This recent story about a 65,000+ page diary of a now-deceased publisher/printer/professor named Claude Fredericks, goes some unexpected directions.

This is one of my favorite passages... about the author's feelings after reading many parts of the journals:

This experience generated a profound dissonance. For all the effort that Fredericks put into completing his journal project—and promoting it to others—an essential element is missing: he was not a good writer. He did not instinctively make judicious choices on the page, whether recounting a dramatic episode or offering a lengthy evocation of the pleasures of gardening in Vermont at the height of summer. His prose rarely displays the ingrained sense of control that true writers have even when jotting off a postcard.

At the end, the author ultimately deremines that, after devoting several years of his life to the reading of the journals... that he "sometimes wonder[s] if it would have been better had the vaults never been open."

Either way - this article is worth opening.

The Most Ambitious Diary in History by Benjamin Anastas in The New Yorker.

This is my favorite thing on the internet right now. Each week, the folks at The Pudding try a get a computer to win the New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest.

Here’s this week’s attempt:

You can sign up for their email newsletter to help train the algorithm at their website.  

I liked this short story by Keith Ridgway in The New Yorker. It's about about an older woman whose young neighbors are having a party has so many good lines in it.

Here's an excerpt:

He was pulling some sort of, what on earth, headphones? Big black things, with the big fat pads for the ears.

—Headphones here, for this, which is this old

A small . . . a phone?

—An iPod. My old iPod. And I don’t know what you like obviously, or even if this is a stupid idea, you might not want to listen to anything at all, but there’s playlists on there, some easy-listening things, some pop stuff, and some classical as well, you can, will I show you what, will I show you how this works?

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See also: other things to which I've linked.

Fun article about Sudowrite, which is a "deep-learning neural network that can auto-generate text."

Sudowrite works like this. You give it a sample of some writing — a research paper, a poem, a blog post — and it creates a whole lot more convincingly human prose based on the sample.

More from Stephen Marche, in the New Yorker:

GPT-3 hints at a world in which machines can generate language. The consequences are vertiginous. To spend ten minutes with Sudowrite is to recognize that the undergraduate essay, the basic pedagogical mode of all humanities, will soon be under severe pressure. Take an A paper, change a few words in the first paragraph, push buttons three times, and you have an essay that fits the assignment. Whatever field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed. The changes that are coming are fundamental to every method of speaking and writing that presently exists.

The article includes lots of examples of Sudowrite trying to write like famous authors like Kafka and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

See also: this episode of podcast All Consuming about writing tools, which is where I first heard of Sudowrite.

See also also: other posts about links and podcasts on this blog.

My bi-weekly shipments of coffee from Lancaster PA's Passenger usually come in a plain cardboard box. You know, the brown kind that you can fold up and put in the recycling bin.

But my most recent shipment came in an oddly sturdy black box that was made of this corrugated plastic-y cardboard material. (OK, I just did some research, and found that the material is corrugated polypropylene sheets.)
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Once open, the box introduced itself as Boox, a reusable box company. If I sent back the box to Boox, they'd reuse the box and I'd get a discount code from Passenger.

I like trying new things so I took them up on it. I flattened the box and slapped the prepaid shipping label on the front. Then I went to the blue USPS drop box near my apartment and crammed it in past the little steel anti-theft teeth they started putting in those blue boxes recently. It barely made it in, so who knows if I damaged it beyond reusable-ness. Hopefully it's on its way to California.

Which brings me to the true sustainability of this. On the Boox site, they say:

Boox reduces your environmental impact by 75% compared to single-use packaging. It's science, people!  👩🔬

Consumers (esp. Millennials) are choosing brands based on environmental impact. Boox helps your brand meet its goals and stand out from the crowd.

Which sure, but I can't tell if this take into account the environmental impact of me shipping the box back to them from Brooklyn to California. Maybe that's not a big environmental hit, but it seems kind of silly to be sending a fairly small box all that way.

See also:

• This interview with Boox founder
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• Article in the wapo about this
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• Other posts about coffee on this blog.

