Commonplace

Robin Sloan:

Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.

But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

Heather Kelly in the Washington Post:

Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday took extraordinary action against President Trump for spreading coronavirus misinformation after his official and campaign accounts broke their rules, respectively.

Facebook removed from Trump’s official account the post of a video clip from a Fox News interview in which he said children are “almost immune” from covid-19. Twitter required his Team Trump campaign account to delete a tweet with the same video, blocking it from tweeting in the interim.

In the removed video, President Trump can be heard in a phone interview saying schools should open. He goes on to say, “If you look at children, children are almost — and I would almost say definitely — but almost immune from this disease,” and that they have stronger immune systems.

The source video, however, is still on YouTube. It’s simply not true that children are immune from the disease, nor should we forget that there are children and adults in schools.

Last week, as part of the Environmental History Action Collaborative of EDGI I collaborated with Jay Turner, Scout Blum, Finis Dunaway, Emily Pawley, Keith Pluymers, and Ryan Driskell Tate on annotating Biden’s clean energy plan. Our annotations add historical context, fact-checks, and comparisons between his plan and the Green New Deal.

Sarah E. Needleman in the Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. is pledging to become carbon neutral across its business, including its mostly overseas supply chain, within the next 10 years, the latest corporate giant planning to shift its operations to battle climate change.

The iPhone maker said Tuesday that the new commitment means that by 2030, every Apple device sold will have been produced with no net release of carbon into the atmosphere. The company plans to reduce its emissions by 75% and develop carbon-removal solutions for the remaining 25% of its footprint.

Apple said its global corporate operations are already carbon neutral and that all of its iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch devices released in the past year are made with some recycled content.

This move doesn’t directly address the right to repair, though in part feels like an attempt to fight off right to repair legislation. But to Apple’s credit, this extends on their commitments in 2017 to make their supply chain a “closed loop.” Plus, Apple is pretty good about encouraging people to hold onto their devices even as it introduces new ones every year: the next version of iOS will run on five year old phones, and macOS Big Sur will run on seven year old Macs.

Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny:

Twitter will stop recommending accounts and content related to QAnon, including material in email and follow recommendations, and it will take steps to limit circulation of content in features like trends and search. The action will affect about 150,000 accounts, said a spokesperson, who asked to remain unnamed because of concerns about the targeted harassment of social media employees.

The spokesperson said that as part of its new policy, the company had taken down more than 7,000 QAnon accounts in the last few weeks for breaking its rules on targeted harassment.

The sweeping enforcement action will ban QAnon-related terms from appearing in trending topics and the platform’s search feature, ban known QAnon-related URLs and prohibit “swarming” of people who are baselessly targeted by coordinated harassment campaigns pushed by QAnon followers.

This has crossed over from Internet fringe to real-world violent extremism, so it’s a welcome step from Twitter.

Tamar Hallerman in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

In June 1963, [John Lewis] moved to Atlanta, the headquarters of SNCC, taking up residence in a sparse second-floor walk-up in the southwest corner of the city. He had barely unpacked his bags before he and other civil rights leaders were invited to White House. President John F. Kennedy, who would be assassinated a few months later, had concerns about the impending march.

The peaceful event drew more than 200,000 people to the National Mall, all pushing for more federal attention to the electoral, social and economic plight of African Americans. That muggy August day lives on in America’s collective memory as the day King articulated his dream for an equal society. But Lewis, then 23, delivered the event’s most controversial address, rife with frustration and anger at the “cheap politicians” whose inaction perpetuated inequality. The Kennedy administration and march leaders implored him to soften the speech at the eleventh hour.

“To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we must say that ‘patience is a dirty and nasty word,’” Lewis stated in his original speech. “We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now.”

The crowd’s applause interrupted Lewis 14 times.

Barack Obama:

I first met John when I was in law school, and I told him then that he was one of my heroes. Years later, when I was elected a U.S. Senator, I told him that I stood on his shoulders. When I was elected President of the United States, I hugged him on the inauguration stand before I was sworn in and told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made. And through all those years, he never stopped providing wisdom and encouragement to me and Michelle and our family. We will miss him dearly.

What most clearly characterized the intellectual landscape of the first years of the New Deal was an exceptionally wide range of approaches to reform. Some were rooted in the progressive philosophies of the first decades of the 20th century, others in the experience of World War I, still others in the generally unsuccessful reform initiatives of the 1920s. . . . In fact, the early New Deal was awash in ideas—ideas of significant range and diversity (at least by American standards), but ones that somehow managed for a time to coexist.

– Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform (1995)

Alan Brinkley died over the weekend. He was a giant in writing the history of twentieth century America, and his End of Reform is nothing short of masterful. Rest in peace.

Marco Arment introducing Overcast 4.2:

In Overcast 4.2, the login screen now prominently encourages anonymous accounts by default.

If you already have an account in iCloud, it’ll pop up a dialog box over this screen asking if you want to use it.

And the first time you launch 4.2, people with email-based accounts will be encouraged to migrate them to anonymous accounts.

How often do you get an update to an app that asks for less information from you? I’ve been an Overcast user since it launched, and Marco’s commitment to this kind of thing adds to my desire to keep supporting his work for a long time.

Thanks to the hard work of Erik Steiner and Jan Lahmeyer, the Spatial History Project has compiled what I believe is the most complete dataset on U.S. population figures over two centuries. The dataset tries to compile historical city populations decennially between 1790 and 2010 for cities above 2,500 people (when the U.S. Census Bureau first added them to their records), but the data is spottier for cities with populations below 2,500.

There’s more thorough documentation in the README about the sources for the data and method of compilation. We’ve placed the data on Github for use and improvement by others, so I hope you’ll check it out. Feel free to submit pull requests or get in touch with Erik or I with questions or suggestions.

Nice collection of AeroPress recipes from Tools & Toys. My own favorite is still 12g of fine ground coffee dumped into an inverted AeroPress, steeped in water poured up to the “3” mark for about a minute, then a quick flip and press.