2023: The Year's Best Words

To close out this perplexing & frustrating year, here are the best things I came across. Things are getting weirder, more complex, and somehow, more stupid. But there are rays of hope, good tunes, and better art out there for us. Find the time to rest, hug your loved ones, and gird your loins for 2024: The Last Election.

After the Flood (The Baffler) & The Crash to Come (NY Review of Books) & The billion-dollar industry between you and FEMA’s flood insurance (Grist) One of the first Dispatches next year will be on this exact issue. Hundreds of millions of people are going to migrate because of climate change, and we are going to need to accept that they are blameless for wanting to escape the flood waters or desertification of their homeland. North America & the Eurozone need to understand they not only caused it, but their power consumption is accelerating it. So, maybe cool it shitting on the refugees who just want to drive a cab without damp socks.

How to Do Great Work (Paul Graham) More useful for young adults just starting out/over, and much more useful for those who are going into professional services or knowledge work. It’s helpful as a way to frame planning & preparation, as long as you remember the overwhelming privilege the advice comes from, and take it with a Scrooge McDuck-sized Money Vault of Salt.

Early Christians struggled to distinguish themselves from pagans (Aeon) & Red Jacket Defends Native American Religion, 1805 (History Matters, GMU) I’m deeply interested in ideas that mirror each other across time or space. This feels like one such pair, with Christianity having to defend itself in the marketplace of ideas vs just being the faith incumbent of the West.

Disengage: Why we must seize leisurely interludes from the confines of work (Aeon) & The Value of Work (AntiMatter) Breaks are important, art is important, turning off is important, or so we’re told. In America, many punk & hardcore bands, even successful ones, don’t make enough $$ for their band members to retire from. Why should people be forced to choose between making art that sometimes thousands or millions of people like, and knowing that you’ll be secure in your old age? The Aeon article asks, have a career but took time off? Like going out for a smoke break? You’re maybe not be serious about success. Or, as per both, punks and slackers deserve peace and happiness too.

 Wild Minds (Morgan Housel) I keep coming back to this wonderful reminder, greatness usually comes to the exclusion of everything else. That champion marathon runner? Didn’t see the latest Netflix show. Your unhinged crypto-trading success story friend? Rude as hell and unable to hold a conversation. Why? To be exceptional in one area means deficiencies in many, if not all other areas. Don’t believe me? Just ask Dr. Ben Carson what he thought of Mr. Beast’s latest video, or ask your gamer friend who went Platinum in League of Legends what he thinks of the philosophical writings of Deleuze or Lacan.

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft (New Yorker) ChatGPT and AI can’t do everything, but coding? That they can help with. Does that mean programming or being a dev engineer is going the way of the Icebox or Milkman?

Hostile Epistemology (C Thi Nguyen - Full Paper in the Journal of Polarization, Reconciliation, and Community) Why blaming people who fall for multi-billion dollar misinformation campaigns isn’t helpful. We love feeling superior to people who fall for scams, grift, cults, or get exploited by politicians. What if we blamed the businesses, organizations, or political parties that benefit from or sometimes fund, the engines of misinformation that trick those same people? If you want to change how people vote, this is a mandatory read for you.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s Guide to the New Supreme Court Ethics Code (McSweeney’s) Because all we can do is laugh. If you don’t want to laugh, just look outside. Or at the art below.

The Right to Speak for Ourselves (The Nation) & Palestinian Suffering Is Never As Urgent As The Counterfactual (Defector) One continued aspect of the media associated with the IDF-Hamas conflict is the comprehensive lack of Palestinian voices. Even at the negotiating table, Israel, the USA, UAE, Saudi Arabia…no actual government or citizen representatives of the people in question. For a long, depressing, but utterly humanizing read to both sides, Save Your Kisses For Me by Adam Curtis of the BBC was published in 2012. Nothing else has connected personal lives of historic individuals with the events the world has pivoted around, since.

