Sunday Morning Reading

It’s time to share a little Sunday Morning Reading. Words on Apple, words on politics, words on loss, and some words on photography. Read some words.

This week Apple will hold its annual World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) focusing eyeballs on Cupertino and what everyone expects to be Apple’s big push into the Artificial Intelligence game, now looking like Tim Cook’s version will be called Apple Intelligence. This has been no secret for quite some time. That said, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg seems to have gotten quite a few of the details, whether leaked or planted who really knows, on what’s about to unfold. Check out Here’s Everything Apple Plans to Show at It’s AI-Focused WWDC Event.

As a companion to that check out John Gruber’s take on Gurman’s Epic Pre-WWDC Leak Report. Gruber seems to think it’s indeed a leak and the folks inside Apple aren’t too happy. IYKYK

As I stated the focus will be on AI. I’m thinking it will be just as hard to cleanly view where this is all headed as it has been with announcements from other companies, given that no one has nailed down an AI or LLM that seems to live up to the promises or provide reliably accurate answers. Check out Google’s and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election by David Gilbert.

Perhaps the best pre-WWDC piece for providing some pre-perspective comes from Om Malik in Apple + AI: What to Expect at WWDC 2024.

Natasha MH has penned a lovely piece about the lives we cherish and the ones taken from us with Weeping For Relationships Made Out of Dreams and Denials. There have been lots of dreams and denials dashed in this last decade. Some very personal and some quite global.

In many ways, Natasha’s piece linked above is a a companion to this David French piece The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day. We’ve gotten far to used to loss and far too accepting of how we’re experiencing so much of it because of the turmoil visited on us by one orange-tinged demagogue. Brenda Wineapple says this is Trump’s Most Dangerous Gift., and that it will never rise to the level of public tragedy. If that’s the case, nothing ever will.

We think it’s all happening to us in the here and now. But while today’s issues are horribly threatening and provoke chatter of Civil War, we’ve had our share of the same from our past. Jon Grinspan takes on a bit of a tour of some long forgotten American history that actually led to our actual Civil War with Long Before the Woke, There Were The Wide Awake.

And as a final Sunday morning palette cleanser check out The 25 Photos that Defined the Modern Age in a piece put together by M.H. Miller, Brendan Embser, Emmanuel Duma, and Lucy McKeon. The pictures are worth thousands of words but the words accompanying the pictures are worth quite a bit as well.

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Sunday Morning Reading

Secret octopi, culture wars, convictions, and reading between the letters. In this week’s Sunday Morning Reading.

Life is beginning to settle in after the big move, although there’s parts of it we still can’t figure out which box we packed some of it in. Perhaps we need some sort of A.I. bot to help us figure that out. But we’ll get there. In the meantime here’s some Sunday Morning Reading to share.

Speaking of AI, WTF is AI? That’s the question posed with some attempted answers by Devin Coldeway. It’s a decent primer on the topic. Watch out for secret ocotopi.

A couple of pieces on AI from Nico Grant at the NY Times shows just how unknown and perhaps reliably unreliable this fast evolving tech territory is. First up is Google’s A.I. Search Leaves Publishers Scrambling. Follow that up with Google Rolls Back A.I. Search Feature After Flubs and Flaws. I wonder how AI will spit all of this back at us once articles like these are trained in. I also wonder when publishers will start to standardize whether or not we’ll write it as AI or A.I.

Some think The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam. I happened to agree with Christopher Mims, the author of this piece.

Even in the midst of moving it’s been tough to ignore the political comings, goings and convictions in the news. Check out David Todd MCCarty on Bedtime for Bonzo, Or Nothing To See Here. Even after 34 convictions for the orange dude, this piece holds up.

This piece from July of 2021 by John Pavlovitz resurfaced in my feeds in the last week. The Sadness of Sharing A Country With Trump Supporters is worth a re-read in the wake of this week’s news. Somehow I think it will remain relevant for quite some time.

With all that is going on in the political world, it’s a good idea to always remember there is so much more going on behind the scenes than we ever want to realize. Check out Ken Silverstein’s look behind the curtain in Off Leash: Inside The Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat. You might be sorry you did.

I hope The Wonkette is writing you visit often. There’s an excellent serial novel there called The Split by Ellis Weiner and Steve Radlauer. It’s up to Chapter 30. It’s terrific and worth your time.

