As a rule, I don’t recommend people make dinner reservations for Valentine’s Day. Even in the best of times, I subscribe to the theory that February 14th is “amateur night” in restaurant world¹, practically designed to make everyone from the overworked staff to the couples with mis-calibrated expectations miserable.

These, however, are not the best of times. As if to prove the point, Andrew Cuomo, who has somehow received high marks for his handling of the pandemic, has declared restaurants can reopen for indoor dining at 25% capacity, starting February 14.

Even after granting restaurant workers eligibility for the vaccine, which remains in short supply, this is an untenable decision. I understand why Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio are going forward with this — like every other state in the union, they are at the mercy of a year of disastrous decision making from the federal government and believe in the false choice we can either manage the virus or force businesses to shut down —but that doesn’t absolve them from this craven and irresponsible decision.

Helen Rosner notes there really isn’t a debate to this issue, at least not a serious one, and in lieu of rational guidance from our elected officials, the choices we make are increasingly important.

We are not, of course, individually responsible for the sort of relief, support, and subsidy that ought to be provided by a competent government, but surely we are obligated to consider the impact of our actions in light of all that has happened during the pandemic so far. In December, the city and state’s worsening infection rates and climbing death tolls were not the fault of desperate restaurateurs who chose to open their dining rooms, nor were they the fault of people who trusted the leaders who gave them permission to go and eat. But today, on the cusp of a second, nearly identical experiment with indoor dining, the moral weight of our individual decisions has increased. We know what happened last time; we know the limits of what this move can fix, and the extent of whom it can harm. There is a flip side to the fallacy of individual responsibility during the pandemic: just because we’ve been given permission to do something doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do.

My annual recommendation to avoid restaurants in mid-February holds a particular urgency this year. If cooking isn’t your idea of a romantic night, I totally get that, as much as I understand juggling room-temperature takeout or huddling under a heat lamp isn’t exactly a thrill. This year, though, try to find the romance all the same and extend a little love to your neighbors.

Earlier tonight, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from the committees to which she’d been assigned as a newly-elected representative from Georgia. Before being elected to Congress, Greene was active in what we might call the conspiracy theory community, writing unhinged blog posts, rallying around “false flag” lies about mass shootings from Sandy Hook to Christchurch, and nearly every other vile, insane, and inhumane interpretation of reality. From the September 11th terror attack to the murder of Seth Rich, Greene has stoked the absolute worst of America and ridden a swelling tide of grievance and misinformation to the House of Representatives.

Eleven of her fellow Republicans voted to strip her of those committee appointments, which means 199 did not. Republicans have already vowed to seek revenge the next time they are in control of the House, which could be as soon as 2022; they will almost certainly pursue their vendetta in the most vile, racist way possible, having already spent weeks falsely equivocating The Squad of left-leaning Democrats with certifiably batshit members like Greene, Lauren Boebert, and my own representative, Madison Cawthorn. Even before they were sworn in, we knew these represented a hateful face of the GOP’s future and they’ve wasted no time proving every fear correct, including their role in the January 6 insurrection.

The question of what Trumpism-without-Trump looks like is becoming clearer every day, as David Roth writes, with the new rise of American kooks:

For all the clammy and overdetermined machinations by the aspirants to Trump’s throne, it is plain to see which people in our politics are most authentically like him. The new congressional Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert take after Trump in their thirst and strident idiocy, but mostly in their understanding that their jobs are to sell, and complain, and post and post and post, and never to disclaim any of the lazy suspicions and secondhand gripes and idle vendettas out of which they’ve fashioned their public selves. As with Trump, the goal is in one sense more about presence than power; as also with Trump, and with Schilling, the obligation to that thirst runs far deeper than the ridiculous outward presentation would suggest.

The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, lord knows, or really about any kind of ideological program at all. It is about an obsessive and even loving taxonomy of and fixation upon enemies and problems, and the way it works is through relentlessness, and through a refusal to ever stop performing weird arias of anger and umbrage. The terrified and fuming derangement that conservative media sought to embed in its consumers, mostly to keep them pliable and on the hook through the commercial breaks, has blossomed into this: a rising army of impossibly unhappy people, their ambitions both vague and vast, who have come to understand that the dizzy righteousness of that derangement is the point.

Roth has captured better than anyone the horrors, large and small, of the Trump years and once again has laid bare the lunacy at the heart of the GOP. For all the handwringing over a battle within the party, it’s painfully clear how much Trump remade Republicans into a mirror image of himself, and in such short order.