How the New York of Robert Moses shaped my father’s health (Aeon) The creation of infrastructure is never without consequence, as anyone whose neighborhood was lacerated by America’s addiction to the automobile can tell you. Only now are we starting to understand what the vivisection of the Bronx in NYC, Overton in Miami, or Butler’s Crossing in Houston, cost our minority families and businesses.

Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder. (Crooked Timber) & Software is Beating the World (Ed Zitron) & It’s All Bullshit: Performing Productivity at Google (The Baffler) After switching to technology from healthcare & homeless services, I was continually shocked at just how little “work” was done by seniors at tech companies, while being paid ludicrous amounts of money. There’s a re-write of Howl by Allen Ginsberg out there somewhere. Something about seeing the best minds of my generation destroyed by getting people to click ads or a download button 0.6% more often than last year.

You can’t even pay people to have more kids (Vox) An exhaustive review of policy research at the national or systemic level, failed efforts to jump-start birth rates across the world. Shockingly, handing someone pocket change doesn’t change the multi-decade calculus associated with raising a child in this nightmare of a modern world.

'FYI Pickleball DRAMA': Local Governments Overwhelmed By Tennis-Pickleball Turf Wars, Documents Show (404 Media) & Pickleball Injuries Are to Blame for Surging Health Care Costs: Kiplinger Economic Forecasts (Kiplinger) Pickleball is a known menace, but it is apparently causing half a billion dollars in injuries and additional healthcare utilization? Sounds like something pickleball players would do.

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies (Rolling Stone) As a US citizen with Cypriot blood, there are people in my family who were tortured after the Kissinger-sanctioned invasion & seizure of half the island by Turkey. So, this quote does hold a special place in my heart.

Not One Tree: Stopping Cop City (N+1) A gigantic police & fire training campus is being fiercely resisted outside of Atlanta. For activists across the nation, the way the protesters are being treated is a window into how they would be treated everywhere if the conditions were right. N+1’s narratives are comprehensive, if needing of a tablet and a chez-lounge chair to enjoy properly.

Slavery’s Descendants (Reuters) Reuters doing the work we wished we saw from Ancestry dot com or any of those “Famous People Find Their Roots” shows. If it’s hard to read, imagine how hard it is to be a descendant of the people they owned.

A Future of Walls or Liberation (Foreign Exchanges) & Untangling the Mystery of the World’s First Rooftop Solar Panel (Bellingcat) As long as we’ve had progress, we’ve had enemies of progress. As long as we’ve had autocrats, we’ve had revolutionaries. We should be mindful of who the technology we create, helps.

Explain the events of Star Wars Episodes 4-6 like you are a heavily biased Imperial history textbook (Reddit) Rereading this, it strikes me as somehow critical for the next calendar year’s worth of misinformation. So I’ll just leave this here. See below:

The slovenly wilderness (Rob Horning) & Fake Totalities (Horning) & The preponderance of the object (Rob Horning) Rob reminds us that AI sifting data collected by internet trawlers & bottom feeders, doesn’t replicate the real thing at all:

Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore (The Atlantic) You’re not alone: everyone is losing their grip on the internet, culture, the universe and everything. The internet’s fragmentation is hitting escape velocity, with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Discord channels providing entirely different mixes of content, niche celebrities, and event schedules. The last thing we all watched “together” was Game of Thrones, and that ended so badly, we shall never speak of it again.

The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming. It’s Happening Right Now. (The New Republic) A hard piece to read, especially if you live in the many, many blue cities that exist within red states. You can’t run an Obstetrics department in a teaching hospital if zero medical students want to do their post-doctoral fellowships (or even specialized training post-residency) in these states.

AGI Futures (Roon) Roon’s predictions and wordplay about the near & far future make it the only fiction on this list. The possibilities are endless, but what we’ll create might not be what we want. Just because a God-like AI can keep us alive in a digital cocoon, experiencing infinite pleasure for 10,000 years, doesn’t mean it should?

That’s all folks! We’ll be back on Jan 10th with more info on subscriptions, how Factual Dispatch will evolve, and how you can help!

Keep your head up,tn