In The Vast of Night, 16-year old evening telephone operator Fay Crocker and radio DJ Everett Sloan stumble across a strange sound in the telephone lines and radio airways. What is this whirring sound, almost like a windmill, but less natural, with a distinct atonal voice coming through.

There’s a featurette showing an impressive long tracking shot that last about 4 minutes in The Vast of Night. It is impressive and well-conceived. But the best trick in The Vast of Night comes in the scene directly following this shot. Everett patches the sound Fay heard through to the radio and asks, “Has anyone ever heard such a thing?“ That’s when caller Billy is introduced. As Billy tells his story of strange events during his service in the air force, the screen goes black for long stretches of time. Billy is a voice on the radio, and we get to experience him entirely as a voice on the radio. There’s no cut to Billy. Nothing visual establishes him. His story is told to us as the characters in the film experiences it, with an occasional flash of our protagonists reacting in to something important that he says. We listen, and the movie deftly gives us cues on how to react by showing us Everett and Fay just every so often.

From there, the chase is on, first to another town denizen with stories of people in the sky and finally to look at what it is that’s in the sky, as reported by those few people who are not at the high school basketball game.

At times, The Vast of Night is a bit too cute. We open to a Twilight Zone-like TV show on an old tube set that’s meant to tell us we are watching a similar television program. There are several shots throughout that swap the dark, grainy almost Instagram-like tones of the majority of the movie to a faded, cyan-heavy, tube-TV look to remind us, “This is all a show.” It’s not just visually unappealing, but it served to take me out of the film and lower the stakes. We’re in early 50s, small town rural America at night where the streets are dark with a masterful soundtrack and rich diegetic sound that raise the stakes and intensity. It’s dark, there’s naturalistic dialog with mumbling and extreme crosstalk. And then we’re forced to become all too aware of the hand of the director, ripping us to a television screen, as if to say, “Don’t be scared. Don’t feel anxious. This is just a story.”

The Vast of Night joins a rich tradition of smaller, less expensive films that uses its budget well to tell a science fiction story that feels real and personal. But the filmmakers need to communicate that this modern film was just a piece of 50s pulp television ultimately undermines its successful world building instead of enhancing it. If they only had the conviction to let the audience live in Cayuga, New Mexico…

Each time you write something to post on social media, think, “Actually, should this go on my blog?”. ¹

Each time you write something to post on your blog, think, “Actually, should this go in my journal/diary?”

Each time you write something to save in your journal, think, “Actually, does this need to be written down at all?”

Sometimes the right thing to do is to sit and feel what you’re feeling, think what you’re thinking, and then let those feelings and thoughts dissipate.

Brought to you by a tweet draft I pasted into MarsEdit to make a blog post that I then pasted into Day One instead.

This review contains spoilers.

Movies like Greenland have certain beats they have to hit.

Start with a normal life that is revealed to already be imperfect or broken in some way, usually between two lovers. Underestimate a coming threat. Rapid realization that things are about to get dangerous fast, showing lots of fear and uncertainty. Take action to survive. Show the world falling a part and have otherwise “normal” seeming people act in ways that under normal circumstances are completely immoral. Let the audience question what happens to morality under these new conditions. Race to survival through trial and tribulation. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die, but you always resolve that initial conflict shown from the Before Times.

Did I just describe Greenland? Yes, and plenty of other films/stories like it. But just because there is a formula, it doesn’t mean the formula is bad. Greenland executes this race to survival very well. I felt the rush of adrenaline and anxiety throughout this movie. I felt genuine fear. I felt genuinely uncertain if they would make it.

There’s real horror when a message flashes on the television at a birthday party that makes it clear that only one family in this suburban neighborhood was being chosen to evacuate. I was already anxious as Gerard Butler didn’t immediately and quietly throw his family in the car when he got home from the grocery store where he received his first warning. And I felt the crushing claustrophobia of the crowds at the military air base trying to squeeze in to be allowed on the planes leaving for Greenland. I was nearly crushed by the child abduction and felt genuine relief when our main family is united at grandpa’s farm house.

