The purpose of art is to delight us; certain men and women (no smarter than you or I) whose art can delight us have been given dispensation from going out and fetching water and carrying wood. It's no more elaborate than that. — David Mamet

By J. Kaiser. Tools for Thought in 1908. Via Chris Aldrich. Here’s a paper from a doctoral dissertation on the work of the author, Julius Otto Kaiser.

There’s going to be a total solar eclipse visible in New England on April 8. Here’s what you need for planning.

Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo:

Think of scale as a mix of morphine and trust fund. It let’s you ignore quite a bit.

Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo:

Think of scale as a mix of morphine and trust fund. It let’s you ignore quite a bit.

by Mary Norris

Oh, this was fun! Mary Norris was the longtime comma queen of The New Yorker, the person responsible for ensuring that you and I agree and that people from Manchester can be Mancusians if they (and the writer) like. The English language is full of odd nooks and crannies, and Norris explores them with wit and humor.

by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

After the Second World War, American foundations worked with the CIA to rebuild the intellectual world of Western Europe. Code explores the intersections between big ideas and big money; structuralism, in particular, received crucial boosts from American grants, and returned the favor by favoring a technocratic, rather than strictly social, solution to France’s postwar crisis. Geoghegan tends to posit that all robber barons were alike and that the foundations that lived after them are mere extensions of their interests, and so we learn little about the foundations and even less about the CIA programs they supported. The impact in France was crucial, and this volume documents that impact with precision and finesse.

Mar 24 10 2024

Boeuf Bourg

In the process of picking up the roast beef, I was tempted — tempted — to grab some prime short ribs. Would I like them cut to 1.5 inches or 2 inches? 2 inches, of course. They made a lovely boeuf bourguignon. Honey in the braising liquid was a real boost. So was the light beef stock I made a couple of weeks ago!

I watched Les Saveurs du Palais for French practice while the meat was braising, so I did sear the mushrooms and exchange the braising vegetables with additional onions, carrots and celery.

Keza MacDonald in The Guardian says the industry must stand up to right-wing trolls. (The industry will not stand up to right-wing trolls.)

This week, a 16-person narrative design studio has found itself at the centre of a conspiracy theory that holds it responsible for the insidious prevalence of “wokery” in modern video games. A group with more than 200,000 followers on PC games storefront Steam, as well as thousands in a Discord chat channel, believes that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to “woke” ideology.

Early in the week, a few of us were discussing getting together for a visit and a game. We needed a dinner plan. Pizza? Sushi? I suggested roast beef.

Roast Beef

This was pretty easy. After the beef (Savenor’s) had warmed up with plenty of salt, pepper and coriander, I seared the it on the Weber grill. I gave it about ten minutes more of smoke on the cool part of the grill, then into a 250° oven for a couple of hours. (Thanks, Ruhlman!) It was delicious with Yorkshire pudding and salad.

Sure, it’s an expensive cut. But it’s not hard to spend as much on takeout, and it sure was a treat.

Mar 24 7 2024

Girl At War

by Sara Novic

A fine debut novel by the author of True Biz. Ana Jurić of Zagreb was ten when she discovered she was Croatian, or rather that the cigarettes her uncle sent he down the street to buy for him are Croatian cigarettes, and that this provokes ridicule from the Serbian shopkeeper. That was the beginning of Ana’s war. Ten years later, she sneaks away from her Columbia University roommates to testify about her years as a child soldier. Sara Novic does a terrific job of showing the line between these two girls.

Mar 24 6 2024

Badges

In Tinderbox, a badge is a small icon that you can display in the corner of a note. Tinderbox offers a collection of built-in badges, and you can easily add your own. Each badge has a name; to use a badge, you set the value of $Badge to the name of the image you want. There's a nice browser that lets you select the badge you want.

Badges

At a recent Tinderbox meetup, I noticed a speaker fumbling to find the badge he wanted: he knew he was looking for (say) the telephone badge, but where exactly is it? I made a note to myself, “Add a search field to the badge picker!”

I’m playing today with a new kind of fuzzy search. First, we look for badges that match the string you type, and badges that contain the string you typed. For this, we use “localized standard case-insensitive” comparison, so “Phone” matches “phone” and “Hueckel” matches “Hückel”. That gets a lot of what we need. But what if you aren’t sure about the name? Is the badge named “airplane” or a “jet” or “travel”?