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Image taken from their site.

link one

Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others? {new yorker}

"The usual trend of death from infectious diseases—malaria, typhoid, diphtheria, H.I.V.—follows a dismal pattern. Lower-income countries are hardest hit, with high-income countries the least affected. But if you look at the pattern of covid-19 deaths reported per capita—deaths, not infections—Belgium, Italy, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom are among the worst off.

"The reported death rate in India, which has 1.3 billion people and a rickety, ad-hoc public-health infrastructure, is roughly a tenth of what it is in the United States. In Nigeria, with a population of some two hundred million, the reported death rate is less than a hundredth of the U.S. rate. Rich countries, with sophisticated health-care systems, seem to have suffered the worst ravages of the infection. Death rates in poorer countries—particularly in South Asia and large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa—appear curiously low. (South Africa, which accounts for most of sub-Saharan Africa’s reported covid-19 deaths, is an important exception.)"

link two

Who cares about the Ivy League? {noah smith}

"But on a more fundamental level, how much does any of this really matter? How central are the Ivies and other elite private schools to our educational system in the U.S.? And how much would it change our country if they changed their admissions policies?

"My answer: Not very."

Semi-famous Brooklyn-based ice cream brand Ample Hills went from $19 million in total investments and 17 stores (including one in Disney World) — to bankruptcy in just a few years.

It's mostly a story about bad management. But it's also a story about how the allure of an ice cream factory is so strong you forget to keep track of how much stuff costs?

A former employee says...

Ample Hills began a pattern of aggressively opening new shops while the old ones languished [in 2014]. As freezers broke or fuses blew “we would have to throw away massive amounts of ice cream."

"They were all very simple things that could have been fixed or addressed. But they would say, ‘Oh, we just opened Chelsea so we have to put money into that shop.’” According to employees, the shops almost always were over budget and failed to meet ambitious targets. Smith doesn’t dispute that they prioritized expansion. “If something is working but just not working as well as it could, and your focus is on growth, then yeah, you’re going to make some of those mistakes,” he says.

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Full story here.

It's called Same Energy.

You can find stuff by just clicking images you like, and it gives you ones that are similar. Or you can upload an image or search by word.

Here's what came up when i searched bicycle:

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and here's what comes up when you click the pic of the kids in the pail:

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here's what comes up when you search yellow:

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and i guess a bunch memes come up when you search coffee:

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ok one more, here's what comes up when you search for my hummel avatar:

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found via marty who made the very good poolside.fm thanks marty

Sort of..

In France, a complaint is an appropriate – and frequent – conversation starter. One could begin talking about a restaurant by focusing on the poor service during an otherwise great meal, or highlight the fact that the east-facing windows in your new flat mean you now have to buy curtains. But while, as Julie Barlow, Canadian journalist and co-author of The Bonjour Effect, explained, “To Americans, saying something negative sounds like you’re closing the conversation”, in France, such comments are perceived as “a way to invite other people’s opinions”. North Americans, she said, are not as comfortable with confrontation – or with criticism – as the French are. Râler, then, “comes across as something that’s more intelligent than being too starry-eyed and optimistic about things”.

I’m definitely down for this.

From this bbc article. I can’t quite remember how or why I came across it.

Someone linked to this article in the Smithsonian (I forget who sorry) from 2008 and it's so great. It's a hypothesis about why there is a (mostly) inaccurate stereotype about how New Yorkers are rude. If you think New Yorkers are rude, you haven't spent enough time (say, >10 minutes) in Philly.

Author Joan Acocella thinks New Yorkers get a bad rap "because they make less separation between private and public life."

That is, they act on the street as they do in private. In the United States today, public behavior is ruled by a kind of compulsory cheer that people probably picked up from television and advertising and that coats their transactions in a smooth, shiny glaze, making them seem empty-headed. New Yorkers have not yet gotten the knack of this. That may be because so many of them grew up outside the United States, and also because they live so much of their lives in public, eating their lunches in parks, riding to work in subways. It's hard to keep up the smiley face for that many hours a day.

Even if you have no interest in this "debate" you should read the article for the dramatic story that unfolds in a post office, when the USPS clerk insists a man buy a big roll of bubble wrap after he's already paid $2.79 for the box. It's a very New York story.

Read the article here.

Image above taken from Apple Maps