Ted Gioia’s top 100 albums of 2020 ❃

Ted Gioia has been one of my favorite Twitter follows in a year that could use some thought art critique and exploration.

Paul Ford has a conversation with himself from the year 2000 ❃

God I bet blogs are amazing now. How do people even know what to read?

Paul had a follow-up that’s less jokey and a bit closer to how things work now.

How to vaccinate the world ❃

Smart, succinct podcast from Tim Harford — I was a fan of his previous 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.

Tom Stoppard and the last crusade ❃

Tim Carmody with a delightful bit of insight into the complex life of Tom Stoppard, including his uncredited drafting of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The data heroes of the Covid Tracking Project ❃

Drew Armstrong profiles the truly outstanding Covid Tracking Project in Bloomberg:

The project is a demonstration of citizen know-how and civic dedication at a time when the country feels like it’s being pulled apart. Yet it’s confounding that, almost a year into the pandemic, the Covid Tracking Project is doing what might be expected of the U.S. government. “It’s kind of mind-boggling that it’s fallen to a group of volunteers to do this,” says Kara Schechtman, one of the project’s early volunteers, who’s since become the paid co-lead for data quality.

This is an equally inspirational and maddening story — volunteers with organization and guidance from a team of journalists working for a 150-year-old magazine doing the grueling work in the middle of a pandemic that could and should be managed by a competent federal government.

Pair this one with Delia Cai’s interview with The Atlantic’s Ed Yong about the marathon of covering the pandemic for 8 months.

Building the impossible city ❃

This New Yorker profile of Mark Ellison, a brilliant carpenter who constructs some of the most incredible homes in the city, quietly captures the sad reality of life in “superstar” cities. Ellison works on truly incredible homes built for the incomprehensibly wealthy class of people for whom a home in Manhattan — one of several they float and flit between — is a mere lifestyle choice.

Ellison himself doesn’t live in the city but an abandoned fire station 60 miles north on the Hudson because there’s nowhere for someone with decades of experience in a trade to actually hang his hat. Even a generation ago there would be small, if shrinking, pockets for people who actually work for a living to, well, live in the city; now they’ve all been consumed by a real estate industry fully overtaken by finance (to say nothing of the actual titans of tech and finance themselves).

I suspect the post-vaccine recovery will only continue and exacerbate this trend to the point that major cities will be unlivable by anyone but the wealthy.

The Internet Archive is emulating Flash animations ❃

To be “very online” in the late 90’s through the aughts meant a certain fluency with Flash. Before influencers got locked into a few platforms, people built wacky Flash games and movies and uploaded them to forums for free. The first decade of my career was spent cursing at that app or trying to figure out how to properly detect if the plug-in was installed. Flash was hugely influential in the much smaller world of online creators and it’s now all but gone, so this is amazing to see from the Internet Archive, as usual.

Technically, this is pretty nifty. The emulator is written in Rust and targets browsers that support WebAssembly. Seems to work pretty well, though I couldn’t get any of the audio to play on my iPad.

(The Strongbad email archive is, thankfully and necessarily, included)

Helen Rosner on the joylessness of cooking during a pandemic ❃

Feelings of emptiness are normal, even expected, in times of stress and uncertainty. (“Stress and uncertainty” being at best a tiptoeingly diplomatic way to describe the experience of the past year in America, with its million and a half dysregulations, both ambient and immediate.) But isn’t cooking supposed to be a balm for this sort of thing? Much of the happiness I used to find in cooking—even when cooking became, sort of, my job—was rooted in how tangible it was, in both labor and outcome. Simple, repetitive, semi-creative tasks like kneading dough and chopping dill are supposed to thaw us when we’re frozen with existential dread, to ground us in the tactile world, to give us a sense of power and control over the small universe of the cutting board and the stovetop. This makes sense, I know it’s true, and I guess I remember living it, and believing it. But lately it feels awfully far away. I don’t want to re-center myself by being mindful while I peel a head of garlic for the hundred-and-thirtieth day in a row; I want to lose track of myself entirely by playing seventeen straight hours of a battle-strategy video game in which I get to be a military-school professor with magical powers and green hair.

Rosner is one of my favorite contemporary writers and this piece underscores why. Her beat is food, something I also care about more than the average bear; she often writes about broader social issues and how those are reflected in how we eat, where our food comes from, and who prepares it. There’s nothing more broad and social this year than the pandemic, yet she inverts the lens here for something intensely personal and resonant.

I cook for a lot of reasons — it’s a hobby that I get to write off as a chore, for one — but mainly it is, as Rosner says, a balm. When I’m feeling ground down or particularly low or dark, one of my mental tricks is to simply roast a chicken. It takes a bit of time, but is often something I can pull off on a weeknight, is unobjectionable among my family, and something I can pull off without thinking about. It’s always deeply satisfying to dig into the crispy skin and juicy dark meat of a thigh, along with maybe some roasted new potatoes and an arugula salad, and helps to reset my well-being.

That trick’s all but failed me as the months have continued. I’m still cooking as much now as I was when it felt like such a discordant luxury, back in the dark days of March and April when so much of the world was breaking. And I’ve been in the kitchen since Sunday, preparing the usual Thanksgiving spread despite the fact there are only three of us this year. The biggest change I’ve noticed is my complete inability to think holistically about food, specific meals, prep — any of it. This ebbs and flows but for the most part that muscle is simply exhausted, to the point I’m not even sure I remember what that was like. I’ll know I’ve re-established normal when that feels effortless again.

Hey built the email dumpster fire 2020 requires ❃

Hey, the email service from Basecamp, built a dumpster fire anyone can email for a cathartic release as we near the end of a truly, spectacularly, dumpster fire of a year. This is pretty much perfect, from the domain name to the design to the 3x carbon offsetting.

On Google maps, it’s always spring ❃

Lara Chapman, writing for Real Life magazine, on “Mother Earth’s best selfie”

Judging by what the app shows us, these decisions are governed not by an essential demand for accuracy but for clarity: for a certain smoothness that makes the representation seem plausible as Earth’s replica. Just as Instagram filters can remove blemishes, plump our lips, and thin our chins, Google Earth filters its representation of our planet, digitally nipping and tucking unpleasant weather patterns, harsher seasons, and the nighttime hours to render Earth as budding, healthy, and predominantly green. The version that feels “real,” that we’d prefer to be real, is not the one that is verifiably accurate but the one that’s easiest to consume, the one whose concerning blemishes have been fixed.