The New York Times has embarked on an incredibly ambitious project with a seemingly simple premise: tell the story of America starting not at 1776 but one hundred and fifty seven years earlier, when the first ship carrying African slaves arrived at a port on the coast of Virginia. It’s a daunting task — I certainly wasn’t aware of this inauspicious anniversary, a glaring hole in my own reading of American history — one the Times has been working on this entire year. 

The scope of The 1619 Project is massive, encompassing history, analysis, criticism, original works of fiction and poetry, and teacher’s guides, spanning various mediums. I haven’t even come close to getting through everything that’s been published while I await my delivery of a reprint of the original magazine (which now appears to be sold out). The Columbia Journalism Review has a behind the scenes look with some of the writers who made the project possible and some analysis as to why this is so vital.

The idea that slavery is America’s original sin is, at this point, universally accepted but also missing some meaning. Everyone agrees chattel slavery in America was horrific, but too many seem to focus on the “was”, as if we’ve somehow moved past the most defining part of our history. Thus, I found this piece from Michael W. Twitty searing, damning, unsparing, and necessary. Twitty is a fantastic writer (I can not recommend his book The Cooking Gene more highly) who pulls no punches. He has focused on telling the story of America through the food of his ancestors, from African slaves to organic farms in today’s south. 

And in further proof that Faulkner’s observation about history remains forever true, this week we learned that Aaron Burr (sir) had a secret family of color.

Gizmodo ran a series this week imaging what an alternate internet might (and, they posit, “still could”) look like. It’s a pretty good, at times depressing, thought exercise.

It got me thinking of a dm I winged off to a friend a while back, about how none of our current … mess? stupidity? hellscape? would exist if browsers had just blocked third party cookies back in the day. Which probably isn’t remotely true, but it’s an idea that’s been in the news of late. 

First, both Mozilla and Apple (via their WebKit project) announced they would be proactively implementing anti-tracking measures in their browsers and treating privacy the same way they treat security. This means they will consider attempts to circumvent anti-tracking with the same level of seriousness as security exploits. That’s a pretty big deal!

Google, whose business model is in many ways predicated on exploiting a certain ignorance or naïveté of internet privacy, wrote a pretty weak blog post saying they want to wait for a privacy standard and, anyway, anti-tracking technology is the real problem. Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan were having none of it and wrote a direct and damning response. This quote brought me back to my original fantasy.

cookies were not supposed to enable third-party tracking, and browsers were supposed to block third-party cookies. We know this because the authors of the original cookie technical specification said so (RFC 2109, Section 4.3.5).

At the height of the browser wars, Netscape and Microsoft decided to simply ignore the standard recommendation.

Related: Farhad Manjoo’s “internet colonoscopy”.

We’ve been living in the world defined by the way gamergate exploited the perverse incentives of social media for five years now. The Times wrote a history, at times very personal, and how it’s shaped our lives since.

Related (?): We finally convicted a couple of the cowards who call themselves “Proud Boys”.

Josh Marshall on “feral dweebs” and mockery as a means of fighting fascists.

A new(ish) Coltrane album has been “discovered”, hidden in plain sight, as the soundtrack to a French-Canadian art film. This is the classic Coltrane quartet, with McCoy Tyner on the keys, Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison playing bass. I’ve listened to the first single almost non-stop since it popped up on Spotify (“following” dead artists does pay off!), I love it, of course.

Pro Publica wrote a fantastic guide to how media organizations can work better together on data projects. That URL slug :chefkiss:

Two sides of internet-enabled capitalism

1. People selling mirrors

2. Cigarette unboxing

@phillygirl curates Twitter for me: 

Repurposed tennis balls as predator-proof shelters for harvest mice.

We've been repeating this one all week. Toddlers are ruthless. 

The time Nina Simone tried to kill a record producer.

I’ve been kind of fascinated by the idea of “ghost kitchens” or “virtual restaurants” ever since, a few years back, I noticed a modern Greek joint in San Francisco called Souvla had built their entire space as much to accommodate delivery apps as people eating in. Mike Isaac and David Yaffe-Bellany dive in.

A new generation says they don't want to work for Facebook. I'll be curious to see if this holds true after graduation — the best minds of every generation have tended to lose their idealism pretty quickly to go work at corporate law firms and Big Finance once they realize how quickly they can pay off their student loans.

My unabashed nerd love for Paul Ford knows no bounds, apparently. His Uses This profile is that combination of deep nerdery (emacs! Paul! You think you know a fella!) and just delightful writing that seems to have all but disappeared.

A link from one of the few people I've known their entire life, my baby brother: the world’s oldest continually running webcam will soon migrate to the great 404 in the sky.

I’ve missed most of the apparent online hype about the The Chicken Sandwich and yet I found myself in a very crowded Popeye’s on Lexington Avenue this week (I left without a sandwich and walked two blocks to Shake Shack, having to settle for a Chicken Shack. The weather was nice, at least.). The most desperate in the crowd seemed to be the small scrum of bike messengers, giving precisely zero fucks, just trying to make their delivery to someone willing to settle for a lukewarm Chicken Sandwich they ordered on Uber Eats so they could do it for the ‘gram. Regardless, Helen Rosner has written the best of The Chicken Sandwich Thinkpieces.

This one’s gone a bit long, so I’ll save the Sunday Supper I’ve been working on for next week. Go get a Chicken Sandwich maybe?

As always, thank you for reading. Be well and be kind.

Jim