Tag: rss_source

“And Americans have largely been very confused at the idea of this genuinely very famous man that they have never heard of before.

I, too, was very confused when I first learned of Williams while I was living in London many years ago. I was even more confused by his Whole Deal, which I guess I’d compare to Mark Wahlberg, if Wahlberg never went into acting and, instead, blew up into a Justin Timberlake-level pop star”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-ai-guys-were-lying-the-whole-time

“But my visceral response to this kind of thinking – and even aside from ordinal lists of importance, the smartphone-supremacy attitude is very common – is to say, wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.

Plumbing – bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering – goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-shitting-in-the-yard-test

“Indeed, it appears that the dominant manufacturers have managed to turn their delivery failures into financial advantage. Using the purported difficulty of projecting material costs over a 2-3-year lead time as an excuse, they have imposed “floating” price clauses onto their customers — allowing them to increase the final price of a rig when it finally goes into production”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-roll

“More and more, I find myself relieved by endings. When I put on a record on, it ends. When I turn the last page of a book, it’s over. When I finish a comic, it’s done. That can feel inconvenient, but it is actually a moment of empowerment. You will now decide whether you want to hear the album again, or listen to a different one, or do something else entirely. You are not just lost in this endless conveyor belt of content, which you long ago stopped considering with a critical eye”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/how-to-resist-the-tech-overlords

“The fourth and most important reason blurb dependency is surprising is that the limited data available indicate they’re ineffective. The audience-research firm Codex Group tested variations of book covers, some with blurbs, some without, in surveys of several thousand readers. A very small number of participants found blurbs meaningful, and only when the person doing the blurbing mattered to them, and the blurb itself contributed to their understanding of the book. When it came to purchasing decisions, 2.5 percent of participants admitted to discovering a book through the recommendation of a favourite author, and 1 percent bought the book as a result”

https://shush.substack.com/p/judging-a-book-by-its-back-cover

“At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-16-2025

“With some rare exceptions, I have found reading the classics as an adult to be thrilling and artistically inspiring. The classics are not some scam by Ivory Tower elites. Yes, we should expand the classics to include great works from across the world and by authors of all different backgrounds. But these books really are great. More than just great, the classics are always far weirder, hornier, and funnier than their reputations. Proust’s Swann’s Way is a riot. Melville’s Moby-Dick is beautifully bizarre. I recently revisited Morrison and Marquez and was reminded of just how full their works are of energy, mystery, and the fullness of life”

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/recommendation-the-odyssey-read-by

“The net result is that a huge number of our leaders are essentially stealing money, but they can’t withdraw the money directly, so they have to spend the organization’s capital on expensive nonsense to purchase status then convert that status into a better salary somewhere else at a really, really bad exchange rate”

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/

“First, a practical argument: writing a formulaic book may be easy but making money off it is hard. Slop is still a numbers game. There are countless writers trying to hop on the latest trend, whatever it is. Editors I know tell me their inboxes are flooded with Romantasy pitches from authors who have never written in the genre before. This is true in every commercially successful trend, fiction and non-fiction. Remember when bookstores were overflowing with adult coloring books, Tumbler-to-book deals, and “fratire” bro books? The vast, vast majority of authors chasing trends will fail. Their books won’t be published or if published they won’t sell. Succeeding in the slop game is a matter of luck and timing, impossible for an author to control”

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/art-in-the-age-of-slop

“concerning characters that could actually exist doing things that could actually happen in a world that’s recognizably ours; matching the mundanity of the described world with a mundanity of style and voice; expressed without any experimentation, formal intricacy, or metatheatrics; relaying all information in sentences that never fool, trick, deceive, engage in play, engage in double entendre, engage in deliberate obscurity, or otherwise strain the reader’s attention at all; are based on the assumption that the only path to transcendence is through steady and responsible accumulation, not the transformative moment; and which generally operate according to Jonathan Franzen’s commandment that for literature to survive, readers must never be challenged in any way they don’t wish to be challenged”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-the-book-section-likes