Gabriel Rosenberg¹ has also captured the darkness of the current political moment, writing of Trumpism as “a structure of a feeling”²:

One thing I need emphasize now is that because it is a structure of feeling, Trumpism is unstable and impossible to describe coherently as either a set of claims about the world or as a particular constituting public. Put differently, if it seems like I’m playing fast and loose with who belongs in the Trumpkin tent or what conspiratorial claims make up their worldview, that’s by design. It’s people who believe the vote was rigged and the election was stolen. It’s people who think Antifa stormed the Capitol. But it’s also people who see Cultural Marxism lurking in a offhand use of the phrase “speaking truth to power.” It’s people who are obsessed with George Soros and it’s people who have common, if disturbing beliefs about Christ’s imminent Second Coming. It’s pizzagate and birthers. And, of course, it’s Qanon. That no one believes in all of it and that some of the constituent beliefs are contradictory is the point. Trumpism is how these disparate, fractious, and contradictory positions become a unifying feeling about the world and, thus, come to obtain an articulated, actionable cohesion that they would otherwise lack. Trumpism is the structure of feeling that knits these disparate elements into a political force.

It’s hard to come away with much hope from any of this. As Rosenberg concludes, it’s entirely likely Trump, by remaking the GOP in his image (“precisely what makes Trumpism Trump ism”), has doomed the party to a certain degree of failure. It’s also a truly terrible thing for American government, politics, and society that one of two political parties is doing everything in their power to establish ethno-religious minority rule.

And then there’s the question of how, exactly, do we even begin to communicate, let alone convince via the difficult work of politics, a growing plurality of countrymen who simply refuse to accept reality.

I try, especially as I’ve aged and my views of the world softened a little, not to ascribe facets of American life to being uniquely American — conspiracy theories are a global phenomenon, there are hateful bigots in every corner of the earth, just as there are many, many, many more kind and generous souls everywhere. I try to remember there’s very little that’s truly new in any given age — “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which shares many of Roth’s and Rosenberg’s observations with the added looming threat of nuclear holocaust, was written in 1964 after all.

There are, though, unique challenges today, primarily epistemological and driven by our fractured media and culture. The United States, of course, has is own unique history that as often as not we still need reckon with to overcome. And the kooks keep marching.

Janelle Shane, a brilliant writer and researcher whose work explains our increasingly machine-intermediated world in ways we mere humans can understand, is back with another neural-net-generated collection of candy hearts, this time using GPT-3. Previous iterations have gifted us with STANK LOVE, SWEAT POO, LOVING HORN, and, naturally, BALLS.

One thing I didn’t realize (still awaiting my API token!) is what we know as GPT-3 is actually a collection of different neural net models of varying capabilities. Shane tested with several variants, to excellent effect.

Dan Froomkin has a powerful piece on some of the big problems of news coverage today, somewhat cheekily framed as “here’s how I’d do it” speech for the next executive editor at The Washington Post or New York Times. For starters, he suggests ditching the horse-race coverage that dominates political reporting and instead focus on how well the government is governing:

While we shouldn’t pretend we know the answers, we should just stop pretending we don’t know what the problems are. Indeed, your main job now is to publicly identify those problems, consider diverse views respectfully, ask hard questions of people on every side, demand evidence, explore intent, and write up what you’ve learned. Who is proposing intelligent solutions? Who is blocking them? And why?

And rather than obsess on bipartisanship, we should recognize that the solutions we need – and, indeed, the American common ground — sometimes lie outside the current Democratic-Republican axis, rather than at its middle, which opens up a world of interesting political-journalism avenues.

Again, the truth of the world not just the facts of it.

I also deeply appreciate how Froomkin’s analysis doesn’t begin and end with the past four years. He stretches back to the mendacity of the Bush/Cheney regime and the complacency of the Obama years, as well as the media’s role in elevating a demagogue sideshow to the presidency, as failures in equal footing.

It’s a great piece and one of the best hard looks at the media I’ve read in a long time.

Simon is a news nerd who started her career at a public radio station in Vermont, worked at The New York Times and, most recently, the Covid Tracking Project. OpenNews interviewed her for their Source blog as she leaves the industry and her insight is a perfect critique of one of the problems of the news business right now.

I don’t say this lightly, because craving the feeling of demonstrating I’d done the reading is precisely what led to my burnout, but I’ve seen far too many people in this industry encourage the pretense that a journalist’s job is simply to find “the experts” and report out “the facts.” Instead, I did my best work when I knew the source material well enough to fully engage with it and well enough to grapple with difficult questions about how best to approach what I learned.

One hope I have for the industry—especially for local news—is that newsroom management might provide reporters with the time it takes to build this kind of expertise.

The truth of a thing, not just the fact of it, is possibly the greatest challenge the news faces.

Tim’s Amazon Chronicles blog has been an incredible catalog of this gargantuan company. His was the post I waited on when I saw the headlines popping up.

Amazon will continue to be a dominant retail powerhouse. It will sell books and electronics and lawn furniture and t-shirts and everything else, along with digital media, cloud storage, and advanced AI. It will not abandon the hard work of physical infrastructure for the sweet, high-margin lure of the cloud.

