Internet reading Q2 2022

 New batches of links!

1. Let me put “reading” as queerly as I can. In the act of reading, we are being penetrated by an author’s sequencing of sensuous dildos we call words, which we kiss, which then open us up to viral growth. The word is a dildo? A dildo we kiss? Kissing leads to penetration? Penetration spreads a virus?

More LGBTQIA+ stuff, relationship

• Possibly the loveliest show on TV 
• Reid says, “When I was approaching the character, I thought it would be mistake to ‘play gay.’ I thought, ‘What I can play is a man who falls in love with another man, and build that connection into the character.’ Dan made that very easy. It was incredible to have such a front-row seat to the sculpting of that relationship and the way it impacted people. It was handled with a lot of care and a lot of love. It wasn’t an accident that that relationship meant so much to so many. It was crafted that way. Some of the storylines—like Patrick coming out to his parents and even that first kiss moment—were very carefully constructed with a lot of love and tenderness. It was intended to be, and ended up being, a ray of light for people." 
• How many times can a person write an article about biphobia or bi-erasure before readers and publishers demand something new? The competitive marketplace of ideas incentivizes people to embrace increasingly radical positions. This race to stay relevant is a dangerous game. 
• Angel Maxine - Wo Fie feat Wanlov the Kubolor & Sister Deborah 
• Schitt's Creek Captures the Unexpected Joy of Being Seen
• Brock Colyar on Pronouns, Identifying as Nonbinary
• The reason my marriage fell apart seems absurd when I describe it: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink. It makes her seem ridiculous and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations. But it wasn’t the dishes, not really—it was what they represented. 

2. The Gassing Of Satartia: A CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured last year, sickening dozens of people.

More on global warming, climate change, and the environment

• The Democrats Really Are That Dense About Climate Change 
• Forget your carbon footprint. Let's talk about your climate shadow  
• Coal Fever in Indonesia 
• As the tide rises, Indonesia struggles to save the living—and the dead 
• Rethinking Solar Farm Design: Can we just lay these panels on the ground? 
• Ten ways to confront the climate crisis without losing hope by Rebecca Solnit 
• Why does my county want to ask me what to do about sea level rise? from The Planet You Save Could Be Your Own newsletter 
• This gas would have stayed in the ground if it wasn’t for bitcoin 
• Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. In making the planet brighter and louder, we have endangered sensory environments for countless species in ways that are less viscerally galling than clear-cut rain forests and bleached coral reefs but no less tragic. 
• A Once-in-a-lifetime Bird
• Can outdoor recreation really support conservation for the long-term health of the land, not just human access? I suspect the answer is a hollow no.  

3. Afterparties, stories collected just in time, too late, and from a source gone too soon

More poems, short stories, and writing

• Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker 
• Grizzly Bear Conflict Manager
• O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love by Anne Carson  
• To be of use by Marge Piercy 
• Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte
• The "Pity Me" personal essays bring us a whole lot of dramatics and zero perspective. The tone is pure misery; in place of honesty we have melodrama; instead of empathy this writing seeks acclaim for its author’s courage in the face of quite surmountable obstacles. 
• Full Moon and Little Frieda by Ted Hughes
• Writing and whoring—selling a body or a body of work—what’s the difference? 
• “For Lack of a Bed” by John Wiswell 
• Who Is Steven Hotdog? Or, Untangling the “Braided Essay” 
• The People Downstairs By Diana Fuss - A review of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal 

4. When women were hired to operate the calutrons, the supervisors ultimately found that the women were better than the highly educated men. If something went wrong, male scientists would try to figure out the cause of the problem, while women saved time by simply alerting a supervisor. Additionally, scientists were guilty of fiddling with the dials too much, while women only adjusted them when necessary.

More science, technology, and the sociology of internet

• A history of the physicists community in modern America 
• Why innovation prizes fail
• How polyester bounced back
• The World That Venture Capital Made: on The Power Law, Mallaby's book on VC. In the end, this book is really a lesson not in the power law, but in the law of power. 
• Wishful descriptions of Twitter as “the de facto public town square” sound, to me, like Peter Pan begging the audience to clap and raise a swooning Tinkerbell. You don’t have to clap. 
• Why the hidden internet can't be a libertarian paradise 
• The rest of the world should not have to know the name Bari Weiss
• Inside the cult of crypto
• Slobbing out and giving up: going ‘goblin mode’? 
• Where does Tumblr go from here?
• Contra Google Chrome 
• What TikTok’s obsession with nepotism babies says about class 
• The ‘successful failures’ of Apollo 13 and Covid-19 vaccination 

5. If you want to write applied theory, read empirics. If you want to write empirics, read theory. You would like to have your empirical work place some intellectual capital on the line. What views of the world will we affirm or abandon on the basis of your empirical work? If you do not have an answer to this, then the empirical work will not be very exciting. 

More econ

• Things Keith Head hates: Precise (but wrong) and vague (but useless) reports of robustness.
• If we were somehow able to create sustainable resource use (and that’s a big if), then in the future we could get “infinite” growth: as long as people want things, you will get “growth”. This is what economists are thinking of when they say “yes, we can get infinite growth on a finite planet”. 
• When to Give Up, from Patrick Julius 
• Fake Journal Club: Teaching Critical Reading of research papers 
• Pritchett: how is a paper based on the treatment of 13 villages in Afghanistan sufficiently interesting and important to justify publication in a top journal when its findings confirm what everyone already believes? Why “feigned ignorance” is not good economics 

6. The remaking of New Delhi’s Central Vista provokes troubling questions about the already fraught relationship between architecture and power.

More from Japan, Sri Lanka, Maine, Myanmar

• Walking the Cotswolds, Walking Japan 
• The YIMBYest City in America: Auburn, Maine
• They look white but say they're black 
• How hubris and Covid transformed Sri Lanka from ‘donor darling’ to default 
• My Husband Died With Dignity. Everyone Should Have That Right. 
• Hot, summer days full of anger and tears: a former journalist from Myanmar's diary 
• Jeff Mermelstein’s photobook #nyc is a series of photographs of the text messages from the streets 

7. Gun control activism: It's as if we’re living in the 1950s and the only groups leading the charge for civil rights are the NAACP and the Urban League, and the only strategy they’re willing to try is polite protest and lobbying. One theory: they has been rolled up under one roof, Everytown for Gun Safety, with deep backing from Bloomberg. 

More on thinking, activism, rationality, and other miscellanea

• Don’t Lecture On Respectful Disagreement If You Don’t Practice It: Don’t be like James Lindsay 
• Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy. [Kolmogorov's Complicity] 
• What’s Wrong With Identity Politics? On Olúfemi O. Táíwò’s new book, Elite Capture 
• Unmoored from religion, we seek new forms of exaltation. We turn ordinary objects into holy grails, making pilgrimages to restaurants ranked among the world’s best (and helmed by chefs not so jokingly compared to gods). 
• EA’s Talent Bottleneck is a Barrier of its own Making
• The Life Cycle Of A Youth Activist
• You’re not going to become George Clooney: men don’t age like wine
• The questions to map an area (What are your “white whales?” What projects didn’t quite work out but are still nagging you?) are not how you should ask them  

8. Writings from Andy Matuschak and Dynomight

• 2021 reflections on creative work, the field, crowdfunding
• Reflections on 2020 as an independent researcher
• When you look for someone to marry, you’ll care about many things. And are they, like, wicked hot? But your parents probably care about it less than you do. So, why do you want to marry someone hot? 
• Diet Coke tastes sweet because it has aspartame in it. Is it bad for you? 
• New meth might be chemically different in a way that caused people to go crazy, starting around 2017.  But the main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it