There’s a new book worth highlighting and highlighted by Laura Colliins-Hughes in the NY Times. James Shapiro’s The Playbook chronicles the history of The Federal Theatre Project. The subtitle teases well: A Story of Theatre, Democracy and The Making Of A Culture War. A great story from back in the day when live theatre was actually something folks believed was dangerous enough that it could change minds.

And to close out this week’s edition check out Natasha MH’s Writing The Unpretentious Prose. Don’t just read the words. Look between the letters.

Sunday Morning Reading

Sunday Morning Reading is back while we continue to unpack. The environs are different, but everything remains the same.

Everything changes and everything remains the same. We’ve completed the Big Move and are now in our new abode. Heads sleep on the same pillows, coffee is sipped from the same mugs, but we’re still living out of boxes and unpack others. That’ll be the state of things for a bit still. That’s life on the home front as everything has changed but remains the same. That seems to be the case in the world in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading.

Kicking things off is an excellent series of articles from The New Republic. What American Fascism Would Look LIke is a collection of essays by a collection of writers, each one worth your time. Start with Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s The Permanent Counterrevolution, but check them each out.

The Roberts Supreme Court continues to show its true colors witih all sorts of flag flyiing controversy from Samuel Alito. Blaming your wife is becoming a thing also. Check out Alitio and Thomas Aren’t Really Jurists. They’re Theocratic Leninists by Michael Tomasky.

There was lots of big news on the Artificial Intelliegence front. There was also not much new in much of that news. LLMs still bung things up. Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI pushed their newest in a race that feels very much like the runners keep tripping over themselves. Nico Grant in the New York Times points to the ongoing snafu in Google’s A.I. Search Errors Cause a Furor Online. At some point this is all going to end up like the streaming entertainment wars. Once all the players are on the field there will be consolidation. There will still be problems. Those new subscription prices will rise. And everyone will complain.

Even so, Steven Levy says It’s Time to Believe The AI Hype.

Naveen Kumar takes a quick look at how AI might be worming its way into live performance in AI Is Getting Theatrical.

David Todd McCarty takes on the contradictions of believing that more than one thing can be true at the same time in An Angel With An Incredible Capacity for Beer.

NatashaMH pens a nifty piece about how the act of writing gives a teacher a window into the mind of her student in Writing The Unpretentious Prose.

And while we were busy moving, Apple released new iPads. Not surprisingly everything changed and everything remained the same. The new software that may or may not yield potential changes is due to roll out in a few weeks, but until it does, those iPads remain behind the software curve while setting the hardware pace. Or at least that’s the accepted line in Apple circles. Federico Viticci penned an excellent summary of what he feels iPads are still missing in Not an iPad Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn’t Get the Basics Right and Steve Troughton-Smith also put out The iPad Pro Manifesto (2024 Edition ).

Closing things out this weekend as I try to get these old bones moving again to unpack some more boxes, check out Margaret Dean’s A Mutiny of Bones about recalcitrant bones and aging and how it’s not just the joints that stop bending. The one constant as everything changes around and within you, some things just don’t work the same as they once did.

Sunday Morning Reading

We’re in the final throes of packing our lives into boxes as we await the furniture movers tomorrow so Sunday Morning Reading remains on hiatus this weekend, hopefully to resume next weekend. Thanks to the friends and family who helped move more boxes than anyone hoped to count yesterday. That went as smooth as anyone could have hoped for.

Today is final pack up day. The kitchen has been moved, as has the most of the rest of the stuff from other rooms, but of course breaking down the office and computers to move is the last thing on the punch list.

Sunday Morning Reading

We’re in the process of packing our lives into boxes preparing to move so Sunday Morning Reading is on hiatus this weekend and next.

Happy Mother’s Day and catch you back here in a couple of weeks.

Sunday Morning Reading

Some Sunday Morning Reading to share amidst prepping to move.

I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to rub elbows with folks from all corners of life. Those who live the high life, those who live the low, and many in between. One thing those on the high side have in common is that however they achieved their status above it all is their predilection towards self-delusion increases commensurate with the size of their bank accounts. The first few links in this edition of Sunday Morning Reading feature three interesting pieces about life on that side of the tracks.

The Blindness of Elites by Thomas Chatteron Williams takes on Walter Kirn and the empty politics of defiance revealing how much of a luxury it is to make life up as you go along. It also reveals how wacky it is when elites go after others for being elite.

This piece by Elizabeth Mika is from 2016 but it could have been written at any point since, so it’s worth a revisit. The Pivoting: On Narcissistic Collusion of How Evil “just happens” reminds us that we can’t escape black holes, especially those of our own making.

Dan Adler takes on The Life and Times of Fergie Chambers. It’s a strange journey into the life of a rich, radical communist with time on his hands that only money can buy.

David French takes on The Magic Constiutionalism of Donald Trump. There’s nothing magic or constitutionaal about it.

James Jordon has a terrific piece about racism called My Grandfather’s Response to a Racial Slur Shaped My World.

David Todd McCarty says America is in crisis because voters are completely uninformed. I concur. That’s a state that doesn’t get votes in the Electoral College, but it’s one too many prefer to live in. Check out For They Know Not What They Do.

Changing course, last week Natasha MH wrote about dancing. This week she’s ridiing carousels in Riding the Taylor Swift Carousel.

And closing things out this week is Anne Spollen with An Unedited Day In An Ordinary Life. Pro Tip: Every day is unedited. Often we’d be better off trying not to make it make too much sense.

Sunday Morning Reading

Some serious stuff in our world this week, but we must dance on. Here’s some Sunday Morning Reading to share.

The world is a very serious and uncomfortable place based on what I’ve been reading this past week, so the topics for this edition of Sunday Morning Reading will lean that way. Good writing all around that meets the seriousness we’re all dancing around.

The United States Supreme Court is about to alter the world we’ve all thought we’ve lived in. Rick Wilson of Everything Trump Touches Dies fame writes:

“The Supreme Court will delay Trump’s case and then make the most cataclysmic legal mistake in American history.

We’re not talking Dred Scott bad, Plessy bad, and Korematsu bad.

We’re talking about previously unimagined levels of bad.”

He’s correct. Check out The Red Court Strikes Again.

Bryan Tannehill says The Court Just Sealed Everyone’s Fate, Including It’s Own. Again, correct.

While this may be a bit less current than most articles inlcuded this week, Brian Gopnik reminds us that it takes more than one man to turn the world upside down in The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers.

Wars, protests and political shenanigans about those wars abound. Mo Husseni has laid out his thoughts about what’s happening in the Middle East and our reactions to it on Threads and published them as an essay on Medium. Well worth your time to read his piece titled Hmmm… do I need a title?

A few topics on the tech front, the mechanism that one way or the other bring us all this news and writing about that news, Edward Zitron tells us about The Man Who Killed Google Search.

Craig Grannell tells us to Just Say No: Not Every Piece of Tech Needs Subscriptons and AI. He’s correct and he nails the reason why this is becoming pervasive.

I don’t agree with everything Allison Johnson says in The Walls of Apple’s Garden Are Tumbling Down, but she makes good points and provides a piece of the necessary frame around this unfolding story.

Changing the subject, it is tough to laugh given all that is swirling around us. But laugher is crucial. Always. As unprovoked a release of emotion it is, laughter does take on different forms and come from different places. Christie Nicholson takes on The Humor Gap between men and women. Hat tip to David Todd McCarty for this excellent piece.

A Summer Place by Natasha MH reminds us that whatever we’re mired in, we should always dance on and quoting Neil Gaiman we should

Face Your life

It’s pain,

It’s pleasure,

Leave no path untaken.

Sunday Morning Reading

Imaginations run wild when the grandkids come to visit grandpa’s house.

Dreams fill our imagination or sometimes vice versa. Especially when there are young kids around. This week’s edition of Sunday Morning Reading is a smaller list than most given that we’re on grandparent duty, but it should pique your imagination nonetheless.

As mentioned, we’re babysitting the grandkids this weekend. And so it’s only appropriate to kick off this edition of Sunday Morning Reading with The Dollhouse and it’s Discontents by NatashaMH.

With visiting grandkids comes a revist to the land of vivid imaginations. Watching the older one explore grandpa’s house and turn discoveries of the mundane into new found adventures may not approach hypherphantasia, but it’s enough to blow one’s mind. Speaking of, check out David Robinson’s ‘Like a Film in My Mind’: Hyperphantasia and the Quest To Understand Vivid Imaginations.

Speaking of dreams and imagination, Daniel Bessner has a great piece called The Life and Death of Hollywood. The dream factory might be going through some nightmares.

As our world seems both full of imagination and fraught with fear about Artificial Intelligence, Benedict Evans goes Looking For AI use-cases.

Ever wonder how the Internet keeps us connected around the globe? Check out Josh Dzieza’s report for The Verge about the folks who keep undersea cables maintained in The Cloud Under The Sea. Imagine that.

