Feb 20, 2025 2 min read

You Should Read - Feb 20

It's a coup. We live in a weird twilight time between democracy and dictatorship. Just typing that sentence sounds alarmist and semi-fictional. But it's not. The President and his mob of enablers fully intend to implement an American-style Führerprinzip. Elon Musk is literally mouthing the words when he suggests the Executive embodies the will of the people. The latest Executive Orders say it explicitly.

One wonders about the private conversations of retired Generals Milley, Austin, Kelly, or Mattis.

Five Things

In the Face of Overwhelm (In These Times)

Believing that there is simply nothing we can do to change the ways things are is exactly how the status quo has always been kept in place. Worse, it’s how the unimaginably wealthy have been able to consolidate power to keep society moving in a direction that keeps them getting richer and richer at everyone else’s expense. And in this moment, what serves their interests is to overwhelm those of us inclined to fight for something better in the world — to the point that we either disconnect, revert to silos, or ignore what’s going on.

Leaving MAGA

Empower others to leave MAGA and tell their stories.
Foster reconciliation with their friends and family.
Develop movement leaders to help others leave.

Suffering Is Real. AI Consciousness Is Not. (Tech Policy)

By appealing to our emotional responses and our readiness to anthropomorphize [AI], they eschew the need for real arguments to convince us of a falsehood—that the chatbot explosion is the leading edge of a real scientific revolution rather than a particular overhyped and oversold application of transformer-based models whose success has depended on a vast scaling up of exploitative data practices and resource-intensive computation.

Oh the Humanity (Benjamin Sandofsky)

While the people who manage these [venture capital] firms like to paint themselves as "billionaire scouts" that possess some keen intuition to pick the winners and losers, in reality there's a handful of checkboxes that any mediocre dude can follow.

The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan (Marcin Wichary)

You’re not supposed to fall in love with an ugly font. No one collects specimens of Arial. No one gets into eBay fights for artifacts set in Papyrus. No one walks a hundred miles in a hot New York summer, sweating beyond imagination, getting shouted at by security guys, to capture photos of Comic Sans.

This is the sort of exhaustive interdisciplinary mystery story I adore. Technology, design, culture, history, business, art, geography. On first glance, I thought this would be a simple story of a specific use of an esoteric type system. I thought I recognized the font from a video about the shipboard sign shop on the Battleship New Jersey YouTube channel. But this goes waaaay beyond that simple answer, even touching on the odd comic book lettering found in early EC Comics (technical lettering long before the rise of Richard Starkings's ComiCraft). The essay is illustrated with 600 photographs. Delightful.

The Wabbit Trail

Selections from my Wikipedia searches this past week:

I Made Something

I fell in love with this wild script font during one of my RISD continuing education classes, so had to make something with it.