Coffee of Honor
I love coffee, I love Star Trek, and of course, I was going to love a recipe for Klingon coffee, known as Raktajino. The drink of choice of the Deep Space Nine senior staff and the impulse behind one of my favorite scenes in all of Star Trek:
I confess to enjoying mine with a great deal of weakness.
Absolute Power Can Be a Terrible Weakness
For those of you feeling fearful about the current Trump administration, Henry Farrell does a deep dive on the nature of power in the modern era as social coordination. He notes that in a lot of ways, for all of Trump’s bluster, they’re terrible at coordinating and tend to alienate those they most need.
This is an advantage to those who would stand against him, and we should seek to improve our own coordination in response.
The United State of Snitches
Another politics hit – this one about what the fundamental appeal of Trump is. I think two quotes summarize it the best:
“There aren’t really central tenets to Trumpism, at least beyond the bigoted defaults of the stupid and spiteful stripe of the American Elite from which Trump himself emerged; that absence of ethos, at least beyond the belief that it is the absolute and natural right of that rancid elect to prey upon everyone and everything else, constructs a perverse permission structure of its own. Trump did not invent any of this so much as it invented him, and the fantasy of Trumpism, for those who have remade or simply discovered themselves in the service of it, is that Trump’s followers might, through their service, claim for themselves the same privileges that Trump himself has so delighted in abusing. This is not how it works for followers, though, or with Trump; those who live to serve him have always very clearly been destined to be buried alive with him. It is, in every degrading sense, a sort of American Dream.”
“But for all of Miller’s furious Cobra Commander rhetoric, for all the metastatic gilding and trophy clutter in Trump’s Oval Office, for all the strident and signifying fascism down on the streets, the reality of all this is plain and shabby. It is not any kind of full-spectrum authoritarian command, or even the grubby paranoid snitchscape of oppressive surveillance states, but the more familiar sputtering busybody bullshit and hair-trigger offense of a deranged Homeowners Association.”
Never let them intimidate you into not fighting back. Understand them for who they are – they are still dangerous, but they are also kind of pathetic.
The Lost Art of Sweating Your Ass Off with Other Guys
Slightly less political – Jason Diamond of Esquire talks about the importance of a schvitz. Not just from the health perspective of a sauna or steam bath (although those are nice), but the sense of community it brings.
Getting out of isolation and back in touch with each other is one of my great missions in life, so I will always promote anything that accomplishes that.
One Vigilante, 22 Cell Tower Fires, and a World of Conspiracies
Speaking of isolation, this story by Brendan I. Koerner is a fun true crime read about cell tower fires in Texas. It’s also a tragedy about how isolation and the modern internet lead people down conspiratorial rabbit holes where all the world’s problems have simple solutions.
Marketing Attribution
I’ve gotten way into Tom Fishburne’s Marketoonist ever since I found his AI email cartoon. This one captures something I’ve always found deeply frustrating in marketing – the fact that the last touch gets all the credit, despite the fact that research has shown it’s the full journey that matters.
The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card, From Versailles to Microsoft Word
Nothing especially deep on this one. I just think the business cards are cool-looking, and I appreciate Elizabeth Goodspeed’s history of them. The texture of things is sometimes lost in digital convenience.
A Small Number of Samples Can Poison LLMs of Any Size
A study done by Anthropic (one of the big 3 AI companies) revealed that it is SHOCKINGLY easy to poison an LLM. It only requires 250 malicious documents to convince the AI that something is true, regardless of the LLM’s size.
This has very concerning implications for the safety of LLMs as well as their trustworthiness, although you shouldn’t be trusting them that much to begin with.
Stew Kids on the Block
I’m not a trend chaser by nature, but I enjoyed this story by John Devore about Stewfluencers, especially because it taps into a few of my favorite topics: delicious stews, interacting with the physical world, and approaching things at a more gradual pace. Time is an ingredient in and of itself.
What if This is It?
Prickly Oxheart creates an almost anti-FOMO philosophy. Don’t worry so much about missing out, don’t fear that you’re going to get things right. Or as they put it best:
“This isn’t resignation. It’s rebellion. It’s a refusal to treat your life like a rough draft, like preparation for the real thing that’s always just around the corner. It’s an insistence that this moment — this imperfect, incomplete, thoroughly ordinary moment — is worthy of your full attention.”
Lightspeeed and Nightmare Podcasts
As I’ve been reading more, I also find myself wanting to listen to short fiction more. Lightspeed (for sci-fi and fantasy) and Nightmare (for horror) scratch the itch perfectly. Each podcast comes out about twice a month, usually with two stories. One long, one short.
The stories (from the eponymous magazines) are of excellent quality and wide variety, but the real selling point is the narration. Produced by legendary audiobook reader Stefan Rudnicki, the podcasts have a solid roster of professional audiobook readers, creating an incredible experience.
The World Series
Man, did I pick a great time to get into baseball. I was never much one for sports, but somehow over the past year, I’ve been getting more and more interested in baseball whenever the Dodgers were on TV in a bar. I credit my friends with this one, but while we will likely never see a World Series like this again… I get it now in a way I couldn’t before.
Patrick Regan 
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