“Frozen in an uncomfortable slouch”

Whew, okay, hi! The day has flown by, and I’m now at the level of energy / willpower where I waste away what’s left of it by falling down internet rabbitholes while frozen in an uncomfortable slouch. Hmm, describes more of my days than I’d like. So, now to sit up and write!

• I had a pleasant interaction this week. Put off by some wording that’d been consistently used by the Globe (which I won’t share for now, but may down the line), I wrote to the Standards Editor (formerly “public editor”) noting the issues with the term. Within hours, I had a response, written by a real person, that acknowledged the concern, engaged with it, and shared their next step (passing the feedback on to the editing desk that could consider it for future stories). It was so refreshing to have a feels-like far-off institution be so accessible: yes, newspapers are by their nature more likely to be engage-able than, say, a government bureaucracy, but it’s still easy to just file these notes away with no response. Something for those of us in far-off institutions to consider.
• Speaking of the inaccessibility of far-off institutions, of various pieces I’ve read on the student protests recently, Justin Ling’s coverage from Columbia struck a thoughtful note. Steve Saideman’s thoughts, too, drew some useful lines around the protests as part of what universities are for. From another angle entirely, adrienne maree brown with her “prayer for palestine – hope in the face of hopelessness”.
• Jack Cheng inspired me to pay more attention to trees as I’m out and about, to try to learn to identify one or two types species. So, walking through the park one morning, I was struck by a tree with an oddly shaped bud, a round cluster facing skyward. When I went home to look it up, turns out it’s a maple (lol), and now I see them everywhere (and, just yesterday, saw some with leaves forming along those same stems—it’s happening!!).
• I miss Frank Chimero’s sporadic web writing, but will happily take this list of lessons-learned from his 30s.
• A link I’d meant to share last week, a Kottke.org discussion on what people are starting or hoping to.
• Saw and was sent this from a few corners (thank you! lol), on the bad UX of running for president of Iceland.
• I like this idea of a library of infinite loan but fear the hard part of identifying “books that you are ok lending out and never seeing again”.
• My shoulders unclenched at the end of this elegy for the internet.
• Relatedly, Molly White on the web still being, y’know, the web, for those that make it so.
• I love this idea of a paperless household (“Any paper that crosses the threshold is either scanned and filed (if important) or put in the bin.”), but, aside from the vendor lock-in pains described in Rach Smith’s experience with doing so in Evernote, I also do quake a bit about digitizing everything, from a privacy and security point of view.
• Wonder why semiconductor (microchip) manufacturing is so expensive, with tens of billions going into fabrication facilities? Because, my goodness, the fabrication process is mindnumbingly precise and infinitesimally small.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas