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2021: May we rebuild, but build better.
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Fantastic afternoon snowshoeing. Just me, my gear, and the best jazz of the year in my ears.
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Now that’s better.
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The proceedings of a workshop held in September 1975. I’m half-tempted to read it.
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No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.
Facebook is a Doomsday Machine | The Atlantic
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This might be the first year in quite a while that I don’t finish a year-end music mix.
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0107 – b moll — what a fantastic little film.
Bright nights, lonely crowds – a Tokyo train speeds through urban contradictions | Aeon
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Christmas night companion.
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Lost in Space
We use our location as a way to think about our identity. In the case of the cosmos the timescale is well beyond our very short lifetimes or even beyond our comprehension. Some of the answers to these questions won’t be solved while we are still here but will be left to the incoming generations and the truth is there are questions that will simply be passed on and never answered. The quest might seem a bit nonsensical. Why does it matter when or how the universe began? Why does it matter when or how it ends? It matters for the same reason your locations throughout your life carry context for who you are. We exist on a timeline together — we pop into existence and then one day we stop. It matters for the same reason one of the first questions you learn to ask in another language is, “where are you from?” To know where you are at any given time is a frame of reference in which to measure your life in some way and in many ways those locations, those slices of time, hold a great deal of meaning.
A poignant reflection on the meaning of existence in a universe we’ll never understand.
An Atlas of the Cosmos | Longreads
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[E]very part of [NASA’s] quarantine procedure suffered disastrous breaches that would surely have exposed Earth to lunar microbes – had they existed. The microscopic universe, it turned out, was simply impossible to control.
Fascinating.
A lunar pandemic | Aeon
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Jupiter & Saturn’s Great Conjunction +1. It was overcast yesterday, so while I didn’t see them at their closest, what I saw today still swept me with wonder. I hope I’m still around for the one on 15 March 2080.
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I’m pleased to see that Minnesota-based climate journalist & scientist Eric Holthaus, my favorite writer from the soon-to-be-shuttered slow news site The Correspondent, has started his own Substack newsletter, The Phoenix.
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Before big farms, this plant alone could feed many people… Grandmothers said these turnips point towards each other, so you’ll always know where the next one will be.
I missed this article back in October.
Thíŋpsiŋla: The Edible Bounty Beneath the Great Plains | Serious Eats
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Two seasonal cocktails better than egg nog: a Tom & Jerry and a Coquito.
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This longtime favorite is the tea equivalent of a Gary Snyder poem.
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2020 strikes again. I was a Correspondent subscriber from its US launch, and greatly valued the “unbreaking news” approach to important issues. I’ll miss the thoughtful, deeper dives it championed.
The Correspondent will stop publishing on 1 January 2021. | The Correspondent
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It seemed as if [COVID] was coming straight for JaMarcus, but he wasn’t able to isolate. Every other day, he still needed to trek to a dialysis clinic to spend hours tethered to a machine, surrounded by strangers.
Tethered to the Machine | ProPublica
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When Apple Music’s algorithm starts serving up albums you bought from BMG’s record club while in high school, have you come full circle?
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Turmeric-Ginger, tree.
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More baking & shoveling. Today’s batch: sumac-vanilla shortbread, and the foot-deep, frozen windrows of plow leavings.
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Peak winter today: I baked a batch of gingersnaps & shoveled our first significant snowfall — about three inches of beautiful, heavy, wet snow.
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10 December 1967:
Redding is flying up from Saturday night shows in Cleveland in the well-used green-and-white Beechcraft 18 airplane he had just bought for $78,000.
Madison In The Sixties – The Death Of Otis Redding | WORT 89.9 FM
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How nice to get a Christmas card from a President who shares (many of) your values!
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Звёздочка.
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I’ll be forever grateful for my visit to the Pec. I’d so looked forward to returning one day. Another loss in a year of far too many unnecessary losses.
El Chapultepec, Denver’s iconic jazz club and bar, closing permanently after 87 years | Denver Post
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