Documenting Life

“A version of this dynamic may explain why we can’t deal with our biggest problems. Hamlet, famously, vows revenge on his uncle, Claudius, for the murder of his father—but then he dithers, delays, and generally goes crazy, only killing Claudius at the very end of Shakespeare’s longest play. Literary scholars have written essay after essay remarking on Hamlet’s delay, and he has been widely understood as a flawed person, too melancholy and intellectual to do what he’s decided to do. Yet, arguably, this is a bizarre view. Yes, in a narrow sense, Hamlet has concluded that he needs to kill his uncle—but in a broader, “all things considered” sense he’s reluctant to become a killer himself. This is an entirely sane way of behaving; it’s how we ourselves would hope to behave. It’s only within the confines of a revenge thriller that Hamlet’s actions seem odd”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/why-cant-you-just-deal-with-it

“What happens when norms break down? When individualism gradually erodes the ties that bind us? What happens when thousands of people collectively cross the line? Nothing, of course. The line simply moves. The crowd, emboldened and empowered, sizes up its next meal. At the temple of mass consumerism, the customer is always right. And in this respect darts is something of a canary in the mineshaft: a salutary and perhaps cautionary tale of what can happen when a sport indulges its audience to the point where it can essentially behave how it pleases”

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/may/06/untameable-darts-crowds-tell-us-about-the-future-of-sport-and-maybe-society-too

“At this point Westbrook’s drift into a kind of late-career entropy seems unarguable. Those piston arms are still pumping, and the square-jawed stare is undefeated, but the magic is gone. A career that once promised so much – coming close to the pinnacle first with the 2012 Thunder, whose trio of Westwood, Kevin Durant, and James Harden were a kind of younger mirror of the Miami Big Three that eventually orchestrated their finals downfall, and then with the 2016 vintage, famously collapsing from 3-1 up to gift the Western Conference finals to Golden State – and has since had to negotiate a sequence of career-threatening injuries seems to have little room left to run. And if there’s one thing Westbrook needs to sustain himself as a basketballing force, it’s room to run”

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/may/19/russell-westbrook-denver-nuggets-nba

“When he wrote an editorial accusing circuit court judge Clarence Dearth of being a Klansman and stacking his juries with Klansmen, that judge sent Dale twice to perform hard labor on a penal farm. He later fled to Ohio to avoid arrest. When Dale got home, he picked up right where he left off and he and Judge Dearth fought a long and protracted defamation battle that left Dale broke”

https://dansinker.com/posts/2025-02-23-dale/

“The Commonwealth Bank of Australia tried to rewrite a core system in a fresh language; the project cost twice as much as they expected, $1 billion in Australian dollars. Len Santalucia, the longtime mainframe expert, once worked with the financial institution DTCC to investigate the possibility of converting their COBOL to Java.

“They probably have about seventy-five million lines of COBOL code,” he tells me, “and they found out that it would cost them so much that it would take, maybe, a couple of lifetimes to recover. It was ridiculous. And they have more money than God.”

So the banks shrug, and figure, screw it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Keep the old COBOL running”

https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money