Nobel Prize alongside Weissman.

“I think it’s a testament to her fortitude,” Sobol said. “Now that you look back on the calendar, you see that she was 20 years ahead of where everyone is now.”

Scales said he hopes that Karikó's win will prompt changes to funding allocations in research.

“I do hope that it causes Penn and a bunch of other institutions that fund science this way to reflect a little bit on what the chances are that some scientists who do not get funding, and wind up leaving, end up being like Katalin Karikó,” Scales said.  

The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/decolonization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. 

I Fought for the I.D.F. in Gaza. It Made Me Fight for Peace.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opinion/international-world/gaza-idf-israel-veterans.html

All our casualties and the suffering brought on Palestinians in Gaza accomplished nothing since our leaders refused to work on creating a political reality in which more violence would not be inevitable. While I believe in self-defense, fighting in Gaza taught me that if my government doesn’t change its approach from crushing Palestinian hope to committing to Palestinian independence, not only will this war kill an untold number of Israelis and Palestinians in addition to the thousands who already have died, but it also will not decisively end terror. A ground invasion is doomed to failure.

The attacks on Israel, and the response.

https://www.readtangle.com/israel-attacks-hamas-palestine-war/

And yet, many Americans only view modern Israel as the "powerful" one in this dynamic. Which is true — they obviously are. It isn't a fair fight and it hasn't been for decades because Israel's government is rich and resourceful, has the backing of the United States and most of Europe, and has an incredibly powerful military. At the same time, Israeli leadership has made technological and military advancements that have further tipped those scales — all while the Israeli government has helped create a resource-thin open air prison of two million Arabs in Gaza. 

Conversely, Palestinians are devoid of any real unified leadership, and the Arab world is now divided on the issue of Palestine. Israel is unwilling to give the people in Gaza and the West Bank more than an inch of freedom to live. These are largely the refugees and descendents of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can't keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this. 

Texas state representative James Talarico explains his take on a bill that would force schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom

https://v.redd.it/tj9xa36qektb1

Doesn't just discuss separation of church and state, also talks about being a Christian and praying in secret.

Ways of Knowing: Lessons on Agroecological Transitions from a Pothwari Farm

https://blog.castac.org/2023/07/ways-of-knowing-lessons-on-agroecological-transitions-from-a-pothwari-farm/

As a researcher and self-identifying ‘citizen planner,’ I was curious if new methods of agriculture could make the sector remunerative enough to counter the desire to convert agricultural land into real estate. Since I was familiar with the emerging significance of agroecology and regenerative agriculture  in climate adaptation, I was motivated to understand what it would take to help us transition towards practices closer to agroecology.

Thread on homeschooling

https://twitter.com/sugar_boogers/status/1711903253615505669

The Dark Side of Courtship

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09/the-dark-side-of-courtship.html

In complementarianism, women have limited spiritual authority. Once Shannon married and became first the youth pastor’s wife and then the senior pastor’s wife, what little power she did have was over other women. “I was given a small group of women to lead in my new role,” she wrote. The first task she was given was to tell a new pastor’s wife that her new position meant she could not pursue her dream career in veterinary medicine. The idea made her sick. “But I did it,” she wrote. “This time I was the cruel one, forcing obedience and conformity on a person I was supposed to love and care for.”

I asked if she perceived a tendency to pit women against one another in the church. “I do think conservative Evangelicalism falls under this model,” she said, “because it’s a hierarchical community,” one in which she had to show people what they were supposed to be like. “I do think women are used,” she continued. “They’re a part of the reason why we got stuck in it. Because women themselves are being mistreated, but they don’t see it and then they pass it on because we believe it’s noble and we believe it’s good. And so we’re literally selling it to our own kind, and it’s hurting us all and we don’t see it.”

It’s complicated, she added: “When you are limited in your power and then you are given a place where you can be powerful, I think different kinds of people are going to respond differently. They might not see that they don’t have power in other ways. I certainly didn’t totally understand the full scope of my situation.”