If there’s anything that detracts from this movie, I think it’s the happy ending. I’m not sure there was any need for the shots of destruction around the Earth. I don’t think there was a need for showing the bunker doors opening and the return of wildlife. In fact, I think the movie plays fast and loose with the audience only once, and that’s when it shows the “flashes”, telegraphed repeatedly as what you see before dying, prior to the films unnecessary coda. This should have been a signal they did not survive. There’s no reason not to end the movie there. I don’t think Greenland is ruined by its happy ending, but I think just a few choices in how it’s presented were just a bit inelegant compared to the rest of the film. I also didn’t like how a character literally has to say, “You were chosen because you’re a structural engineer who builds buildings.” This should have been clear to the audience and characters without being spelled out.

Overall, this is a story that’s been told, but it’s told competently with great acting performances and some stunning visuals that are well deployed. The ending is a little bit creaky compared to an otherwise extremely competent execution.

Punditry can tend to focus too much on decorum and terminology, like the overachieving students so many of us once were, conflating the ridiculous with the unserious. The incoherence and the incompetence of the attempt do not change its nature, however, nor do those traits allow us to dismiss it or ignore it until it finally fails on account of its incompetence.

– Xeynep Tufekci on Trump’s autogolpe

As someone who generally wants the web to move away from a monolithic culture who is somewhat tech, I will often run into pitches for the decentrtalized web. But I think this is a solid post that explains why a decentralized technology is not a solution to cultural decentralization. Instead, they may create culturally centralized spaces that cannot be meaningfully constrained.

I think there are three groups that should be addressed at once by any policy looking to provide relief to student debt holders.

1. Current student debt holders
2. Future college attendees
3. Non-college attendees

These three groups are more relevant than income brackets for understanding the moral basis for debt relief. Student debt relief is not about strict income redistribution, but instead about:

1. Rationalizing the debt load that college attendees have taken on in the last twenty years with the costs to past generations. Recent college attendees pay significantly higher costs and have had two (or maybe 3 if you squeak in the tech bubble) major recessions that they have faced. The Warren plan of forgiving the first $50,000 of student loan debt works nicely here as a way to make the debt load of recent students better resemble the debt loads of previous generations of college graduates.
2. We have to also tackle the costs of college going forward, because they are still too high, and debt relief does nothing to avoid recreating this problem. Here, we can imagine a number of policies that the federal government could pursue to curtail rising costs. I would love to see some combination of restricting federal financial aid and student loans to certain top-level caps and remove institutions from being eligible for federal support that raise costs too much year over year with an increase in Pell Grants. We need both more grants for low income college attendees and a reduction in the federal governments role in ensuring the higher education market can easily increase their sticker price.
3. Federally guaranteed sick and paid family leave is long overdue, and will materially change the condition for non-college graduates most of all. College graduates are far more likely to have jobs that provide some form of paid sick and family leave as a private benefit, but these benefits should be universal. And although student debt relief is not about strict income redistribution, there’s no strong moral reason why we should provide large assistance to past college attendees without providing something to the many Americans struggling who don’t and haven’t attended college. Pursuing a parallel policy that will most impact non-college graduates helps to demonstrate that these policies are meant to provide relief to all Americans. An alternative policy that would also pair well here is a raise in the federal minimum wage and no longer excluding restaurant waitstaff from the minimum wage.

That’s how I’d pursue tackling debt relief as solid stimulus during COVID, while bending the cost curve on higher education and not leaving behind many Americans who don’t end up in higher education.

Our government is:

1. Suppressing the vote of the opposition.
2. Threatening and inciting violent militias to rise up against the opposition.
3. Increasing protectionism and economic isolation through tariffs while subsidizing domestic industry (largerly farmers) for their losses.
4. Pushes for a white, Christian, cis, hetero monoculture.
5. Worships their current leader, believing he cannot do any wrong.
6. Worships the cops as always acting in the best interest of True Citizens and the cornerstone of our society.
7. Actively gerrymanders (as do dems, but less completely) to ensure minority party rule, and goes even further so as to strip power from statewide offices during lame duck sessions when the opposition wins.
8. Believes in violence as a core method to secure their ends, using it to project power at home and abroad.

