Wesley Yang's story
(clearing out old posts, this one is from three years ago ...) I'm enjoying Wesley Yang's Substack these days -- it's well-written, comprehensive, and inspiring. How did this come about?…
People
27 posts
Writing with constraints
This might be an extreme example of a maxim. I was dimly aware of a novel written without the letter “E”. Recently saw a mention of it and looked it up. "Gadsby" is a novel written by Erne…
Social Network Scores
The shape of things to come: (As seen in the Economist, April 13th edition)…
The many Nostalgias of Harry Potter
(an old draft!) I first read the Harry Potter books when I was a teenager. I revisited them when my daughter read them recently. There are, as I realized, several layers of nostalgia within them.…
Shiro Protagonist
I thought this was a cool combination of skills. This is Shiro, the author of Gauche Scheme, a Scheme implementation you may not have heard of (and if you're unfamiliar with Scheme itself, some o…
Gotta go by the bridge ...
I found something amusing about this pic I can't put into words. Think of it as a little party game of "who do you think this is?" (afaik this is from the 80s, and he was in his early…
On heros becoming villains
It has been surreal to watch several of my early heroes become "villains" Matt Taibbi: got turned on to him after insightful reporting after 2009 (remember Goldman Sachs as giant squid) --…
On cleaning up after yourself
Grabbing my popcorn and cheering them on…
Realizations after watching a play
(a draft originally written July 2023) Watched a performance of Matilda this weekend. This was such an old-school experience. We were told turn off all phones, not take any photographs or record an…
Trumpian nationalism
(From todays Wall Street Journal) When I saw this headline, I was expecting to see a bunch of horrible stuff, but gotta admit at least some of this stuff is going to be popular with people. Gotta le…
Fraying
The UN and associated bodies are nearing an end of an era…