Archive

Hello, readers,

This is the final issue of Across the Sundering Seas—a mostly-weekly-up-till-now newsletter about the things been reading and thinking about.

Hello readers,

I’m Chris Krycho, and this is Across the Sundering Seas, my mostly-weekly newsletter on what I’ve been studying, reading, and generally thinking about. Feel free to unsubscribe—or to forward it to a friend who could use something more like this in her reading life! (I hope at least someone out there could use something more like this in her reading life!)

This week, I’m mostly sharing a few quotes from Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. The book seems extremely timely in light of the nation-wide protests in response to George Floyd’s brutal, unjust death—but I did not pick it for that reason. Indeed, my friend and Winning Slowly cohost Stephen and I picked this as one of the key books we needed to read and talk about on this season of the podcast some six months ago. The book sits squarely in the center of our current focus on the intersection of epistemology and technology.

More than that, though, it points directly at a critical reality: while this round of protests has (rightly!) pushed all of these issues to the fore again, and even seems to have started making a dent, these issues are not new. To the contrary, they have been a part of American history from very nearly its beginning. Racism is not the whole of America’s story, but its vile stain has, wretchedly, always been a central part of her story. So we’re reading Browne’s book, which sits squarely

Hello again, readers!

Another week, another missive from me—Chris Krycho, author of Across the Sundering Seas, this basically-weekly newsletter that you’re reading. In this space, I reflect publicly on the things I’m learning and thinking about: from longish essay-ish entries on topics ranging from the future of home economies, to theological anthropology, to physics, to technology, to music production. (Yes, music production. Read on!) If you ever feel the need to unsubscribe, you can do so at the click of a link!

This week, much as I wish I had something interesting to say about the ongoing racial tensions and (well-justified) protests happening here in America, I simply don’t. Rather than opine in an area where I am reasonably well-informed, but not well-enough informed to add something meaningful to the conversation, I am going to carry on with the things I have been learning lately. In part because I agree very much with Alan Jacobs:

Dear readers,

I’m having a lovely weekend off celebrating my 33rd birthday, so I’ll be back next week with another missive on the things I’m reading and learning and thinking about.

My only note: I pray and hope that this round of debates and protests and marches in memory of George Floyd is indeed the turning point it has felt like it might be. I encourage you: to pray earnestly for change, and if you’re an American, find ways you can invest in changing the profoundly unjust justice system here. Call your national Representatives and Senators and press them to work to end qualified immunity. Call your state representatives and press them to end over-criminalization and mass incarceration. Learn about these things, about the history and present realities of both racial politics and dysfunctional policing, and work where you are to do better.

Hello readers,

SPAAAAAAAAAACE!

Hey readers, I wrote this and was all ready to send it out… and then there was a quirky issue with Buttondown, the newsletter service I use: I couldn’t log in! Sorry for the late issue, but here it is!

Happy Saturday! Another week behind us, another bit of steady progress on the tasks in front of you I hope (as it was for me).

This is your weekly issue of Across the Sundering Seas, my weekly newsletter (where “my” means “Chris Krycho’s”) about the things I’m reading, learning, and thinking about: an ongoing exercise in public learning in the interest of fostering a healthier culture of learning to whatever degree one person can! If you like it, forward it to a friend; if it’s no longer your thing, you can always unsubscribe.

Hello, readers!

I’m back with another missive. This one will be a little different, as you’ll see, but I’m just glad to get it out (even if it’s a day late).

First, though, your usual reminder, in case these years-long months have you wondering what exactly it is you’re reading (): this is , a weekly-ish newsletter by (hi!) about the things I’m studying and thinking about. You can any time if you need one fewer newsletter in your inbox; or you can forward it to friends if you think they need one newsletter in theirs!

Hello there, readers! Another week, another missive!

(This is Across the Sundering Seas, a newsletter by Chris Krycho—me—about the things I’m learning and thinking about. You can unsubscribe if this fills you with angsty dread; or you can forward it to a friend if you love it and think they might as well!)

