πŸ”– Read Curing Coronavirus Isn’t a Job for Social Scientists. (This article is from May 2020, which is probably why it has the word “curing” in the title when that seems like, you know, not a thing that is possible.)

πŸ”– Read Why does social science have such a hard job explaining itself?.

πŸ”– Read More contagious version of omicron spreads in U.S., fueling worries.

This. The lifting of mask mandates. The expansion of what counts as high-risk.

Sigh.

πŸ”– Not their first rodeo: How Black riders are reclaiming their place in cowboy culture

This is so cool and the pictures are phenomenal.

πŸ”– Read The Millions of People Stuck in Pandemic Limbo

…people are still dying, and immunocompromised people disproportionately so. Ignoring that sends an implicit message: Your lives don’t matter.

πŸ”– Read How to Reclaim Normal Life Without Being β€˜Done’.

I appreciate the acknowledgement here that inputs for risk calculation vary widely.

πŸ”– Read My Platonic Life Partnership Went Viral On TikTok, & People Have A Lot Of Questions

I’m a person who’s been squarely romantically committed for 23+ years but I am so happy this idea is out there for people that need it. It’s sort of like having a chosen sibling, I think - at least, it sounds like how I feel about my sister.

πŸ”– Read Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot​ | Against the Contemporary American Essay by Jackson Arn.

Timely, given my own musings on essays. There’s a lot of fun to be had in this anti-essay essay.

πŸ”– Read The Holes We Live With by Katie Rose Guest Pryal.

I think my hole is named in the Encanto song “Surface Pressure”:

I’m pretty surΠ΅ I’m worthless if I can’t be of servicΠ΅

πŸ”– Read Women of a Certain Age.

Great piece about how the Golden Age of TV creates space for roles beyond somebody’s mom, somebody’s wife, and harpyish crone. πŸ“ΊπŸΏ

πŸ”– Read A Counterintuitive Nighttime Routine For The Type A Insomniac.

I love this. I’m constantly trying to Type-A-away symptoms of chronic illness and it Does Not Work.

πŸ”– Read The Only Work Ethic I Care About is the One on Star Trek

Yes! When a 20th c guy ends up on the Enterprise and is all “What am I supposed to do if I don’t need to make money?” Picard is basically like, “Grow.” ❀️ πŸ––β€β€

πŸ”–Read What is β€œDark Academia,” and why is it trending on social media in 2022?

πŸ”– Read Julia Cameron Says You Can Get Creative Indoors.

πŸ”– Read The Homebound Symphony by @ayjay

I’m trying to be the Homebound Symphony. Just one person sitting in my study with a computer on my lap, reading and listening and viewing, and recording and sifting and transmitting – sharing the good, the true, and the beautiful, with added commentary.

This is what I would like to do, too.

πŸ”– I highly recommend Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up as a tool for managing daily living when things feel hard.

πŸ”– Read Tamsyn Muir Understood the Assignment: The Locked Tomb Series’ Expansive Exploration of Death and Grieving by Emma Leff πŸ“š

πŸ”– Read As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

This 1945 essay by Vannebar Bush is one of the first texts they had us read when I got my MS in Library Science.

Notes and highlights

A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it,

every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine

Whenever logical processes of thought are employedβ€”that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted grooveβ€”there is an opportunity for the machine.

There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Bush points out that indexing systems and rules do not duplicate the human mind - we must convert our own mental associations to a form we can use to search them - but that the human mind works by association. I extrapolate from this the idea of hypertext as a model of how the mind works. I’m going to keep an eye out for other instances of this idea.

if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

How many people use Evernote as a Memex?

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word.

This is tagging.

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

It me! This is kinda what people who operate as web librarians do. Web librarian isn’t my job title or description, but it’s just kind of who I am.

His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

This is one of my difficulties. I put a lot of stuff in my blog-as-memex but don’t have a good way of surfacing them again. Theoretically I could do this with categories, but that gets overwhelming fast. This is why I’m thinking about using a blog and a wiki together for this purpose.

He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good.

I fear this is so.

πŸ”– Read Why PhDs Need to Study Creative Writing.

Awesome piece with an excellent argument. I’ve been tacking this direction for a while and it’s nice to see more scholars talking about it.

πŸ”– Read We Are All Hostages to Anti-Semitism by Yair Rosenberg

Excellent piece about how anti-Semitism is not individual prejudice, but part of a vast, centuries-old conspiracy theory that undermines people’s faith in democracy.

πŸ”– Read Hypertext Gardens.

Efficient traversal provides the information readers think they want, but may hide information readers need.

I love the 1998ness of this essay. It’s given me a lot to think about, though it’ll be a while before I figure out how I’d like to apply these ideas.

πŸ”–Read What happens when we die.

Beautiful notes from Maria Popova on the novel Mr g.

πŸ”– Read The comedy of survival.

πŸ”– Read “I Feel Very Uncomfortable When People Call Me A Writer”.

Great conversation between Sara Fredman & Dr. Merve Emre. WRITE LIKE A MOTHER is a newsletter fave for me right now. Highly recommend.

πŸ”– Read Lost Time in COVID.

Overall, we have, of necessity, learned to value the quality of our time over the quantity of it, and to work with the rhythms of our energies.