There are a few reasons for this. The first one is that it is impossible to do digital retail (and increasingly, brick-and-mortar retail) at Amazon’s scale without having the technological capacity a company like Amazon has. If you spun off or sidelined the retail business, you’d be either kneecapping it or forcing it to buy back the services that the retail side of the business already gets in house. Amazon has a huge advantage in both digital and physical logistics; that’s better than a moat, it’s two moats. It’s a moat surrounded by a ring of fire with a dragon inside. You don’t let that go because a consultant or activist shareholder points out that technically your profit margins could be higher if you only did one or the other. Amazon has never run its business that way under Bezos and it would be incredibly foolish for the company to start doing so now, especially when he’s still in a position to influence precisely those sorts of decisions.

The New York Times has built a very detailed map of the 2020 election using the data they have currently (they built something similar in 2018 for the 2016 election). The data is not yet complete, with “detailed data from 1,922 of 3,143 counties in 42 states, representing 64% of all votes cast”. They even did the thankless, herculean, brain-breaking work of scraping state and county data and building out a GIS election map and put it on a public repo with details about the data and the GeoJSON available for download.

I’m a huge fan of the data explainers The Uphsot puts together and commend them for this work. Looking at the map, though, being over one third incomplete, I have to ask: why now? The impression this map creates is deeply misleading about the actual results of the election — a problem with all maps of U.S. elections that overrepresent empty counties — but this is stark. And given the election’s big loser continues to insist he won despite all evidence to the contrary, this incomplete map is certainly going to fuel disinformation.

The Times should, of course, continue to do the important work of informing its readers. The journalists who build these also need to recognize every map brings with it a bias that we know will be exploited by cynics and disinformation purveyors who don’t give a damn about journalists’ good intentions.

As these maps show, the fact of a thing and the truth of it aren’t always the same. And that divergence is only growing.

In anticipation of changes to iOS that will require apps to ask users for permission before tracking them, Facebook is going to start prompting users with its own screen outlining why it tracks app usage.

The prompt is intended to preface the system-level pop-up Apple will make mandatory in an upcoming iOS 14 release this spring. Notably, Facebook does not use the word tracking, but instead asks to “use your apps and website activity,” while the Apple pop-up that follows spells out that Facebook is asking for permission to “track you across apps and websites owned by other companies.” Developers have been able to ask for permission since the release of the new operating system last fall. Yet few have done so, while Apple delayed its implementation of the opt-in requirement in September of last year to give developers more time to comply.

Even the best designs must contend with tradeoffs, must be a guide for users, and must deal with constraints imposed by forces outside of the designer’s control. That’s the job, and it’s what makes the gig challenging, exciting, frustrating for sure, but also often fun.

There’s precedence for this kind of pre-prompt explainer — apps will often explain why they need permission to access your camera roll or location. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a dark pattern, especially since the prompt from Apple will be clear, unambiguous, and unable to be changed by Facebook, but it certainly showcases the bind they are in.

The problem for Facebook is it exposes what was formerly hidden about the company and brings to the forefront something they were perfectly content to leave hidden. Once again, the fundamental problem of Facebook isn’t any one particular feature, it’s the soul of what it is.

The Covid Tracking Project has been an incredible resource over the past year, seeking out and providing the kind of data the federal government should have been equipped to provide to help manage the pandemic. Now that there are systems in place to collect and publish data on a national level, they are winding the data collection part of the project down.

Every day for almost a year, hundreds of COVID Tracking Project contributors from all walks of life have compiled, published, and interpreted vitally important COVID-19 data as a service to their fellow Americans. On March 7, the one-year anniversary of our founding, we will release our final daily update and our data compilation will stop. Documentation, analysis, and archival work will continue for another two months, and we will bring the project to a close in May.

The seeds of this choice have been with us from the beginning. From its inception, this project was both unlikely and unprecedented: No one expected a volunteer pop-up collective to publish and interpret public health data for the United States for the first year of a global pandemic. We began the work out of necessity and planned to do it for a couple of weeks at most, always in the expectation that the federal public health establishment would make our work obsolete. Every few months through the course of the project, we asked ourselves whether it was possible to wind down. Instead, we saw the federal government continue to publish patchy and often ill-defined data while our world-famous public health agencies remained sidelined and underfunded, their leadership seemingly inert.

The work going forward will be what the work of the fourth estate should be — investigating, holding account, asking hard questions.

It’s obviously not a coincidence that the federal government is under new leadership. American healthcare was in terrible shape before Trump, but his malfeasance and complete ineptitude made any kind of coordination impossible. The Biden administration inherits that, as well as the patchwork healthcare system that predates it, and will wok to improve access to vital information, while the Covid Tracking project will focus on reporting and accountability. The work they’ve done on race and ethnicity, for example, shows one possible path forward.

What an incredible project, built by volunteers and started with a single spreadsheet to try to understand what in the world was happening in the face of a grossly incompetent president who refused to acknowledge reality. We owe them our gratitude.

Rae Paoletta thinks “right now, all of us deserve a treat, and pets with food-inspired names are just that”.

She put out a call on Twitter to find as many people who named their pets after food as she could. From Pumpkin Pie À la Mode to Mushu and Mochi to Cannoli the corn snake (there’s also a pup who takes the Cannoli), these are their stories.