Hello, readers!

This is my monthly week off of writing the newsletter. With the slight relaxation of stay-at-home guidelines in Colorado this past week, we had a small family get-together to celebrate Mother’s Day (a week early), and that took much of my day. The remainder of it is apt to be spent in a mix of working on some composing, some photo editing, and perhaps—perhaps!—working on a right and proper essay. See you next Saturday, most likely with a bunch of leftover materials from the essay I’m building this week!

– Chris

Hello, readers! We’ve nearly made it to the end of the longest April in living memory, and that after the longest March in living memory. I hope, very earnestly, that you are all well physically and as well emotionally as you can be in the midst of this upheaval. Things are bumpy out there. They’re bumpy here, too. But we all keep trucking onward.

Your weekly refresher, because these virus times are really something: I’m , this is , and here I think out loud in public about the things I’m reading and studying and learning, hoping that they benefit you to some degree and in some way. You can at any time without hurting my feelings one bit.

Good morning, readers!

It’s a nice day here in Colorado, and I’ve done some reading and study again this week, so I’m happy to be diving back in with some reflections on some internet reading I did this week!

First things first, though! Who are you? Who am I? What are we even doing here? Well, I can’t answer the first question (though I’d love to hear from you if like to answer it; just reply!). I can, however, answer the other two questions: I’m , and is my roughly-weekly newsletter where I learn in public, reflecting on things I’ve been reading and thinking about and sharing that with you. You can and should feel free to at any time—we all have a lot on our minds, and now more than ever!

Hello readers!

Let’s talk research tools. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart, and although I’m a long way from being able to do things as well as I’d like—because literally nothing solves all my problems, and I’ve found it so frustrating that I’m building my own tools as a result, slow though the process be—I think it’s still useful to share the ways I approach the process. (And yes, I’m actually back at it this week! Thanks to those of you who wrote kind notes in response to my note that my wife had dealt with COVID-19.)

Before I get into the nitty-gritty details, the usual qualifiers: what this is, who I am, and how you can escape the infinite list of newsletters that is 2020 if you so desire—

Hey readers,

Chris here, noting that this week will be my week off for April. I mentioned last week that my wife had been sick; it was indeed COVID as far as we can tell (as some of you might have surmised from last week’s email). I say “as far as we can tell” because Colorado is reserving tests for pregnant women, the elderly, and the immunocompromised: none of which my wife is—but the symptoms fit the bill to a ‘T’. We’re grateful that it was a relatively mild case, which she got through in one piece… by resting nonstop for two full weeks, many of those days sleeping 18–20 hours per day. Gladly, she is on the mend. We’re grateful. There’s a good chance I’ll actually read some books this week!

Hello readers!

I read almost nothing this week. I had a very sick wife (now on the mend), and therefore ran point for our whole household, including all the parenting, as well as doing my normal work tasks. The net was that by the end of the day, I had little mental or emotional energy to spare for anything at all. Single parents do heroic amounts of work, and single parents whose children are now at home in the midst of COVID-19 school system shutdowns particularly have my sympathies. It’s one thing to know these things are hard; it’s something else entirely to try to carry everything alone for even a single week.

Even so: I’m committed to writing this newsletter—it does my soul good.

Hello fellow travelers,

Coronavirus changes have made a surprisingly significant difference in my day-to-day (as I’m sure is far more true for those of you out there who, unlike me, had to transition to remote work in the last few weeks). My reading and other side projects have definitely been impacted, but following the advice of the ever-excellent , I refuse to let this go wholly by the wayside. This may not be the longest or deepest issue of this newsletter I ever publish, but I’m going to keep publishing. It’s good for me, and I it’s good for you.

Hello readers!

