If you were around in the early days of blogging, you probably know what it means to get “dooced” — essentially, to get fired for blogging about your job or coworkers. Back in 2002, it was a somewhat novel thing to be dooced, whereas now it has become part of how we navigate our lives with no real distinction between online and off.

Still, the world continues to be a beautiful and surprising place full of wonder and amazement. To wit: an Italian gangster was arrested thanks to his distinctive tattoos appearing on his cooking channel on YouTube:

Marc Feren Claude Biart was always careful to hide his face in his Italian cooking tutorials, filming the YouTube videos while laying low from police on a sandy beach in the Caribbean.

But Biart, an alleged member of southern Italy’s powerful ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate, had failed to obscure his tattoos on tape — a clue authorities say they used to track down the mobster in the Dominican Republic.

Alas, the channel doesn’t appear to be live any more.

I have something of a weird, though maybe understandable, relationship with cars. I’m far from a car geek but I know my fair share about how they work and what differentiates one from the other; I can identify models from a glance.

I genuinely like driving and being able to get around quickly and easily. I also think cars are one of the more destructive human inventions, have utterly destroyed far too many cities, and that not enough people take the responsibility of driving seriously. Cars, I’d probably argue, are fine, but car culture is terrible.

This fall, we moved out of the city and needed to buy a car. I hadn’t owned a car in a decade, and bought my last car five years before that, so I went fully down the rabbit hole of what it means to be a car owner these days. I was thinking I’d come away with a late-model electric or plug-in hybrid, ended up buying my first-ever brand new car, a more traditional hybrid.

Probably the biggest change from the last time I bought a car was using a mix of online services to find the exact model I wanted, four states away, and then completing the deal entirely over text message. I first saw our car about thirty minutes before handing over a certified check and then driving it off the lot. It took about a month to fully trust the rear-view camera, and I dig CarPlay more than I thought I would, but overall it’s still … a car.

Maybe I’d feel the shift a bit more if I’d gone fully electric and plugged my car in instead of refueling it, but even fully electric cars still have most of the same problems as their internal combustion brethren. They still create traffic, take up too much of the space that should be dedicated to housing or parks or bike lanes, and still crash and kill people with impunity. A vision of the future where every gas-powered car goes electric isn’t exactly utopian.

So it’s interesting to see other modes developing, like the rise of tiny electric cars in China. These golf-cart-like cars exist in a legal gray area that don’t benefit from subsidies or battery innovations as much as they do from being incredibly cheap and easily built thanks to the local modular supply chain:

Having decided that the future of mobility is electric, the Chinese government has subsidized sales of standard electric cars since 2010. With close to 1.18 million sold in 2019, China accounts for just over half of electric-vehicle sales globally. Bill Russo, founder and CEO of advisory firm Automobility Limited, sees a “steady and solid rise” in China’s electric-vehicle sales generally. The country has set a top-down target for electric vehicles to make up 40% of car sales by 2030, and Russo thinks they’ll have no problem hitting this goal. Tiny cars, which first began appearing in the early 2010s, have more than double the sales of regular electric cars but have never benefited from subsidies. Nor do advertisements for them air on television — instead, they appear on Kuaishou, a short-video platform popular with people living outside China’s big cities. Alongside streamers selling plums by the thousands, and others telling viewers what long-haul trucker life is like, drivers show off their tiny cars. Su Hua, Kuaishou’s founder, has long maintained that his app’s users are not “cool,” unlike those on Douyin, the TikTok predecessor popular with China’s urban elite. Rather, they are ordinary — the kind of people who might be in the market for miniature cars.

As they don’t technically require licenses, tiny cars tend to be popular with migrant workers, who struggle to pay for driving lessons and other car-related costs. The elderly, too, find tiny cars attractive since, up until October of last year, people over 70 could not apply for a driving license in China. They’re also convenient for anybody who wants a car to pick up groceries or their kids from school: No tiny car is longer than 1.5 meters, and their speed tops out at between 40 and 56 kilometers an hour. They’re for the short trips of daily life, not for traveling from one side of the city to another.

