Chapbook
[T]here’s a new consciousness that seems to be trending [...] marked by quotations from sources who quote other material in their speech, such as a notorious post or a meme, or imagine the state of mind of a third party and then paraphrase or quote that third party. There’
LIS + DataSci
I wrote the following post for my LinkedIn account, in response to a viral post that urged data analysts to do a better job selling their work: I used to spend a staggering amount of time listening to music podcasts. Every now and then, a song from one of the
In Memoriam
Originally written on October 7, 2024: Many years ago, I took a dancing class, and learned an important lesson: The right dancing partner can make you feel like a better dancer than you really are. In the class, we would switch every couple of minutes from one partner to the
My life in micro-publishing and text-based social networking: Usenet (1992-2008) WordPress (2003-2026) Twitter (2008-2023) Facebook (2008-2025) Bluesky (2024-present) ...and now Ghost.
Philosophy
[I]t is not necessary to choose between social control administered by the aggrandized state [collectivism] and a self-assertive individualism subject to no social control [libertarianism]. That supposedly exclusive choice, which causes such furious party antagonism in our society, overlooks entirely one of the oldest, best established, and most
Politics
How [is] a democracy to become so well-educated [that it can] find the answers to [its] problems? The necessary education for popular government cannot be obtained in the schools and colleges, from books, newspapers, lectures, and the radio, alone. Popular education is indispensable, and I should be the last
History
Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information [...N]ewspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves. —Robert Darnton, “The Library in the New Age”, The New York Review of Books (12 Jun
LIS + DataSci
As do-it-yourself information finding in cyberspace becomes more common, will librarians go the way of custom tailors—unusual and perhaps a little antiquated? Off-the-shelf clothing doesn't fit anybody as perfectly as custom-made clothing would, but it is good enough (and cheap enough) for
Weeknote
§1 Writing prompts “It's just that I remember you telling me that you would be glad to take care of this kind of thing. I'm sorry I keep forgetting that you never meant what you said.” “She wants to feel good about herself. Don't
Politics
Even before Dobbs, it was clear that the devotion of many American conservatives to restricting or outlawing abortion was about regulating the lives of women, not about “life”. When you put that together with the “family values” fairy tale of a society where sexuality was reproductive and contained within a
Weeknote
§1 The benefits of watching baseball The best baseball announcers have voices like cat purrs, reducing stress and healing bones.
Weeknote
§1 The #1 song a century ago What the kids were listening to this time of year in 1924.