I hope all of you are staying safe and well in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s the kind of thing that reminds us forcefully that we are not in control—painfully so. I’m hoping and praying that the infection curve flattens (and we’re doing what we can in our own small ways to that end). For my own part, I’ve made myself available in the context of our church community to do whatever needs to be done—from cleaning and sanitizing the church building to delivering supplies to shut-ins or quarantine cases. I encourage you to consider how you can do likewise if you’re young and healthy, though of course with every precaution. Wash your hands, wear a mask to help, etc. If you’re looking for input on what local community (but especially churches) I commend to you .

Hello readers,

Been a strange week, so this is my once-a-month week off. I’ll be back next week, likely with some reflections from Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. I told a friend this week that Eisenstein’s book has become my relaxing reading. Given it’s an 800-page tome on a massive cultural event, well, you now have further evidence of just what kind of a nerd I am. It sure beats Kurzweil’s , though, which I’m laboring through for and will be glad to be done with.

Happy leap day, readers!

I’m back and at it again this week, and I’m chomping at the bit to say a piece about Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, which I started reading this week as part of Winning Slowly Season 8 (spoilers!… except that we mentioned we might read this one on air multiple times already).

Before I dive in, the usual asides: in case a friend emailed this to you or you just don’t remember what you signed up for, I’m Chris Krycho this is Across the Sundering Seas, my mostly-weekly (I take one week a month off) newsletter about the things I’m reading and studying. Topics so far this year have included theological anthropology (or what it means to be a human made in the image of God), climate change, epistemology (and especially the meaning of mystery), building reliable software (and why Facebook’s and Microsoft’s and Boeing’s problems are not the same), and the nature of learning itself. If you’d like to unsubscribe, you can always do that right here.

Dear readers—

—today I realized that mechanically, this needs to be a (number of weeks in the month − 1)-issues-per-month newsletter. This week involved (a) publishing a new Winning Slowly episode, (b) recording two more episodes, (c) participating in training for a lay pastoral role in my church, (d) many family goings-on, (e) filing my taxes, (f) spending time with good friends for the first time in almost a month [!], and (g) almost no reading at all.

Hello readers! I’m back this week with another reflection on learning and knowledge, courtesy of Elizabeth Eisenstein.

First, let’s get the obligatory (but hopefully helpful!) bits out of the way: I’m Chris Krycho and this is my weekly newsletter—in which I publicly reflect on the things I’m learning on a wide variety of subjects: currently focused largely on theological anthropology, the history of technology, and epistemology. If someone forwarded you this email and you it, you can subscribe . If you want to unsubscribe for any reason, you can do that .

Good Saturday to you, readers!

In case you somehow subscribed to this email in a semi-conscious daze after Groundhog Day festivities, were hate-subscribed to it by a mortal enemy, or otherwise just don’t know what you’re reading—

This is Across the Sundering Seas, a weekly newsletter by Chris Krycho (me!) about the things I’m reading and studying, in the hope that they’ll be interesting and illuminating to you. But if it ever stops being interesting, or for that matter if you were hate-subscribed by a mortal enemy, your way out is right here!

Thanks for reading!

Hello, fellow sojourners!

I’m Chris Krycho, and this is Across the Sundering Seas—a weekly newsletter digging into the things I’ve been reading and thinking about. Call it an attempt to keep the work of growing in one tiny corner of our culture. If you have too many emails in your inbox and this one just isn’t doing it, you can always . On the flip-side, if you like what I’m up to here, would you consider sending it along to a friend who might like it? Either way, thanks for reading along this far!

Good day, readers!

I’m Chris Krycho, and this is Across the Sundering Seas, a weekly newsletter about the things I have been reading and studying lately—from the politics of open source software to theological anthropology to volumes of poetry. (No poetry this week! But another week, perhaps.) You can find every back issue here or . Thanks for reading along with me!

Hello again, readers! 2020 keeps 2020-ing, and happily, I'm on the mend from last week’s illness. Here’s hoping that’s the last such nonsense of the year: I’ve been sick more than I’ve been healthy since December 20, so I’m very ready to stay well.

