Feeling seen mollymielke.com

The little things you do for others that remind you both of who you are, matter. They’re what define the thread count of the human experience. It’s micro gestures like small smiles, arm squeezes, and “hey you”s that root us in our sense of self without committing to the relationship’s definition beyond momentary shared space.

The Weakness of the Despot newyorker.com

The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had NATO not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.

Pensieri sulla fine di un’epoca iregrazzz.medium.com

Questa crisi era però nascosta allora da un trionfo innegabile quanto illusorio, e dalle facili denunce di un pensiero unico e di un’ideologia della “fine della storia” di cui in realtà partecipavano quasi tutti. Lo testimoniavano il fatto che l’idea prevalente (nella nostra Costituzione come nei documenti della costruzione europea o in molti testi statunitensi) era quella del “miglioramento continuo”; il continuo, cieco riferimento a diritti in perenne ampliamento e per sempre acquisiti; alla pace perpetua; o a una fratellanza universale che solo la malvagità di alcuni impedisce di raggiungere. Le reazioni di tanti giovani amici e tanti allievi che mi ripetono “ma come”, “non ce lo saremmo mai aspettato”, “è impossibile” mi hanno più volte ultimamente confermato la forza di questa “buonismo ingenuo”, il cui vero limite sta nella incapacità di vedere oltre che di ascoltare la realtà, e in specie il Male, che esiste.

How Russians think, and why they do what they do caterina.net

Narodnost means submission, sacrifice and passivity: the Tsar cannot make mistakes. He is Just. Around him are Princes who will rise to become Tsar one day. But when mistakes are made they are made by a class of people under the Princes in the hierarchy, the Boyars. The Boyars are the ones who make mistakes and are blamed. These are those supperrich oligarchs and governors in league with Putin who frequently go missing, have boating accidents, or hang themselves in their garages. [...] It is important to note core Russian beliefs that Democracy is equal to Chaos, and Autocracy is superior to Chaos and Mayhem. Russia has consistently been under authoritarian rule since the Mongols.

Europe’s 9/11 puck.news

Putin has spent the last two decades showing us how manly he was—shirtless on horseback, working out in this home gym, shooting whales with a crossbow. But now that he has started a war, he has not left the Kremin. He meets with the ministers carrying out his orders in giant rooms, across comically long tables. He is scared of them, scared of Covid, scared of a palace coup. He has barely deigned to address his people. He has yet to visit the field of battle. The nice Jewish boy, however, is there, in a flak jacket and helmet. He’s in the trenches, having tea and sausage with his soldiers; he is in the streets, addressing his people every day, sometimes several times a day, always wearing the same military green. He has not run or hidden, despite the assassination squad sent to kill him. He has not sent his family away. He is making fierce demands of the West and the West is listening. He, not the K.G.B. judo master, has become the hero of this war, the manliest of men, the revenge of every good Soviet Jewish boy who was once told by that tough Russian street kid that he was weak.

Three Types of General Thinkers overcomingbias.com

Ours is an era of rising ideological fervor, moving toward something like the Chinese cultural revolution, with elements of both religious revival and witch hunt repression. While good things may come of this, we risk exaggeration races, wherein people try to outdo themselves to show loyalty via ever more extreme and implausible claims, policies, and witch indicators. One robust check on such exaggeration races could be a healthy community of intellectual generalists. Smart thoughtful people who are widely respected on many topics, who can clearly see the exaggerations, see that others of their calibre also see them, and who crave such associates’ respect enough to then call out those exaggerations. Like the child who said the emperor wore no clothes.

Onfim en.wikipedia.org

Onfim was a boy who lived in Novgorod (present-day Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark.

Strangers on a train wittgenstein.it

Ognuno dei coinvolti era mosso dall’affermazione di sé, dall’intolleranza delle rispettive umiliazioni e frustrazioni, dall’insofferenza per alcuni dei presenti, dall’indisponibilità ad “accettare lezioni“, e ricondurre il modo in cui si stava comportando e le cose che stava dicendo al loro senso originario avrebbe avuto probabilmente bisogno di qualche secondo di elaborazione.

It is obscene chimamanda.com

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class. People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’ People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

All This Time ftrain.substack.com

One of my rules in life is that every person added to a group subtracts two percent from the collective intelligence of that group. A group of ten is operating at 80 percent capability; a group of twenty is only 60 percent smart.

