Just a Few Links to Tide You Over
It's too cold to write this week anyway
The holidays are officially over, New York City has snow on the ground for the first time in two years, everyone seems to have some flavor of respiratory illness and it’s a long, long way until spring.
So let’s get a little joy in your inbox today.
For anyone who loves reading
Pulitzer Prize-winning author
shared this delightful “creation myth” of himself as a reader:One summer day I hit a classified that stopped me dead. It read, simply: Free Books!
Followed by a phone number.
At that time no one in my neighborhood, in the entire Middlesex County, loved books as much as I did. That was the only identity I had besides poor and Dominican and immigrant: reader.
Free books to a kid like me was like free money to a miser, or dumb-asses to a dictator.
I couldn’t believe it. Figured it had to be a joke or a trap of some kind. But my desire was stronger than my misgivings and I called, and the American lady on the other side of the line told me they were her grandson’s books and he was out of the country (military) and wanted her to give them away and all I had to do was come to Madison Park to fetch them.
For those of you starting to question the nature of reality in our virtual-first world
Ben Lerner told a mesmerizing and disturbing “fictional account” of his single-handed attempt to influence public opinion and ultimately change reality…through Wikipedia edits:
Late at night, in a state of manic exhaustion, I’d often make anonymous edits of a different sort. I told myself it was research, that I was testing how a stray, strange “fact” might linger, how a fake source might escape notice. I put a line in every cabinet member’s page about increasing concern that the official in question was exhibiting signs of Lewy body dementia. I suggested there was a robust debate regarding whether Edgar Allan Poe actually wrote “The Raven.” I wrote that Dolly Parton was said, maybe as a result of a botched surgery, to perceive ultraviolet light. Many believed Pancho Villa’s mustache was fake. I added a line to Teddy Roosevelt’s entry that said he enjoyed bocce. I added Teddy Roosevelt to the list of bocce enthusiasts on the “bocce” main page. Soon this fact appeared on the home page of the United States Bocce Federation. Then I could use that home page as the source for the claim on Wikipedia. Such edits were somewhere between childish pranks and tiny terrorist attacks on the historical record. All of these examples are fake, but can stand for the ones I made, the bedbugs I released into the linguistic furniture. It was my first attempt at writing fiction.
For anyone who’s just done with both work and having a body right now
Dr.
, author of Laziness Does Not Exist, threw down the gauntlet against the scam that is full-time employment in “Work Is A Chronic Illness”:I have almost no energy to move or to think. My eyes hurt. My head hurts. I’m constantly on the verge of puking. The room is spinning. Normally bouncing off the walls with the desire to exercise, try new things, and socialize, all I want to do is sit silently in the dark. I am incapacitated, in an inescapable way, by the demands of full-time work.
I had forgotten for a while that I am so profoundly disabled, because I have been able to build a life around my natural rhythms and my inarguable sensitivities. But for just one week, I’ve been thrust back into approximating something of a “normal” working life, and I can’t handle it. Not even remotely.
If I were to live by this schedule all of the time, if necessity forced me to work an actual full-time job with real, in-person, full-time hours, I would have zero energy for meal preparation, physical fitness, social outings, on-the-ground activism, or any of the random adventures that make life so worthwhile. In my schedule I’d scarcely find the time for doctor’s visits, tooth cleanings, trips to the DMV, birthday parties, conferences, runs to the post office, or any of the other small journeys that make it possible for supposedly “independent” adult life to run. My health, my relationships, my community, and my grounding in reality would dramatically collapse.
For those of you who follow me for marketing reasons
Mia Sato for The Verge put together this comprehensive, interactive explainer of what writing for SEO (search engine optimization) actually means, what gets lost in writing in web design when Google is our only overlord and how generative AI threatens to make things even worse:
The relentless optimizing of pages, words, paragraphs, photos, and hundreds of other variables has led to a wasteland of capital-C Content that is competing for increasingly dwindling Google Search real estate as generative AI rears its head. You’ve seen it before: the awkward subheadings and text that repeats the same phrases a dozen times, the articles that say nothing but which are sprayed with links that in turn direct you to other meaningless pages. Much of the information we find on the web — and much of what’s produced for the web in the first place — is designed to get Google’s attention.
We often hear about the latest engagement hacks on other platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or X, formerly known as Twitter. But Google is consequential above all of these, acting essentially as the referee of the web. Yet deep knowledge of how its systems work is largely limited to industry publications and marketing firms — as users, we don’t get an explanation of why sites suddenly look different or how Google ranks one website above another. It just happens.
For people not in New York or New Jersey
I just want to make sure you know there was a bull who “mysteriously wandered on to train tracks” of New Jersey Transit last month, and that he’s now doing well. His name is Ricardo.