A friendly reminder/explanation, in case a really dreadful enemy signed you up for this, a friend emailed it to you, or you simply forgot in the haze of the mad signing-up-for-for-newsletters rush that is the start of a new year (because that’s a thing, right?)—

This is Across the Sundering Seas, a weekly newsletter by Chris Krycho. In this space I reflect publicly on the research and reading I'm doing—on Christianity, internet culture, technology, art, philosophy, you name it: all in the interest of continuing to build up a culture of learning. There's never any hard feelings if you need to unsubscribe; and forwarding it to friends or enemies is always a welcome course of action as far as I'm concerned.

Hello readers—just a quick note that this is an out-sick kind of week for the newsletter. I ended up with a nasty chest cold and my dear wife got a kidney infection of all things; the net is that I didn’t have the requisite mental or physical bandwidth to write! Since I've committed to publishing this weekly, I wanted to let you know that I have not, in fact, fallen off the bandwagon immediately after starting. I’ll be back next Saturday… and I have books coming this week! So many books! I’ve no doubt I’ll have a lot to say.

(If you’re trying to remember what this even is: I’m Chris Krycho, and this is Across the Sundering Seas, a weekly email, reflecting publicly on my reading and research on everything from theology to open source software licenses. You can always unsubscribe if you’re dying of newsletter overload or just because I’m way too wordy. For those of who you’ve read any of this, and doubly to those of you who keep reading: thank you!)

See you in a week when I’m less sick!

Hello from the future, everyone! —where by “the future” I mean “2020,” because it’s kind of amazing to me that we’re in 2020. William Gibson’s line—

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.

—seems more true today than ever.

Well, hello there! It is the end of 2019. 2020 is upon us!

First things first: thank you to every last one of you who has followed along with this newsletter. Especially given it’s been a bit more sporadic than I hoped when I started it at the beginning of the year. “Weekly” is hard. I have ever-more admiration for folks who manage it.

Second: I haven’t made up my mind, as of the time I’m drafting this, what I want to do with this space in the next year. I’m pretty sure I want to keep writing it, though, because it’s the best source of conversations I have on the general internet. That’s down to all of you, and therefore my second thank you: for the thoughtful replies off and on through the course of the year. You have been not only readers but also conversation partners.

This week, a two-part note: an exchange with a reader, picking up on some of the themes from last week (very lightly edited); and some early reflections on this kind of “commenting”—i.e. emails back and forth. (But in the opposite order, because when I edited this, that seemed right.)

1. On “comments” and email

One of the great joys of writing a newsletter (as of blogging, when it is carried out in certain ways—as in this recent exchange: 1, ) is this kind of response. It is the thing that internet comments can be at their best: thoughtful interactions that challenge our original formulations and help us to think better. Unfortunately, that kind of interaction is rare. Far too rare. When I wrote , I quoted :

Hello again, readers. It has been a few weeks courtesy of weekend travel around Thanksgiving: cross-country plane rides with kids (even really great travelers like our girls) are no joke!

This week, a few of my notes (very lightly edited where appropriate) on sundry topics I’ve been thinking about lately!

1.

Incrementalism’s failure mode: incremental solutions can sometimes ameliorate the worst ills of the present system that doing the hard work of making deep, systems-level/structural change seems less necessary. Make things better that people get comfortable with it, even if things remain deeply broken, and the urgency of real change goes away.

Hello there, fellow travelers! I come to you this week with three articles, ranging from fractal wonder to depression to remix culture. A smorgasbord, as is my wont. Enjoy!

1. (Joshua Rothman, February 5, 2018) – one of those delightful forays into a corner of the world I’d never actually thought about, but which is fascinating and intricate. The world, it seems to me, is profoundly fractal in nature. Everywhere you look, there are more details than you can imagine at first blush. Paper jams! They’re this fabulous little corner of physics and engineering and they’re complicated, important if they’re in your corner of the world, and interesting. At least, they are to me. This article somehow captures the magic of something which likely never occurred to you as before (as it did for me):

Hello, readers! This week in Across the Sundering Seas, something a bit different—some relatively quick hits (“relatively” because, well, it’s me), none directly related to each other.