Tiny cars are basically non-existent in the States now that most car manufacturers have exploited loopholes in emissions regulations that allow them to essentially classify “light trucks” the same as cars, and then market these monstrosities as safer and more aligned with the American lifestyle.

Even if we embraced smaller cars, they’re hardly a panacea to issues like traffic and street management. But it’s pretty easy to imagine a fleet of semi-autonomous electric cars, particularly in places built for such a thing (think The Villages), mostly taking over. Or urban design where you park your car on the outskirts of the city and are then instantly greeted by an electric cab or small bus that gets you to your destination quickly.

A giant container ship, you are no doubt aware, has been stuck in the Suez Canal for most of this past week, blocking passage between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. It’s costing the global economy something like $400 million dollars every hour. In order to deliver the containers aboard their own ships, captains of non-stuck ships are charting courses around the Cape of Good Hope, which the Suez Canal was built to avoid; there will almost certainly be pirates. As of this writing, the ship is still stuck.

A giant container ship — one of the largest ever constructed — plugging up one of the great infrastructure projects of the 19th Century is, among other things, a not-so-subtle reminder of the chaotic interconnectedness of the world, the fragility of so much of the plumbing of our current state of capitalism, and chance to relearn some geography (for the first full day of hearing about the ship, I had placed it in the Panama Canal in my mind). It is also hilarious.

While the stuck ship isn’t exactly without cost, it feels like a story that we can at least enjoy without much guilt. I found myself agreeing whole-heartedly with Sarah Gailey — I like that the ship is stuck:

Furthermore, most of us share the opinion that it’s disagreeable, logistically, for the boat to be stuck. The boat being stuck is inconvenient. It’s a big disruption! Nobody can say it isn’t a big disruption. None of my distant relatives will get into arguments on The Face Website about whether or not the stuck boat is making a nuisance for lots of people. I like that.

Another thing I like is that we know exactly what the problem is that is making the boat be stuck. It’s a big boat, and it’s stuck. Sure, shipping and manufacturing and boats and canals have lots of connections to varied and sundry historical and sociological issues – but this immediate problem, in front of us, is a stuck boat, and we can look at that problem for precisely what it is. It’s not stuck for mysterious reasons related to a long history of humans cruelly exploiting other humans. It’s not stuck because a politician wanted money from an organization that profits from human suffering. It’s not stuck because someone pretending to be in favor of free speech is trying to promote hateful ideologies. It’s stuck because it’s big, bigger than the place where it is, and that’s why it’s stuck.

There are, of course, memes — intentional and otherwise. They are great.

This feels like the kind of story we deserve right now, in what are hopefully the waning days of a year-long pandemic, ongoing climate catastrophe, and global tilt towards authoritarianism. The ship didn’t spill millions of gallons of crude oil into the ocean, it didn’t even lose its cargo. It’s just stuck, and that’s annoying and inconvenient, but also kind of great.

What we call “cloud computing” these days is an umbrella term for a bunch of technologies that pool together processors, storage, databases, networking, etc. and makes them easy to use, deploy, and scale. The magic is mostly in the software that clusters together massive amounts of hardware, which is housed in huge, geographically dispersed datacenters. “The cloud” feels like a single abstraction of what we used to call servers, even if there’s no single cloud but a bunch of disparate services. The whole system is pretty remarkable and makes just about every part of modern computing possible.

The Solar Protocol project inverts a lot of the thinking of cloud computing and is building a platform with rather different goals:

This website is hosted across a network of solar powered servers and is sent to you from wherever there is the most sunshine.

So much of modern computing infrastructure is all about optimizing for speed, either by physically locating hardware as close as possible to end-users or using AI to reduce the nanoseconds it takes to route packets. The Solar Protocol is kind of an inversion of these principles, picking servers based on where it happens to be daylight — you don’t need machine learning to derive the algorithm of where the sun is, after all. From the manifesto:

If intelligence is the capacity to synthesize knowledge as logic and apply that logic to make decisions, then the Solar Protocol platform relies on an intelligence that emerges from earthly dynamics: specifically that of the sun’s interaction with the Earth. Our lives have always been directed by a range of natural logics that emerge from the intermittent dynamics of our shared environment. Weather, seasons, tides and atmospheric conditions all dictate our behavior, enabling and constraining our movements, food production and cultures. Solar Protocol uses these logics to automate decisions about how the network operates and what content is shown at different times of the day. How can we learn or relearn to design with natural intelligence?