So, experimentally, we take a word embedding for English (for now), feed it your search string, and ask for the ten words nearest to your search. We search those words as well. This works pleasantly because it’s easy to choose the image you want from a short list of related images. Occasionally, you might find a better match than the one you originally intended.

How to start a zettelkasten, from Writing Slowly. (For what it’s worth, I think that the word zettelkasten is plural, and I think it is should not be capitalized in English.)


NB: What it was worth was, not much: zettelkasten is singular, the plural is zettelkaesten. Ouch. I still think it ought not to be capitalized in English unless it’s part of a quotation.

by J. B. Priestly

Anne Louise Avery wrote:

Quinquagesima Sunday, 1934. It was a gentle, warm afternoon of pale blue skies with wool-torn clouds & a lovely breeze from the West. In the drawing room, Pine Marten was sketching a vase of catkins, Babcia and Wolf were writing letters, and Old Fox was reading his book. It was a proof copy by a friend of his from London, a Bradford man whom they all liked very much. It was a story of a journey through modern England, from Southampton to Newcastle, a book of great humanity and compassion.

Old Fox is not wrong. That book was this book. English Journey describes J. B. Priestly’s trek from Southampton to Durham and back to London in 1932. He has no time for Merry Olde England, but he has a knack for striking up conversation with interesting people, and finds that he has sympathy for nearly all of them. He likes castles and cathedrals as well as the next fellow, but heartily dislikes dirty, disused industrial sites.

And the right course of conduct, I reflected, was not, unless you happen to be a professional custodian, to go and brood and dream over these almost heart-breaking pieces of natural or architectural loveliness, doing it all at the expense of a lot of poor devils toiling in the muck, but to have an occasional peep at them, thus to steel your determination that sooner or later the rest of English life, even where the muck is now, shall have as good a quality as those things.

Jane Friedman.

The book proposal persuades agents/editors that readers will pay for the benefit that your book provides, rather than learning from YouTube, Google, or even a competing book. While everyone expects the writing to be solid, they’re probably not expecting a literary masterpiece. To learn how to lose weight, readers don’t need a poet; they need a clear communicator who can deliver her ideas and methods in a way that will help and inspire readers to achieve their goals. Plus those ideas and methods ought to feel fresh and exciting, and not like last year’s 100 weight-loss books on the market. (Even better: the book shows how the most recent books really missed something critical that readers must know to succeed.)

LH units are cool. By Andy Bell.

Historically, I’ve used em, ch and ex units to size icons in contexts like buttons so font sizes icon sizes are nice and synced. Using ex units is especially useful because 1ex is the height of the x character in the chosen font and size.

The lh unit is even more useful though because it is relative to the computed line height. This makes sizing icons relatively and aligning them relatively, much easier.

Good browser support, too.

Mar 24 1 2024

Refrigerators

Dennis Yi Tenen concludes Literary Theory For Robots by saying that “There’s no point in lecturing a ’smart’ refrigerator about ethics.”

The refrigerator might have interesting opinions. You might have interesting opinions. Why not talk?

Guest speakers at recent Tinderbox Meetups have been great! Catch up with the videos.

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A Book Apart will no longer publish new books. Bad news.

Since opening our doors in 2010, we’ve navigated considerable change—from rising production costs, to fluctuating fulfillment needs, to evolving operational strategies. Largely, experiencing such change has inspired us to shift, flex, and transform. More recently, it is testing the sustainability of our business, and after careful consideration we will no longer be publishing new titles.

Tiago Forte: looking back on Building A Second Brain (amazon link)

The main outcome that hasn’t happened much at all, though it does not appear in the list above, is business growth. I think I just assumed that selling tens of thousands of copies would somehow automatically lead to growth in the sales of our courses, but if anything, sales have declined.

It’s hard to untangle that deceleration from the broader slowdown in online education post-COVID, but I’d say that there’s some anecdotal evidence that the book has cannibalized sales of our course.

Feb 24 29 2024

Ilium

by Lea Carpenter

The 21-year-old British narrator falls in love with a wealthy American entrepreneur. Shortly after their wedding, Marcus tells her that he’s dying. “And that’s not all....” A superb launch point for a very fine, realistic thriller. (Reviews: NY Times ❧ Washington Post)

Feb 24 28 2024

Top Chef Stats

I’ve never been that wild about Top Chef — it’s fun now and then — but this site is a heart-warming return to the Web of old.

Top Chef Stats