I. Follow-up: on progress and decline

First: a bit of follow-up from last week’s note. As one reader pointed out, my take on progress and decline lacked some important qualifications. I attempted to gesture toward the reality of progress and decline: “real motion at certain times in certain places.” However, I was sufficiently careful or thorough in teasing that out—and my reader noted that it felt more like a handwave: “a necessary concession to ‘but feudalism! Black Plague! Mongol Hordes! Etc.’” Quite so.

Hi there!

A hearty welcome to all of you readers who got here, as far as I can tell, because I wrote a strongly-worded complaint about the state of Apple’s developer documentation and it made the rounds online this week. And a hearty welcome back to those who’ve been following along on this journey. And if you got here some other way over the past few months and don’t remember how or why or what this even is: Across the Sundering Seas is a newsletter by Chris Krycho (…me) mostly reflecting or linking to people reflecting on technology, ethics, humanism, religion, and more.

Hello, dear readers,

It has been a while! I last wrote you in early August. A few things have happened between then and now that have kept me from writing… but I’m back, and hopefully will be steady through at least the end of the year. Thanks for your patience in the interval!

(“At least the end of the year,” I say, because I’m debating the form I want my writing to take in 2020. More on that in a future issue, as I get it sussed out.)

Next week I will probably have a collection of links for you: I have quite a collection of them gathering. Today, though, something very much in the spirit of this newsletter’s name.

Hello, readers!

It has been almost two months since I cut Twitter out of my life, and I have been mulling a bit over the last few weeks about the change. My thoughts here are preliminary in many ways, as it should be, I think. As I read recently:

Hello again, fellow sojourners on the Eastern shore, fellow longers-for-Westernesse. (This is in your inbox because at some point you signed up for a newsletter titled with an allusion to Tolkien; you have to expect nerdy references to the same occasionally, right?) I’m here this week with a bundle of links and some slow-bubbling meditations on friction.

1. , Dan Cohen, July 2019

> You can’t sprint up the mountain your entire life. You just physically can’t.
> —Charity Majors

Earlier today, I (finally!) got to (which has been sitting in my backlog for months; some language, so not kid-friendly) wherein the guest (Charity Majors) said a few interesting bits about seasons of hard work (indeed, the experience of in search of ) vs. seasons of rest, and it crystallized a few thoughts I’ve been chewing on for months—maybe even years.

Since I left Twitter, I have been slowly and carefully, but nonetheless steadily, upping the number of feeds in my RSS reader.¹ I enjoy having a steady stream of interesting reads come my way through the day, and that was one of the primary things that Twitter did actually provide for me. It turns out, though, that the “old” ways—scare-quotes here because after all nothing on the internet is truly old in any meaningful sense; and there is something more to say on that and the sense in which Google Reader’s 2012 demise feels a lifetime ago, but perhaps another day—it turns out that the “old” ways of reading blogs and following interesting links in them and subscribing to new sites when they’re interesting does in fact still work, and very well.

I’ve also been working on a website redesign, and I have spent a non-trivial amount of time reflecting on the makeup of my website—what kinds of things I put there, and how I structure them. That dovetailed nicely with a few reflections on “content” I saw floating around recently:

Hi there, readers!

I had a lovely week this week, and hope you did as well. My family’s celebration of America’s Independence Day was quite interesting this year, in that it coincided with a thunderstorm and I enjoyed both an extra spectacular light show in the form of lightning mingling with the fireworks and a bit of a shower in the form of, well, rain.

Into some links!

Hello again, readers! This post comes to you a couple days later than normal because I spent most of Saturday helping friends move from one apartment to another, in a city an hour away. Great workout, not so much with the having-time-to-write.