The present day imagination for the internet has been enabled by an energy regime that relies on lethal fossil fuels. And the result? An online culture that valorizes speed, self expression through ever larger media and data-driven intelligence that is requiring more and more energy. Machine learning for example, requires enormous datasets typically collected through private efforts in online digital surveillance that collect every click, keypress, view and page scroll you might make. This data is then used to train models used to automate decisions about what content to show you. These energy hungry technologies are only made possible by extractive energy systems and labor practices.

(Happily, the software is open source and the hardware is relatively cheap and easy to acquire.)

I was reminded of a similar project by Low Tech Magazine a from few years ago (the Solar Protocol credits Low Tech Magazine for the inspiration) that also involved a solar-powered web server, with the limitation that sometimes the server was just not online. It’s a radical notion, in an age when everyone expects any piece of information to be available at any moment, to simply not be there. A sleep cycle for data.

There’s something of an ongoing debate around cryptocurrency at the moment, driven in part by the sudden meme of the NFT art market, about the massive environmental impact of blockchain technology. These protocols that allow for a distributed, decentralized internet are exciting, but they come at a massive cost and unsustainable carbon output. They could learn from a little natural intelligence.

The past few weeks, I’ve been trying to make sense of the spate of attacks that appear to target Asian Americans, particularly in parts of California and New York. The reporting has been inconsistent and localized, the connections and motivations often seem circumstantial, and the fact the perpetrators tend to be Black complicates the telling in a country where discussions involving race are always fraught and taboo. The usual characters and set pieces we trot out — bad apples, no angels, etc — fail utterly while the water of structural racism we all swim in but refuse to acknowledge remains.

As I sought to understand just what was going on, I knew if there was one person who would be able to cut through, it would be Jay Caspian Kang. His piece for the New York Times today is a hard and necessary read and didn’t answer questions so much as force me to ask better ones.

Over the past month, as reports of attacks on Asian-Americans, particularly Asian-American elders, have circulated, a new generation of scholars, writers and celebrities have tried to figure out not just what to do, but what exactly is even happening, and how to discuss it.

The public conversations, which have focused on rising xenophobia and what it means for a largely professional class of Asian-Americans, reflect, in many ways, the legacy of the scholarship following the 1992 riots. One can feel the understandable desire to reroute the conversation to safer and more familiar conclusions. The conversations also reflect a disconnect between the people on all sides who experience the violence — who are often working class — and the commentariat.

A generous and brilliant writer, I’ve found Kang to be a kind of snarky Virgil¹ the past few years while I try to navigate the endlessly upending culture. It’s a role that he seems to often lament, particularly when it comes to, well, helping people like me understand the nuances of race in America beyond the simplistic stories we tell ourselves.

Kang sees a particular danger in what’s happening with these attacks, how they get talked about, what gets left unsaid in particular, and the opportunities our continual failings leave open for more Trumpian attack vectors. Reactionary nationalism may be an primary feature of white supremacy in America, but it’s by no means exclusive.

These are not sophisticated questions, but they are being asked over and over again. My fear is that these attacks will also accelerate a trend already underway. Roughly one-third of Asian-American voters supported Donald Trump in 2020, a figure that represented a seven point increase from 2016. As Asian-Americans once again ask themselves where they fit in the country, champions of law and order like Mr. Zhao will provide simple, compelling answers.

They will not care about the decades of efforts by courageous Asian, Black and Latino organizers to build solidarity between working-class people in the Bay Area and nationwide, nor will they care that the people who have been attacked appear largely to be from the working poor and will certainly bear the brunt of an escalation in racial conflict.

Electoral politics are not everything, nor should they be the basis for how we think about ourselves and how we relate to others. But these past months have also shown the limits of the rote progressive language about race and its assumption, in practice, of a binary between Black and white Americans.

