Stylized MP3 players are all the rage and the good people at Panic want to make sure you have a chance to relive the golden days music on the Mac.

A lovely little contemplation on what a blog is (and isn’t) by Joel Hooks. Pairs well with Laurel Schwulst’s post.

A garden is usually a place where things grow.

Gardens can be very personal and full of whimsy or a garden can be a source of food and substance.

We gather and work together in community gardens to share the labor as well as the rewards of a collective effort.

It’s a comparison that you can take very far. From “planting seeds” and “pulling weeds” to tending mutiple gardens that each serve an individual need or desired outcome.

Like with real gardens, our digital gardens are a constant ebb and flow towards entropy.

(Thanks to Austin Brown for sending this my way)

A delightful post on how Cloudflare uses lava lamps as a secondary source of randomness to seed the entropy pool for their cryptographic needs (based on a design originally built by Silicon Graphics).

I love how accessible this post is, there’s also more technical version with all the nitty-gritty details.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have processes in place to identify domestic threats, they simply failed to implement them out of fear of Trump loyalists and, presumably, Trump himself. Josh Kovensky investigates how this came to pass for Talking Points Memo:

Nobody wanted to write a formal intelligence report about this, in part out of fear that such a report would be very poorly received by the MAGA folks within DHS,” one former DHS official who served in the Trump administration told TPM, on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

Time and again, Republicans have proven that their job of keeping Americans safe is secondary to aligning facts to fit the narrative that they alone can keep us safe. The only reason we even have a Department of Homeland Security is because Republicans failed to respond properly to the intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack.

We’ve known since before Trump was elected the FBI and DHS are filled with partisans who oppose Democratic leadership as a matter of course. One of the many challenges of the Biden administration is going to be how to root them out.

It’s now been a week since Trump’s failed insurrection and attempt to overthrow the election he lost. He has, as of about an hour ago, been impeached for a historic second time.

Wyman brings an incisive, historical perspective:

No violent political event happens in isolation. Something like what happened last Wednesday is always part of a broader trend or pattern, with both direct antecedents and successors. In other words, something happened before to make it possible, and it will lead to something else afterward.

This sounds basic, and it is, but bear with me for a moment. We have a strong tendency to understand events unfolding as a story, a narrative, with all the structural beats we expect from a story: beginning, rising action, climax, resolution. Even as we’re consciously aware that there will be a tomorrow, a next week, and a next year, it’s hard to avoid treating the most recent big thing - in this case, the riot on the Capitol - as either the end or beginning of one particular story.

Narrative is how we process information and give the world some shape and meaning. But it’s deeply misleading as an attempt to understand the complex interactions between past and present that define a political system.

What happened last Wednesday was the result of weeks of screaming lies from Republican elected officials and media figures, not least the president; years of increasingly positive rhetoric around political violence, and the dehumanization of political opponents, from many of those same figures; the lack of crackdowns on far-right violence and instigation going back to clashes in Portland, Berkeley, Charlottesville, and before; the coalescence of a specific form of American nationalism rooted in property ownership, firearms, whiteness, and the unstinting belief that only they embody the true American nation; the growing strength of the militia movement during the Obama and Clinton presidencies; and deeply rooted traditions of American political violence before that, going back to Reconstruction and the foundational acts of rebellion that separated the colonies from Great Britain. Those are just a few things, not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination, and we could go on and on.

Over the course of the past week, details have emerged about exactly what happened last Wednesday — this timeline from The New York Times is an incredible resource — but Wyman’s predictions about this being only the beginning seem true. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared members of congress were nearly murdered and Representative Mikie Sherrill claimed Republican members of congress were giving “reconnaissance” tours to the very people who would carry out the attack. This was a tragedy and it could have been worse, given American’s penchant for arming themselves to the teeth. Everyone involved, starting with the president and sitting members of congress, need to be brought to justice.

Ted Gioia has been tracking big sales of musicians’ back catalogs — his analysis is pretty strident and points to a future where the music industry of the next five years looks a lot like publishing does today; musicians are trying to get ahead of the curve and prepare for a world dominated by a few streaming proivders.

As this Marketwatch piece notes, there are a few other timely factors as well. The pandemic has made touring, which accounts for a huge amount of a band’s revenue, impossible. A combination of low interest rates (for buyers) and the possibility of higher estate taxes (for sellers) also makes the timing right. And there’s also facing up to that other inevitability besides taxes:

Prince. Aretha Franklin. James Brown. Tom Petty.

Besides being beloved music legends, what do these icons have in common? They died without leaving wills to dictate how to manage their estates, and so the rights to their songs and other assets got tangled up in lawsuits.

Everything about this wonderful dive into Robert Caro’s extensive collection of notes and writing, and the plan for making them accessible via the New-York Historical Society, just feels so New York.

Mr. Caro grew up on Central Park West, between 93rd Street and 94th Street. His mother, Cele, learned she had cancer when he was 5 and died when he was 11. On many Saturdays, her sister, his Aunt Bea, would take the boy to lose himself in either the American Museum of Natural History or the New-York Historical Society.

Fast-forward to 2018. Mr. Caro realized that he would have to deal someday with his extensive archives; a few libraries had already inquired. “But my head was always in my book,” he said.

In his heart, though, Mr. Caro knew where he wanted his papers to go: the same historical society building where he found distraction as a boy, a beloved aunt by his side. He asked a friend to inquire whether there was interest. There most emphatically was.

Everything you need to know about how this impeachment is going. Dan is such a treasure.

Camila Vergara, reviewing Patrick Boucheron’s biography of Machiavelli The Art of Teaching People What to Fear, which argues the Italian has been misunderstood as being anti-republican when in reality he wrote against the kind of oligarchic power he saw in the Medicis.

Given the pervasive lack of realism in U.S. politics today, it is clear that the republic would appear to Machiavelli as a corrupt order, not because the powerful few break the rules or because a faction attempts to undermine the integrity of elections, but because the people have been “either deceived or forced into decreeing their own ruin.” Perhaps the most important part of Machiavelli’s wisdom for our own time is that republics tend to become oligarchic, giving the powerful few indirect control over government.

When our attention turns to Machiavelli in times like these, we should take it as a sign to pay attention.