This week you can describe the theme as thinking about systems. Systems of all sorts: biological systems (if that’s even the right word for them), organizations, software… the kinds of things where the sum of the whole often has emergent properties that are functions of the way their individual elements compose and the nature of the boundaries between them: porous or sealed, flexible or firm.

I first bumped into the subject of today’s essay—Nora Bateson’s , published November 2015—a few years ago. I’m not sure exactly when. Sometime during my years in seminary. It had fallen off my radar, but I stumbled back onto it via which uses the eponymous word in its site subtitle, and was reminded how much I like not just the essay (is that what this sprawling, wonderful thing is? I’m not sure) but also the of the thing.

Well, readers, I am back. And a thing happened in my life since last I wrote you: I abandoned social media! It has been a long time coming, in some ways. I first curtailed my engagement with Facebook a couple years ago, reducing it to five minutes once a week. I dropped Instagram around the same time. With Twitter, I have had an off-again, on-again relationship over the years, including a number of phases where I blocked it entirely on my machines during hours where I wanted to be working on something specific. But being offline and enjoying the mental silence that came with it broke loose opportunities for reflection and consideration, and the net was: I’m out. I am far more interested in the kinds of things we can accomplish with longer-form writing, and in the other projects that can now have my far-less-splintered attention.

Hello, everyone! I forgot to mention that my wife Jaimie and I are on vacation, celebrating 10 years of marriage, June 1–12 (including my birthday today!), so no email (other than this one!) for this last weekend or the one upcoming. I’ll be back at it, and quite re-energized if the first few days here in Jamaica are any guide, for the June 15 issue!

I am cross-posting this to my blog and the newsletter, and the reason it is a couple days late will be apparent in the content below. A good thing, but a big thing!

Well, dear readers—

The essay I mentioned last week (the piece I thought would be this email this week) has taken on a life of its own, as these things so often do. It’s growing into a substantive (at least: I hope it is substantive) argument about the nature of learning and the relationship of forms like books and lectures to learning. Matuschak’s essay has become a foil for my argument, rather than itself the focus. There is whole (Silicon Valley-typical) frame of thinking about learning I deeply and sharply disagree with, and I mean to give it the best broadside I can. A sense of the direction of the essay as it currently stands:

Hello readers!

This weekend was far fuller than usual, with a combination of family activities and a very long day of work on a podcast episode (drafting a complicated New Rustacean episode like the one I’ll release this evening is a of work!). I on, but haven’t finished, a long interaction with Andy Matuschak’s post . I take issue with the piece on a very deep level, for many reasons, and they all get back at things I’ve been thinking about in this space all year… so weekend, you should have a long interaction with that in your inbox.

Hello, readers!

Today, a missive in three very distinct parts.

I. write: a project announcement

I had promised news of this project I’m working on, hopefully in the form of a way to get recurring news of it. Alas, ’twas not to be: I made the terrible, terrible mistake of departing from my regular (and beloved) domain registrar, Hover, because Name.com had a discount on the domain I wanted. Pro tip #1: if you have a registrar you like and they’re giving you good service… stick with them. Pro tip #2: don’t use Name.com.

At this point, I’m pretty well resigned to the fact that my best bet is to wait till the 60-day transfer restriction on new domain registrations is up and just transfer the domain over to Hover. Lesson learned. And so you can expect update… in mid-June. But a little preview: the domain I registered is .

This week, I spent a great deal of my “free” time working on something new. I’ll have more to say on it soon—including, next week, a link to what will at least initially be a very occasional update email. If you’ve been paying attention to my blog for a long enough time, the project won’t surprise you. But it’s also going to be a very long burn.

The net of that is that I didn’t spend a of time reading this week… and when I reading, it was going back and rereading , the first book in , one of my favorite pieces of modern sci-fi/space opera. I commend it to you.

Hello again, readers-of-newsletters! This week is more the “traditional” format: lots of good links from things I read this week!