As I consider why I’ve struggled to understand, or maybe contextualize, what’s happening with these attacks, I return (embarrassingly) to Baldwin. “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”

The microwave is quite possibly the most derided appliance in any kitchen, especially be self-styled foodies. Consigned to reheating leftovers or melting chocolate, it’s commonly held the microwave isn’t for serious cooks. I’ve tended to roll my eyes at that kind of snobbery, especially as those very same people gush over sous vide setups and pressure cookery, but I must admit I’ve never really put my own magnetron oven through the paces.

Helen Rosner wants you to learn to love the microwave.

It took the upheaval of the past year to bring me back to the old idea that my microwave might be a cabinet of wonders. Through the window of my iPhone screen, I watched friends and cooks and colleagues admit to their own microwave love. At Eater, the recipe writer Aaron Hutcherson wrote a piece titled “The Time Has Come to Embrace Your Microwave,” in which he describes reheating leftovers, of course, but also crisping bacon, poaching fish, and (as suggested by the chef Preeti Mistry) effortlessly crisping up pappadam. The chef David Chang, a longtime evangelist for the appliance, solidified his position as the high priest of the Church of Microwave with dozens of photos and videos, posted to Instagram, that display techniques both straightforward—reheating rice, par-cooking vegetables—and mind-expanding. In one revelatory post, he explained how he nuked some onions and garlic in olive oil, added crumbled sausage to the mix and microwaved again until the meat was cooked through, then tossed the result with greens and cooked pasta. “Doesn’t matter if the sausage doesn’t brown,” he explained in the comments. “It’s getting wet anyway.”

Like any kitchen tool (or any tool at all), the microwave is exactly as useful as you make it. Rosner, for example, keys in on what I’ve long thought is an under-appreciated secret — simply setting the power level to finesse your cooking, rather than simply “nuking” your food at full strength.

I don’t know that I’ll be serving that microwaved scallop mousse any time soon but I’m certainly going to try some more ambitious microwave recipes soon.

The techniques used by the Covid-19 vaccines to help bring an end to the pandemic have been researched for years. Now that we’re turning a corner, it seems like we’ve got more to look forward to.

The first vaccine to fight the malaria parasite uses self-amplifying RNA, similar to the messenger RNA in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, with the added bonus of being cheaper and easier to distribute.

Making a vaccine for malaria is challenging because its associated parasite, Plasmodium, contains a protein that inhibits production of memory T-cells, which protect against previously encountered pathogens. If the body can’t generate these cells, a vaccine is ineffective. But scientists recently tried a new approach using an RNA-based platform.

Their design circumvented the sneaky protein, allowed the body to produce the needed T-cells and completely immunized against malaria. The patent application for their novel vaccine, which hasn’t yet been tested on humans, was published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on Feb. 4.

“It’s probably the highest level of protection that has been seen in a mouse model,” said Richard Bucala, co-inventor of the new vaccine and a physician and professor at Yale School of Medicine.

Even before the pandemic, mRNA was being researched as a vector for combatting parasitic diseases. Now it looks like mRNA might be able to help fight sickle cell and AIDS as well. A year ago, there were no mRNA drugs in the world, other than some lab trials; now it’s one of the more promising technologies for fighting all manner of disease.

Katalin Karikó, who persisted for over two decades to make mRNA therapeutics viable, should be as celebrated as Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk.

Australia is currently making plenty of noise with its truly awful new link tax, but there’s something potentially more interesting happening in New Zealand. Stuff, a media organization that includes stuff.co.nz, the local news hub Neighbourly, and nearly a dozen other news sites, stopped publishing to Facebook last July; and they don’t really miss Big Blue. Stuff’s CEO, Sinead Boucher, from a symposium hosted by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford:

In July 2020, Sinead decided Stuff would walk away from its audience of over a million followers on Facebook and Instagram. This followed a move to stop advertising on the platform the year before. It was meant to be a quiet, internal experiment, but word of the decision was leaked to the public.

