dreampepper

[1] The New Yorker - Will Shortz’s Life in Crosswords. (archive link) "The veteran Times puzzle editor discusses his favorite clues, debates in the crossword community, and unexpectedly finding his first serious romance."

As Sandy Weisz from the Puzzle League says, "If you know puzzles, you know of Will Shortz. In the latest New Yorker, Liz Maynes-Aminzade interviews him about, among other things, how the NYTimes' daily puzzle, seen by many as the industry's standard bearer, has kept up — or not — with modern culture, and with demands for clues that address a more diverse set of life experiences.

My favorite question in the piece is about the desire for a canon of universal knowledge vs the acknowledgement that such a thing doesn't exist. For me, I’m constantly feeling the tension between wanting to use my platform to boost ideas, people, historical events, and works of art that I think are underrepresented, but also knowing that puzzles don't work unless they rely on, for the most part, things the solver already knows. It's a tough balance to strike."

It's worth mentioning that Will also shares about his personal life, which isn't something that happens often in spite of his celebrity, and specifically on finding love at the age of 70. Shortz and his partner are planning on getting married later this year.

[2] London Review of Books - Diary: Saving a Life, by Patricia Lockwood. Only Patricia Lockwood (often described as “the poet laureate of Twitter”) could turn a story about her husband's sudden life-threatening intestinal torsion into something akin to the sublime. Truly, she is a treasure.

"I was by this time ill – as far back as the plane ride I had cleverly been developing bronchitis, from those cubes of cold air that tumbled through the doors of UCLA – and I kept rising out of myself not through fever, but some supersession of the subtle body that watches things happen to us down on earth. It watched as I bent my head to Jason’s stomach, listening to his inner workings to hear whether he still moved. A frightening Build-a-Bear arrived from my publicist. The ceremony I had come for (the Dylan Thomas Prize) came and went without me; I actually won, which seemed like the funniest outcome. Caspian, my agent, showed up in the lobby one morning with a crystal book and a cheque, and Jason and I laughed at our reflections in the gold elevator as we carried them upstairs. Was the Heathrow we had landed at not the solid and substantial one, but a dome of the fantastic, where we found ourselves with crystal books and unexpected cheques and second acts in our hands?"

[3] The Convivial Society: Vol 2, No. 16: Notes From the Metaverse, by L. M. Sacasas. On modern media and where it interacts with culture, as well as creates it, as well as culture cycles, the commodification of life, virtual spaces, and more. It's an incredibly smart and thoughtful piece. My excerpts do not do it justice.

"We never go back. This is not to say that elements of the past can never reassert themselves or re-appear in interesting ways, but we never go back to a past state of affairs because you cannot undo what has happened since. Even when elements of the past are retrieved or patterns echo, they will have been changed by their passage to the present. I say this, in part, because when new technologies appear, it is tempting to cast them in light of older technologies or in relation to older social states. Some of this reflects the understandable tendency to make sense of what is novel by reference to what is familiar, hence the fact that we still speak of web “pages.” But it applies, too, particularly with new media, to the idea that we are thrust into an older form of culture by a new technology.

[...] Digital media does not make whole what had been broken apart. It’s rather more like having the pieces thrown into a pile together. Work from home is not a return to agrarian modes of relatively autonomous subsistence. For most people, it is a job and a boss that are being introduced into the rhythms of home life, in which children, as has been widely recognized, are not meaningfully integrated but rather appear chiefly as logistical problems to be solved. What will be needed, in my view, is a new way of thinking about work altogether, not merely a migration of old jobs into new settings. And it may be that we get there, and that digital technologies will play a key role in making it happen. But the metaverse as it is presently being packaged is, from this vantage point, a tool that is already obsolete, centered as it is on virtual simulations of traditional office work."

There's just so much in this newsletter. Finding it recently felt like the old internet opening up, words tearing through me, tying thoughts together that had before been floating about, uncertain if they should connect. I am the audience for this, undoubtedly, it's all tech and philosophy and an aesthetically pleasing hybridization of insight and praxis, with quotes from Marshal McLuhan and Jacques Ellul mixed in with snippets of poetry, but perhaps that speaks to you, too. It's written by Michael Sacasas, an independent scholar of technology and culture, and the About Page describes it as "The Convivial Society is a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology and society. It’s grounded in the history and philosophy of technology, with more than a sprinkling of media ecology. No hot takes, only shamelessly deliberate considerations of the meaning of technology for human experience."

Also:

"It seems that the conglomeration of devices, apps, platforms, and networks that are now being repackaged as the metaverse simply push us along the path toward commercialization and datafication, the drive to render our experience quantifiable and subject to computational analysis. Life conducted within the metaverse is already reduced to data. If we were running up against the limits of profitably data-mining human experience in the so called “real world,” then translating even more of our experience into a realm of virtual simulacrum would open up a new frontier. Alternatively, if you’ve run out of physical goods to sell and physical spaces in which to place ads, then a new persistent virtual realm solves those problems. Either that or purchase ads in what may become the equivalent of billboards in space whose messages will be streamed via Youtube."