1. – first up is Ben Thompson’s weekly article: probably the best take on to actually regulate the internet in a way that isn’t ultimately just awful for everyone. Because it turns out that swaths of the internet in fact in need of some degree of regulation… but most of the regulatory approaches that have been on offer to date have seemed (or proven!) likelier to end up affecting the wrong players in the market, to cement the existing dominance of the worst companies, and to be tools of abuse for bad actors. That goes, in many ways, for everything from a decade ago through last year’s and this year’s . Thompson makes a clear case for differentiating between different segments of the market based on specific attributes of those segments—in ways that would keep Facebook from abusing its position and force its hand on consumer protection, while still allowing ISPs to operate in reasonable ways, for example. Perhaps most importantly, for those skeptical of regulation as needful here (or anywhere), he traces out regulation is appropriate:

I have been thinking a lot over the last month about Alan Jacobs’ comments here on “stock” and “flow” in newsletters:

It strikes me that there are two basic kinds of newsletter.

Hello, friendly readers! You may have noticed that you did not get a message two weeks ago. This is not because I failed to write, but because I failed to properly click the Send button! I did not forget you, however, and so here is that week's email, two weeks late!

1. Robin Sloan’s Fusion of Technology and Humanity, Dan Cohen – Alan Jacobs has been shouting from the rooftops (or, well, his blog) for the last few years about how interesting Sloan’s novels are, and I subscribe to Sloan’s own newsletter (as I did to his previous newsletter!). But Cohen’s write-up on Sourdough was the thing that actually pushed me over the edge into “Okay, I really need to read these books” mode. Cohen himself is the kind of scholar I find most interesting: someone doing serious work in his chosen field of history and engaging richly with new media and the implications of digital technologies.

2. a plea to journalists, Alan Jacobs – speaking of Jacobs, this is an important complement to my ongoing musings on social media:

   It’s really astonishing how few people can summon the critical facility necessary even to ask whether a person who claims to speak for all black or Latinx or trans people actually does. But I think it’s very relevant that this dance between triumphant resentment and instantaneous appeasement happens on Twitter: the pace of the medium seems to activate users’ fight-or-flight instinct. And then the ordinary mechanisms of human pride kick in, and people double down on their first responses rather than step back and question themselves.

   Notice that the point here is not whether you support better treatment of various marginalized groups. It is specifically whether a self-appointed representative screaming on Twitter genuinely represents the whole of that marginalized group.

   Given that one of the most important points many members of historically marginalized groups have had to make is precisely that they aren’t homogeneous groups you can lump under one description, the answer is self-evident. But as Jacobs points out here: the structural incentives of Twitter and spaces like it push us away from that kind of thinking and therefore toward the dehumanization of whole swaths of people—perhaps worst of all, of those very people we purport to help.

3. A New Discovery Upends What We Know About Viruses, Ed Yong, The Atlantic – I have a (weird?) side interest in biology, and particularly in weird microbiology things. Like viruses. (Are they alive? How do we even answer that question?) In this case the virus only works by using using multiple different cells to reproduce itself. As one of the researchers put it, the fact that this virus exists at all indicates “that something must be wrong in the conceptual framework of virology.” These kinds of things make for the most fun moments in science: when we have to step back and totally rethink something we thought we understood to some extent.

4. Apologies, Power, and Martyrdom in a Decadent Age, Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy – my friend Jake basically takes a specific bit of recent nonsense from Tucker Carlson and uses it to reflect on the broader problems around power, morality, and culture war—and what our responsibilities are, especially if we are public figures:

   It may well be the case that public apologies are weaponized in the culture wars. But that has no bearing on the fact that a man who made such awful remarks ought to apologize for making them. To suggest otherwise is merely to engage in a slightly more clever form of rationalizing sin.

   But, of course, the bigger story here isn’t just about Tucker Carlson; the story is about power and specifically about things greater and higher than power.