I’ve linked to the wonderful work of Bartosz Ciechanowski before, his delightful explainer about how cameras and lenses work. I love the physicality of Ciechanowki’s work, the way the widgets demand to be played with and spun around, and also the way the fully complement the subject.

He’s published a new one and it’s a doozy, all about mechanical watches. I’ll admit I’ve spent over an hour with this already and I’m not yet fully through it, though I certainly have a much better understanding about how the watch I wear nearly every day works.

The next explainer I’d love to see from Ciechanowski is how he builds these explainers.

For more mechanical watch nerdery, I highly recommend the Wristwatch Revival YouTube channel — it’s one of my favorite bits of ASMR

In my time as a Person on the Internet, I’ve had a few lodestars that have guided my way. Very few remain, especially from the old blogging days, as the world around us has shifted in ways that make this metaphor all but impossible, as people grow into themselves and away from what started as hobbies or distractions, as life simply and inevitably does what it does best.

Jason Kottke’s Home of Fine Hypertext Products has been an enormous influence on everyone who’s blogged, whether they realize it or not, whether they care to admit it or not. Kottke himself has been lauded for mastering the art, derided for, well, mastering the art, and has soldiered on through all of it. And now he’s taking a break, which is fantastic.

The internet is many, many things, among them an accelerant the likes of which we still haven’t quite reckoned with. It’s enabled jobs, entire economies, that were unthinkable half-a-generation ago, but we’re still in the process of sorting out what exactly that means and are grinding through all of the phases of economic development seemingly simultaneously. The hustle culture inherited from Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and finance enables a lot of this and it also churns actual humans through the gristmill at a faster pace than our culture is capable of really understanding. Burnout was a meme even before the pandemic eroded the facade of the world to reveal the chasms underneath it. We could all use a break and, if the opportunity presents itself, we should give ourselves permission to take it.

All of which is to say, I wish Jason the very best, I hope his time away is rejuvenating, and if he decides to get back at it, I will be excited to see his feed light up once more.

I’m probably just not as plugged as I perhaps once was, but it seems like we don’t get good writerly blogs any more. Maybe that’s more an extenstion of we just don’t get any good blogs anymore.

Someone dropped The Wrong Side of Write into the #writers-random channel at work and for some reason it just hit right. Possibly because it’s 100% correct on the Oxford Comma (you’ll need to search for “oxford comma” in the glossary)? I’m someone who loves a good style guide and have never shied from a healthy seasoning of swearing so this felt like catching up with an old friend, with the occasional sip of mezcal.

A little snooping on the various social channels shows this one is recently come back to life after a brief hiatus, which is entirely understandable and very relatable.

I’ve often noted that if social media companies wanted to solve any number of the problems they’d created for themselves, they could do worse than just recreate most of the feature set of Flickr circa 2005.

Twitter just launched a preview of Circles, finally bringing a feature that’s been sorely needed for at least a decade, which allow you to tweet to just a subset of followers (cleverly those subsets max out at Dunbar’s 150 people). People have mostly solved this with private alt accounts or by simply abandoning the platform for Discord or group chats.

Why Twitter never did more with the lists feature they basically abandoned after launch and has only really been embraced by third party clients will remain a mystery.

I have these distinct memories of moments that have crystallized into what I consider a political worldview. Walking across campus in the late fall of 2000, months away from being a college graduate, incensed that the Supreme Court decided the first presidential election I voted in. The passage of the Patriot Act. The Iraq War, which streamed at me nearly every waking moment in the newsrooms where I worked at the time. The midterms where Bush became one of the few post-war presidents whose party gained seats in congress, due in no small part to the political maneuvering of the war and exploitation of people’s lingering fears. The horrorific response to Hurricane Katrina, where I spent weeks reporting on the ground in the aftermath. The election of the first Black president as a seeming repudiation of what felt like the overwhelming corruption of government I’d known for my entire life and then the revaunchist reactionism and Mitch McConnell’s gleeful arsonry that followed.

Through all of that, and moving from a naïve libertarian to unapologetic progressive, I still believed in the core strengths of the foundational institutions. I’ve spent much of my career as a journalist and still hold on to the idea of a fourth estate as a vital, if deeply flawed, institution. At my core I want to believe the same of all of the various machines we’ve created to govern ourselves, and recognize that being man made they are inherently flawed.

Alex Parene has been writing about how our institutions have failed us for years — his piece on the dysfunction of the senate from 2010 felt anarchaic at the time with a parenthetical suggestion of abolishing the upper house of Congress, which has since become a basic assumption among the American left.

Now that five Supreme Court justices, four of whom were appointed by illegitimate presidents, have apparently decided to begin their assault on a century of American progress, Parene once again reminds us that the institutions as they exist are the problem:

One of the more consequential contradictions of the Democratic Party is that the vast majority of its staffers, consultants, electeds, and media avatars, along with a substantial portion of its electoral base, are institutionalists. They believe, broadly, in The System. The System worked for them, and if The System’s outputs are bad, it is because we need more of the right sort of people to join or be elected to enter The System. But when the party does manage to win majorities, it depends on support from a substantial number of anti-system people. Barack Obama defeated the Clintons with this sacred knowledge, before he started reading David Brooks.

Institutionalists, in my experience, have trouble reaching an anti-system person, because they think being against The System is an inherently adolescent and silly mindset. But believing in things like “the integrity of the Supreme Court” has proven to be, I think, much sillier, and much more childish.