DreamBank dreambank.net

Welcome to The DreamBank, a collection of over 20,000 dream reports

Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State newyorker.com

Scholarly estimates of the size of Xinjiang’s internment drive fall in the neighborhood of a million extrajudicially detained people, a figure disputed by the Chinese government. An internal report by Xinjiang’s agriculture department, taken at the height of the internment drive, lamented that “all that’s left in the homes are the elderly, weak women, and children.” It is likely the largest internment of ethnic and religious minorities since the Second World War. After leaving the camps, some detainees are forcibly transferred to farms and factories, or kept under house arrest. [...] More than a million civil servants have been placed into the homes of minority families in Xinjiang in order to “Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Bring Together the Hearts of the People,” according to one government slogan. The cadres are Party members, usually ethnic Han, sent to monitor and assess Turkic and Muslim families, instructing them in political ideology and Han cultural norms. Muslim men and women are pressured to drink and smoke.

The American Abyss nytimes.com

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true. [...] America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good.

How Billionaires See Themselves currentaffairs.org

Much of the behavior we see from billionaires comes from what I’ve come to call “the bifurcated philosophy of accumulation and distribution.” Or, less obnoxiously: it’s okay to be a sociopath when you’re getting the stuff so long as you’re a saint after you’ve got it. The idea is that the world of business is dog-eat-dog and you can be as Machiavellian as you like and don’t need to think about the consequences for anybody’s lives. But then you have to do philanthropy afterwards, because greed is bad. [...] Their justifications for their success crumble when touched. It’s interesting that the ruling class, with all of its resources, cannot mount any kind of persuasive defense of its own position. But to anyone who is secretly insecure, and wonders whether perhaps the people at the top are smarter and better and more hardworking, you will be reassured to know that they are not. You don’t have to take my word for it. It’s right there in their books.

Classic Cafes classiccafes.co.uk

Often dismissed as 'greasy spoons', Classic Cafes are actually little gems of British vernacular high street design. This site celebrates their ambience and architecture with over 130 vintage London Formica caffs (and many others around Britain) reviewed, revealed & reappraised. But as Time Out Restaurant Guide noted, the site isn't simply: "a set of recommendations... it's a whole aesthetic!"; an immersive re-exploration of a cultural phenomenon that is fading all too fast.

What Happened? kieranhealy.org

They thought things would go as protests outside the Capitol usually go, and as their rallies usually go. The crowd would serve as a loud prop. The really dangerous people would be diluted by the rank and file and kept out by the Capitol Police in any case. There would be a great deal of immediate drama and a great deal immediately at stake. Trump loves his crowd, but he has no tolerance at all for the individuals who make it up. As soon as they got inside the building and resolved once more into identifiable individuals, Trump was reportedly and unsurprisingly grossed out by all the “low class” stuff he was seeing. What he envisioned, I think, was a mass of adoring supporters at the very gates of the Capitol, expressing their love and loyalty for him, and together, they would make Congress capitulate to their will.

Why Life Does Not Really Exist blogs.scientificamerican.com

Recently, however, I had an epiphany that has forced me to rethink why I love living things so much and reexamine what life is, really. For as long as people have studied life they have struggled to define it. Even today, scientists have no satisfactory or universally accepted definition of life. While pondering this problem, I remembered my brother’s devotion to K’Nex roller coasters and my curiosity about the family cat. Why do we think of the former as inanimate and the latter as alive? In the end, aren’t they both machines? Granted, a cat is an incredibly complex machine capable of amazing behaviors that a K’Nex set could probably never mimic. But on the most fundamental level, what is the difference between an inanimate machine and a living one? Do people, cats, plants and other creatures belong in one category and K’Nex, computers, stars and rocks in another? My conclusion: No. In fact, I decided, life does not actually exist. [...] Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.

What If You Could Do It All Over? newyorker.com

Their mere presence in our minds may reveal something about how we live: “Unled lives are a largely modern preoccupation,” Miller writes. It used to be that, for the most part, people lived the life their parents had, or the one that the fates decreed. Today, we try to chart our own courses. The difference is reflected in the stories we tell ourselves. In the Iliad, Achilles chooses between two clearly defined fates, designed by the gods and foretold in advance: he can either fight and die at Troy or live a long, boring life. (In the end, he chooses to fight.) But the world in which we live isn’t so neatly organized. Achilles didn’t have to wonder if he should have been pre-med or pre-law; we make such decisions knowing that they might shape our lives.

The Cube Rule cuberule.com

Identify any food purely by the location of structural starch.

To determine if a hot dog is a sandwich, you must first define your boundary conditions twitter.com

Importantly, though, these taxonomies are all useful in different places. Most people, remember, will use the Pornographic Razor. If they ask you for a sandwich, and you give them vanilla pudding between two tortilla chips, you are a madman.

Rats love driving tiny cars, even when they don’t get treats arstechnica.com

Explaining the idea of a steering wheel and pedals to rats was probably too difficult, so the controls were three copper wires stretched across an opening cut out of the front of the bodywork and an aluminum plate on the floor.

Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway lithub.com

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?