Sunday Morning Reading

Silver linings, taking stock, a revival of the Avant-Garde, and the future of chocolate all in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading to Share

Weekends used to be for taking a breath. That seems so long ago it’s tough to measure it conventionally as it somehow sadly just slipped away. Even so, there’s still time to share some Sunday Morning Reading.

Artificial Intelligence remains on the tip of all the digital tongues these days, though it’s yet to show any real promise that I’ve seen. Except for those who got in early on the cash grab. Steven Levy has an interesting piece, Tech Leaders Once Cried For AI Regulation. Now the Message is ‘Slow Down.’ Sounds like the cash isn’t as easy to grab as much as it used to be.

Speaking of AI, Chris Castle has an interesting piece on Music Technology Policy called Has The Ship Sailed On The Myth of “Responsible AI”? I’m not even sure it ever qualified for myth status, but whatever it is, that ship is out of the harbor. Hat Tip to Stan Stewart.

Kyle Chayka thinks The Dumbphone Is Real. This comes as so many blame smartphones for the decline of civilization among other smaller sins. Call me when every company in the world no longer begs you to pay your bills online, you can reach your doctor’s office via a phone, or tech companies (including those that make dumb phones don’t put you through hell trying to get techncial support from a person. I’ll take that call on my smartphone.

Most things get recycled. Including art movements. Helen Shaw takes a look at one such revival/remount in The Avant-Garfde Is Back On The Launchpad about the Wooster Group’s remounting of Richard Foreman’s Symphony of Rats.

Jamelle Bouie’s When Politicians Invoke the Founding Fathers, Remember This is interesting. First, because the title changed from when it first appeared in The New York Times. Originally it was The Founding Fathers Don’t Have the Answers To Every Question. I wrote about that here. My points remain, so does Bouie’s (which are excellent). The headline writing still suffers.

Richard Stengel suggests that 2024 election coverage should be free and out from behind paywalls. He makes a good argument in Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls.

One of my favorite writers, NatashaMH gets quite poignant and, protestations aside, quite brave in doing so, in The Distance Between a Breath And Sadness. I think we should all learn how to better measure that distance.

David Todd McCarty uncharacteristically goes Searching for Silver Linings.

And to close things out on a bitter sweet note, Isable Fattal takes a look at The Future of Chocolate. It’s a summary for articles about the future of chocolate as she tells us to savor our favorites whlle we can. Apparently, yet another in a long line of sweet life things where we need to measure the difference between a breath and sadness because there may not be a silver lining.

Sunday Morning Reading

The world seems a bit crazier each week when the calendar flips to Sunday. In the lead up to a ‘sun eating’ total solar eclipse perhaps a bit more so. Don’t gamble on things settling down after it passes. Regardless, here’s some Sunday Morning Reading to share.

According to Bertrand Russell “fear is the main source of superstition.” That may well be true. David Todd McCarty takes a look at The Disparity Between Fear and Progress.

Kyle Orland in Ars Technica tells us that Google Might Make Users Pay for AI Features in Search Results. I can’t imagine anything less intelligent.

Speaking of AI, NatashaMH wonders Will We Ever Be Ready for the Future? Have we ever?

Getting back to creativity in the real world, textile artist Minga Opazo explores being confident, finding solutions, and balancing research with your artistic practice in Engaging With The World In Your Work. Hat tip to Stan Stewart.

On the politics beat, Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica take a look at what appears to be another in a long line of Trump scams, this time with his last minute bond bailout. Ethical concerns abound in Trump’s Lawyers Told The Court No One Wold Give Him a Bond. Then He Got A Lifeline, But They Didn’t Tell The Judges. Too bad ethics don’t matter much anymore.

One thing about the political beat is that most of what we see and read is re-packaging things most of us already know. Details do matter, but not after the orange bull has wrecked the China shop. Lachlan Cartwright tells us What I Saw At The National Enquirer During Trump’s Rise. A too late, but good read.

Our Entire Society Is Becoming Addicted to Sports Gambling says Alex Shephard. I’m sure everyone saw this coming once the Supreme Court gave gambling the go ahead. Don’t forget, someone paid off Justice Kavanaugh’s gambling debts as he was being groomed for the bench.

To close things out, here’s a bit of history about solar eclipses from Leah Sarnoff in ‘The Sun Has Been Eaten’: Inside The History and Mystery of Total Solar Eclipses.