Tag: rss_source

“I learned this week just how brain-poisoned I am from following the cryptocurrency industry. When I first saw reports that HyperVerse’s CEO was revealed to have been completely made up, I thought “lol yeah that makes sense” and went on with my day. I was then surprised to see headlines about it in mainstream outlets like The Guardian, only to realize that yeah, companies completely making up their CEOs is actually unusual in most other industries and still raises the eyebrows of normal people”

https://citationneeded.news/issue-48/

“Failing to say what is actually happening for fear that you won’t be “objective” is failing your audience. Accepting that humans are biased, thoughtful, and terrible creatures, and that writing for humans requires a clarity of message and spirit, is necessary to fully communicate what is happening around us. Journalism is not objective, has never been objective, and never will be objective. It can seek balance, but overall it should seek clarity”

https://wheresyoured.at/p/a-continual-christmas

“Widows, because sometimes you must kill your darlings. That one sentence you really like, that does its job in the piece perfectly? You know it’s too long, right? You have to find another way to say that, that uses fewer words and operates more efficiently but still has style and snap. Sometimes you have to make a lot of widows. Sometimes making the widows takes longer than it did to write the original document.

But when someone calls for a certain length, you’ve got to run the widows and orphans on it. All day. All week, if you have to. what it teaches you is to revise and revise again, and find a balance between energetic language and clear concise language”

Widows And Orphans

“other major Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou, announced that they now required popular users’ legal names to be made visible to the public. Weibo stated in a public post that the new rule would first apply to all users with over 1 million followers, then to those with over 500,000”

https://restofworld.org/2023/weibo-legal-display-name-influencers/

“All of them are connected by the subject matter (of course), but also by the particular shade of orange, the uppercase Gorton typeface, and the all-around certain Marcin-ness of it all: the strange curiosity, the obsessiveness, the visual storytelling, a touch too much vulgarity at times, maybe, and at other times a misguided fondness for the word “paroxysm.”

Here’s something I should confess, but also something you all probably already know: I live for diminishing returns. I love staying somewhere long after everyone else left, fiddling with minutiae to never be noticed (although sometimes I will try to make people notice), finding pleasure in superfine tuning that comes after fine tuning. I love connecting things and pouring myself into the cracks of a project that few others notice”

“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.”

“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

“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/

“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