Jan 6, 2023 3 min read

You Should Read - Jan 6

Just One Thing

52 Acts of Kindness: How to Spread Joy in Every Week of 2023
Whether fostering kittens, donating blood or delivering boxes of biscuits to striking workers, there has never been a better time to help out. And it will improve your life too.

Collected Ephemera

Duke Law School January 1, 2023 Is Public Domain Day: Works From 1927 Are Open to All!

New York Times The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It.

The Verge Bring Back Personal Blogging: Twitter is creaking. Social media seems less fun than ever. Maybe it’s time to get a little more personal.

Ars Technica Mastodon—and the Pros and Cons of Moving Beyond Big Tech Gatekeepers: Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort of.

Cat Valente Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

Ted Gioia What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround?: Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?

The Guardian ‘It Never Stops’: Killings by US Police Reach Record High in 2022: Law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people or about 100 people a month last year, making it the deadliest for police violence

The Guardian Saudi Arabia Jails Two Wikipedia Staff in ‘Bid to Control Content’: Administrators jailed for 32 years, and eight years, as activists warn of ploy to infiltrate website

CBC Think the Pandemic’s Over? Guess Again: Year-End Figures Show COVID-19 Tied to More Deaths in 2022: Deaths outpaced those connected with the pandemic in 2020 or 2021

Vox Your Stuff Is Actually Worse Now: How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products.
-->The article is more nuanced, but the cause is an expectation of infinite, relentless corporate quarterly growth, not necessarily consumerism.

The Canary Leftists Supporting Putin Are ‘Idiots’, Say Anarchists From Ukraine

CNBC Gen Z Is Re-Thinking College and Career Plans in Post-Roe America: ‘I Want to Leave the Country’
-->This focuses exclusively on the impact SCOTUS striking down Roe v Wade, but could have included any number of issues from gun violence to racism to economic inequality. My son initially was inclined to choose a Canadian college to get out of the country. "America is crazy."

Bene Brown Dehumanizing Always Starts With Language

Religion News Service Despite Ample Evidence, Christian Nationalism Mostly Absent From Final Jan. 6 Report: Faith leaders have questioned the omission, which lawmakers have signaled is founded in caution against tarring ‘every American who believes God has blessed America’ as a white supremacist.

San Francisco Chronicle No, Soft-on-Crime Liberalism Isn’t Fueling San Francisco’s Drug Crisis. Libertarianism Is.

Forbes Four-Day Workweek Going Well Globally, Study Says

Smithsonian The Many Myths of the Term ‘Anglo-Saxon’: Two medieval scholars tackle the misuse of a phrase that was rarely used by its supposed namesakes

Paul Coelho The Importance of the Cat in Meditation
-->When sewing my rakusu for jukai (zen lay ordination), the final step was to sew a symbol of the Soto school onto the the back of the neck strap. This symbol represents a broken pine needle. I was curious how this came to be. I visited the website of the Sotoshu, but wasn't able to find anything. Searching the internet was, to my surprise, similarly fruitless. I asked my teacher. He didn't know. He surmises the reason has been lost to time, so it is now simply tradition. Much like the role of cats in meditation.

Down the Wabbit Hole

Selections from my Wikipedia searches over the past couple of weeks...