I finally cancelled my Twitter account. It was time—I had my fill of toxic nastiness & virtue-signaling (later than many). Very glad to have an independent, thoughtfully designed platform in Micro.blog.
I haven’t seen The Green Book, and don’t plan to, but still highly recommend reading Ethan Iverson on Don Shirley over at the New Yorker’s culture desk. 🎬 🎶
Grateful for some time this morning to read by the fire. More grateful still for a new book by a favorite poet.
The incomparable Brian Phillips is featured on the latest episode of Bookworm, alongside man-eating tigers, a man-eating-tiger-hunting man, death on the Iditarod, and Impossible Owls.
“How Facebook Deforms Us” - a thorough, thoughtful review by LM Sacasas of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media.
Just discoereved @motyar’s MarkShow: Markdown to Slideshow app. It’s wonderful! I lesson-plan in Markdown, & have been looking for a tool like this forever. Thank you!
Recommendation: Spectacle App
In my day job as a technical writer, I use Windows; it’s really not been a great experience, but that’s a subject for another day. There is one feature I LOVE, though: using the Windows + arrow keys to arrange windows around the desktop. Till now, I haven’t found a good alternative on the Mac. But today I found @spectacleapp, and it’s wonderful so far! Free, open-source, customizable, maintained. Check it out here.
I read a wonderful novel tonight, Patrick DeWitt’s very dark & very comedic “tragedy of manners,” French Exit. (h/t the display stand at the local public library.) 📚
I hadn’t heard of translator Anthea Bell until I read her obituary yesterday. But then I realized that the day before, I had started one of her translations: of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. So far, the book is profound, tragic, & absolutely captivating. 📚
The implausible idea of a "chief ethics officer"
I read Kara Swisher’s recent column on the need for chief ethics officers in Silicon Valley with great interest & great skepticism. Swisher documents, with droll understatement, just a few of the ethical “quandaries” [their words] our giant mega-corporate start-ups have faced (or created): Corporations accepting loads of money from Saudi Arabia (cozying up to Saudi Arabia is a problem they share with the NYT itself, incidentally) Facebook lying (again!