Documenting Life

“for more than 500 years, anyone who wanted a Master of Arts degree from Oxford had to take an oath promising they would never “agree to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis” (this was in Latin, so quod numquam consencient in reconciliationem Henrici Symeonis). The requirement was added to the university statutes in 1264, and wasn’t removed until 1827—more than half a millennium later. The good part is that for most of that enormous span of time, nobody had any idea who Henry Symeonis actually was or what he might have done”

“I Hereby Swear to Hate Henry Symeonis, Whoever That Is.”

“It was not a real newspaper but a zombie – a piece of promotional material created for the local Conservative MP, Robert Largan, by a company in nearby Manchester. As such, it was just the latest example of how the local newspaper industry, which has been all but destroyed, is now being replaced. Freed from the oversight of local reporters and editors, businesses and politicians have begun to create their own information networks – they look like local news, but report only the things their owners want the public to see”

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2023/11/zombie-news-the-strange-resurrection-of-the-local-paper

“S Group poses a more fundamental challenge. Here we have a hyper-efficient retail operation, run with cutting-edge management and logistics, dominating half the grocery market of a wealthy country, without minting a single billionaire in the process. It is not just competitive with capitalist businesses; it is more successful. It’s enough to make the ghost of Ronald Reagan cry.

https://prospect.org/world/2023-10-11-cooperative-that-could-s-group-finland/

“When Cohen bought the Mets, he inherited the lease on a giant piece of land: the parking lot next to Citi Field. Almost from the moment he took over, he has been building support for a plan to turn the long-neglected area into an entertainment megaplex. Its anchor would be a casino, one of three that the state government is preparing to license in the New York City region. The $8 billion project, called Metropolitan Park, faces opposition from some environmental groups in the area and competition from most of New York City’s big real-estate developers, who are all battling for the limited supply of licenses. But if he builds it, the gamblers will come, creating revenues far exceeding anything the Mets might ever generate”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/steve-cohen-mets-citi-field-queens-casino-bid.html

“Three Republican judges, two appointed by Trump, ruled that hospital emergency rooms don’t have to perform life-saving abortions in states that have passed antiabortion laws.

After the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services reminded hospitals that accept Medicare money that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), they had to provide care to stabilize patients in a medical emergency, including abortion care, regardless of state law.

Texas sued, and the Fifth Circuit has agreed, saying that the EMTALA does not preempt Texas law”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-3-2023-56e

“To be clear, I think McCartney performing major surgery on Lennon’s song makes the result a more authentic Beatles record, rather than less. Lennon and McCartney’s collaboration was often in the form of editing each other’s work, and sometimes extensively rewriting it (as when McCartney turned Lennon’s sad acoustic dirge about being unloved and uncared for as a child into “Yellow Submarine”) and what both men missed in their solo work was the ability of the other to find the core good idea among their bad ones and to polish it up for them and turn it into something workable. Both released plenty of fatuous solo work that could have been turned into classics with just a little bit of help from the other (as well as both releasing plenty of actual classics in their solo work)”

https://www.patreon.com/posts/thoughts-on-now-92258652

“Huynh said he had dreamed of becoming a TikTok star since high school. He took on a part-time gig with Be when he was in college; after he graduated with a degree in information technology, he joined the company full-time. Soon, he realized his job as a ride-hailing driver would make for good TikTok content. He began saving money from his earnings, and bought a secondhand camera for 2 million dong ($83).

Huynh’s workday can go on for over 12 hours. In the afternoon, he stops to rest at a fast food restaurant, where he knows the manager. He records his rides by day and edits the videos on his phone at night”

https://restofworld.org/2023/life-of-a-gig-worker-vietnam-tiktok-driver/

“Erewhon is one of those phenomena that is ever present if you’re tuned in and invisible if you are not. “Isn’t that just a grocery store?” asked a friend who has lived in L.A. all her life. No, it is not, and has never been, just a grocery store. It exists within, and has always occupied, a space between commerce and cult”

https://www.thecut.com/article/erewhon-smoothie-boston-los-angeles-history.html

“Basically, I’ve started making music for the first time since I was 21. Not regularly, but enough that I bought a tiny mid-keyboard to make it a bit easier. There’s about 6 or so tracks that were finished enough to lob at various friends for their amusement. And I do mean amusement – they’re terrible, but the other thing about art this year is me thinking about the power of just doing art. I still mean to write about AI stuff eventually, but part of the core is that – creating art is just good for you. Its quality really doesn’t matter. What matters is the process of creation, and that’s why it’s good for our spirits.

That said, the experience has also reminded me how I am not wired to be a real musician. I get earworms, so any time I am working on a song, it will inevitably get stuck in my head. There is literally nothing worse that a song that is genuinely awful which is also your song going around and around and around your head at 3am”

https://buttondown.email/KieronGillen/archive/273-im-going-to-tell-my-children-that-this-is/

“They are also preparing to impeach Mayorkas on the grounds that he has failed to meet the requirements of the Secure Fence Act, “which defines operational control of the border as a status in which not a single person or piece of contraband improperly enters the country.” As Brooks and Beitsch point out, “not a single secretary of Homeland Security has met that standard of perfection.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-2-2024