Documenting Life

“American politics has changed. The Republicans felt it first. And the same way the Tea Party ate the GOP out from the inside, laying the groundwork for Trump and his MAGA rebrand, so too has what we once called The Dirtbag Left begun devouring the Democrats. The effects of the internet, a deeply alienating globalized economy, and the rise of a technofeudal billionaire class have finally cracked American Democrats wide open. We’re in a class war and it plays out on video feeds and those same billionaires own the algorithms that decide what side of it you end up on”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/we-did-it-zo

“But this is also the moment my engagement starts to tail off as a portion of the book’s… life in the world? Let’s say the book takes eight hours to read from cover to cover; if even one thousand readers finish it, that’s about four years of full time work, unless I fudged my math somewhere. I will, of course, read at readings, appear at appearances, and sign copies at signings, I will show up for my own work on social media, and most of all I will pledge myself to the keyboard as I write the next and final book in the Series. But so much of the book’s life now is out there, with you, rather than in here: it’s going out to be read, talked about, traded, borrowed from the library, left behind at youth hostels (that’s how I found my first Wild Cards book!), dog-eared and coffee-stained and in the world”

https://maxgladstone.substack.com/p/its-time-for-dead-hand-rule

“The hope for any book you write or publish is that it will be meaningful to people. Maybe not to everyone. Maybe not even to a lot of people. But you want some people to find it worth their while, whether it entertains them or elevates their perspectives or validate their feelings or expands their knowledge. You want it to somehow connect. It’s a pleasure to see it happen in real time”

https://shush.substack.com/p/occupying-john-street

“The same thing happened in the 2008 great financial crisis. There was the underlying economic activity — people building and buying houses — and then there was the financial gimmickry. It turned out that the finance gamesmanship far outpaced the actual economic behavior, and things got out of hand, and then the whole house of cards came crashing down”

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-ai-economy-is-full-of-financial

“The “imperial boomerang” is the concept that all of the methods of oppression that a mighty nation visits upon its far-flung imperial subjects will one day be turned back upon its own population. And here we are. This is a decades-long process, ratcheting up in earnest since the post-9/11 War on Terror, and any declaration of the moment when the boomerang’s sharp edge finally buried itself right in America’s skull is surely an arbitrary one. But last night will do as well as any”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/we-are-all-domestic-terrorists-now

“the actual decision was that there were two proximate causes of the student flats being blown up – the dropping of the bomb in 1942, and its explosion in 2021. Neither cause could have destroyed the flats without the other (if the bomb had exploded in 2021 in a museum in Dresden or whatever, it wouldn’t have triggered this insurance policy). And the rule for insurance cases is that when there are two causes, one of which is excluded and one which isn’t, the exclusion prevails”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/analysing-the-explosions

“Labour’s committees are a maze with no centre. They lead to no destination and are not intended to. They are intended to take the something-must-be-done activist spirit of its members and contain it, so that it can walk the hallways of this maze with a sense of purpose and without ever realising that it has undertaken a journey to nowhere. Having been safely sequestered where it can do no harm, the spirit can then be bottled and used as an energy source to power the party’s leafleting and door-knocking operation, getting the vote out on polling day”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/god-save-us-from-conference-season-627

“I just don’t think it’s possible to base your theory of growth on deregulation, cutting red tape and supporting builders over bureaucrats, while simultaneously championing workers’ rights and restricting immigration of construction workers. The single biggest interaction that most employers have with the state is through employment law (and its overlap with immigration law) – if you’re going to be regulatory about that, business is not going to thank you no matter how easy you make it to concrete over the newts and bats”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/pet-sounds-and-bagels