It’s absolutely true that our political institutions are failing because of decades of willful bad faith and obstruction entirely from the Republican Party. Only the savviest of take-havers will even bother to refute this basic fact of contemporary American life. As Parene has been pointing out for years, they are only able to succeed because this is how the institutions are designed and if we want to live up to the goals we strived for when we built those supposed edifices, we might need to tear them down.

The news that Peter Thiel-funded and Trump-endorsed JD Vance won the Republican primary for Senate in Ohio invited me to revisit one of my favorite denunciations of his terrible memoir.

My friend Martin McClellan, writing in The Seattle Review of Books:

There are two kinds of poor people, JD Vance informs us. The first is the righteous poor — people who killed the cow to tan the leather to cobble the boots to add the straps by which to pull themselves up. His grandparents, for example. They were imperfect, but struggled, and their sense of self-reliance and gumption redeemed their (wholly excusable) lesser points. Namely, that they were “scary hillbillies” whose lineage traced back to the infamous Hatfields.

The other is type of poor person is the good-for-nothing, welfare-abusing, no-direction, lazy ungrateful poor. They don’t pull themselves up, they lie about their income to buy cellphones with welfare dollars, and hustle penny-stakes by reselling those illicit items not covered by the moral authority of food stamps. They’d rather hustle than work. They watch big TVs and isolate themselves from good Americans of good standing who, by nature of their ethical centers, only want to rise.

Here are your two poor Americas. Now, reader of Hillbilly Elegy, which do you have empathy for?

It was so obvious from the moment Vance sleazed on the scene that the story he spun was an artless grift, that his book wasn’t so much a decoding of forgotten America but a justification for Trumpian white grievance. And then Ron Howard made a movie out of that schlock because so-called liberals need to believe themselves to be better angels.

Vance, who has only leaned further into the culture wars and embraced the demagogue he once rightly called an “idiot” before obsequiously begging for his endorsement, will likely become a U.S. Senator because it was more important to pretend he had something to say than to defend against what he truly believes.

I’ve written a lot about Twitter, mostly on Twitter, but aside from a few quips have mostly stayed away from the latest drama, in large part from sheer exhaustion. I’m tired of the way the last epoch of tech has turned out and tired of the way the next epoch is insisting on refusing to learn anything from the obvious failures of the last.

My friend Mike Davidson does a better job of navigating these rough waters than I do and has written an incisive post on what worries him about the coming change in ownership. Much like Mike, I find Musk grating and in many ways a personification of so much that’s wrong with the state of the world — from gross inequality to toxic fandom to cavalier boorishness — while even I have to admit the guy really did pull the entire global automotive industry into the future by at least half a decade.

Here’s Mike on the biggest issue with Musk at the helm:

The word I keep coming back to with all of this stuff is “callous”. There is a callousness to Elon Musk that shows up in almost everything he does. The strange part is, his fans seem to actually love this callousness, while his detractors hate it.

…

The thing is though, if there is ONE quality Twitter — the company and the service — does not need more of it’s callousness.

Over the years I’ve had plenty of friendly debates with Mike about Twitter, where he led design for several years, and the tech industry broadly. We agree to disagree on much of it, he’s spot on here, though — the very last thing Twitter needs is to be controlled by someone as plainly disinterested in the vagaries of humanity as Elon Musk.

Max Fisher, writing in September 2021 when the Supreme Court first upheld Texas’s restrictive abortion ban that seems likely to now overturn Roe v. Wade, notes that curtailed women’s rights tends to be a feature of less democratic societies:

Curbs on women’s rights tend to accelerate in backsliding democracies, a category that includes the United States, according to virtually every independent metric and watchdog.

In more degraded democracies, the effect is more extreme. Around the globe, the rise of right-wing populism has been followed by extraordinary reductions in women’s rights, according to a 2019 report by Freedom House.

Strongmen often curb civil society as a whole, of which women’s groups tend to be leading members. And they rise on appeals to nationalism, with its calls for rigid social hierarchies and mores.

Politico has published what appears to be a draft opinion written by Justice Alito and supported by the current court’s four other most conservative justices that overturns Roe v. Wade.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

The era of “shocked, but not surprised” continues. The end of abortion rights in the United States was basically decided once RBG passed away while Trump was president, but it’s no less horrific to see such an about-face. I fully expected this illegitimate and grossly out-of-step court to restrict abortion without actually overturning Roe, it’s truly shocking to see just how far they appear to have gone.

The implications of the apparent ruling will dominate the news for the foreseeable future and inevitably devolve into handwringing about the draft leak or the politics of it all. Meanwhile actual people will continue to suffer and half the nation will be consigned to a lower status.

Late last year, Dahlia Lithwick detailed why 2022 will not be like 1972:

We are not in fact moving “backward” to life before Roe. We are more likely moving sideways into a fundamentalist religious regime in which life pre-Roe will come to look like a vastly less terrifying option than a world in which women are subject to revanchist religious claims—claims with no support whatsoever in the Constitution—about the lives they may carry, the unknown crimes they may commit, and the choices they are no longer permitted to make.

Tiny electric cars are all the rage in China, where they can be put together cheaply with off-the-shelf parts and sold in gray markets without any of the bells or whistles — or safety features — you’d expect in other parts of the world. I find these a fascinating antipode to the ever increasing size end expense of American cars and long for something of a median, something like the Honda E after which I will pine seemingly forever.

Wired got their hands on a Wuling Mini EV and it makes for interesting urban transit, with a short range, low top speed, and assortment of colors made in collaboration with Pantone. I can see these $5,000 barely-cars mariokarting through crowded Chinese, Japanese, or European streets much more easily than even the most urban American cities, which is much more an indictment of American urbanism than these little cars.