There are several interesting aspect to this story. The first is they stopped advertising on all Facebook properties back in 2019, following the Christchurch terror attack that was broadcast live on Facebook. Boucher says she was dissatisfied with Facebook’s response after the attack, essentially making a moral argument against supporting the social network.

Traffic to Stuff’s network is roughly flat over the past seven months — Boucher predicts being off Facebook has cost them 5-10% in traffic. This is certainly a measurable impact, but by no means existential, and it also means homepage and search traffic are up. There is a concern that Stuff isn’t able to serve some communities, particularly indigenous people, as well by being off Facebook, though. When they reached out to Facebook to see how they could work together, Facebook basically responded with an offer to help them use their paid marketing tools better.

All of this is coming as Stuff, and other media organizations, are dealing with how to build more trustworthy, self-sustaining organizations. Certainly seems like Facebook doesn’t need to be a part of the solution.

The truly astonishing vaccines are upon us. You doubtless know someone who’s been vaccinated by now and hope abounds that by this summer we could start see what life is going to look like on the other side.

As incredible as the vaccines are, we always knew the hard work was going to be distributing billions of them. Even with all of the massive problems facing the U.S. — in terms of infrastructure, healthcare, and equity — the rollout is going … well it could always be worse.

One manifestation of America’s distribution problem is getting signed up in the first place. The scourge of federalism means there are at least fifty different websites for Americans to navigate, all built to different standards and levels of accessibility, struggling to stay up. The additional scourge of “public/private partnerships” means there are also the websites of pharmacies like CVS to track down for appointments, which often means people are constantly refreshing half a dozen websites at 2am trying to get appointments for their parents, like sneakerheads waiting for the next drop of Yeezys.

Diligent volunteers are pulling together open source websites that aggregate all this info, an effort that is as kind and hopeful and frustrating as it is wholly American.

There is, of course, a better way: a single, nationwide clearinghouse that anyone can log on to and find vaccination appointments, public or private, near them. Barry Patterson, writing for the blog of the govtech consultancy Ad Hoc, lays it out:

A better way is for the federal government to provide a single COVID-19 vaccination website with consistent information about when people can get the vaccine, where, and at what cost. This website should go beyond providing accurate information to help people take action and sign up for a vaccination.

In our discussions with state governments and our explorations of the issues surrounding vaccinations, we’ve landed on a handful of principles that could shape a federal vaccination website and core features the website should provide on launch. These principles are grounded in our work creating action-oriented digital experiences for federal websites including HealthCare.gov, Medicare.gov, VA.gov, and more.

As Hoc’s approach is everything you’d want from such a herculean and important project — thoughtful, detailed, and built on real-world experience. There are even solutions to those built-in scourges of federalism and privatization, instead of just kvetching.

Yesterday, 2.2 million Americans were vaccinated, a record that I hope we will continue to build on. We should also be building infrastructure to handle the myriad problems of American healthcare, not just to tackle future pandemics but all sorts of problems, starting with a nationwide front door to how to get vaccinated today.

Can a delightfully low-fi, three-dimensional, spatial, customizable immersive space save us from the uncanny valleyness of Zoom conferences? Andy Baio wants to find out.

After the pandemic cancelled XOXO last year, I started attending a bunch of virtual events, mostly out of boredom and longing for connecting to other people.

Unfortunately, many of them were pretty uninspiring, basically just fancy webinars with breakout rooms for Zoom. Others were just livestreams with little room for social interaction beyond a global chat room.

Almost all of them left me feeling like I’d either sat through a long meeting or watched a long YouTube video. Was this even an event? Did I actually attend anything?

In so many ways, this really is a perfect project for Andy, and maybe only Andy could have built this having cofounded the beloved XOXO conference and promoted a truly indie vision of the internet for going-on two decades. Everything about this looks delightful, playful, thoughtful, fun, and just different from what you’d expect from today’s platform mediated internet — the kind of virtual event you might actually want to attend, as The Verge puts it. I love it.

The obvious comparison is to something like Second Life but it honestly feels more like Game Neverending, er, Glitch — in all the best ways. Or maybe the kind of virtual conference Shigeru Miyamoto might have designed.