Now read the introduction to the Fascism article on Wikipedia.

Can anyone honestly say that Trumpism is not fascism?

Our only hope to escape this fate is for democrats to decisively take the White House and the Senate and for their to be a peaceful transition in power, Hopefully, the win will be so decisive that the GOP will abandon Trumpism. But if we cannot achieve that, then the narrow Democrat victory must enact a series of structural forms to end minoritarianism.

If the Democrats lose, then I’m afraid we’ve lost the country and the damage will become irrevocable and accelerate.

I am terrible at comforting people. I just want to do something. I want to solve the problem. I want to say the magic words that fix things. I want my love and my care to make it all go away.

Of course, when I am in a bad mood, there’s nothing the people around me can do to soothe me. There’s nothing to fix. Nothing to say. Often I have to let it fizzle out of me. I will just… run out of the energy to feel quite so foul and return to some kind of mean. Sometimes I need to read a book or watch a movie or show that will get me crying. Often I just need to eat or drink a Diet Coke, because I’m a cranky fuck when I’m hungry or under-caffeinated.

But it has almost never been the case that someone can say something to me or do something for me that fixes it. I have to deal with it and even dealing with it often just involves enduring the lows until they fade.

And yet, I still so desperately want my own care to burn through and evaporate the dark clouds of those I love. So much so that I find myself speaking when I should be quiet. Offering council when I need to offer an ear. Trying so hard to be the who or what they need, even though I know I’m nothing of the sort.

People are not problems to be solved, but that’s the only hammer in my tool belt.

Amy Coney Barrett doesn’t deserve your defense because of her religion any more than she deserves criticism for it.

Of course, the actual critique is not her religious belief, but her belief that she has a duty to use her position in the courts to impose those beliefs on others.

The conservative movement talks a lot about patriotism. Their vision of patriotism is celebrating the history of a country whose past reflects their current values. This is not an active patriotism of taking part in the American project today and weaving ourselves in her fabric.

A higher form of patriotism actively participates in the American, small-l, liberal democratic tradition. In this patriotism, pride in America is connected to how she welcomed those of us with nowhere else to go. Her ongoing project and triumphs come from her struggle to build a functioning civil society out of radical pluralism. Patriotism in America is using the civic process to accept and incorporate people of all backgrounds into her body-politic.

I am Jewish, and until recently, I have found safety in America. That safety has been challenged many times in the past, and has, at times been compromised. Patriots view this with shame. Patriots view slavery with shame. They view Jim Crow with shame. They view the backlash against the Civil Rights movement, past and current tense, with shame. They view the treatment of Chinese immigrants throughout the 19th and early 20th century with shame. They view the treatment of Catholics in public schools with shame, and the questions of JFK’s loyalty to the nation with shame.

Patriotic America celebrates radical pluralism. Every moment we celebrate in American political religion is about expansion of our ideals, welcoming new people and new thoughts into our project. Every moment we view with shame is about rejection.

It is in the context that the pre-accusations that Democrats or “The Left” are and will attack Amy Coney Barrett on her religion bring to mind the words of the Bard– she doth protest too much.

In a now off-cited law review article written when Barrett was 22, she herself posits that a Catholic judge may not be able to sit impartially over a death penalty case. The article is detailed, strong scholarship, if boring to someone disinterested in the finer points of the teachings of the Catholic Church. While it repeatedly states that trying to bring Catholic dogma and the law into alignment is neither possibly nor advisable for a judge, it makes clear there are moments a Catholic judge must use their discretion to act in accordance with their faith. Fair enough– exercising discretion in ways that align to personal moral beliefs is part of the role of being a judge, wherever those beliefs stem from.

Barrett is clear– her particular beliefs, grounded in her particular sect of Catholicism, will impact her jurisprudence, just like every judges. With her paltry three-year long history as a judge, we know she is being chosen, in fact, to sit on the highest court for possibly the next 40 years based not on her history as a jurist, but instead based on her belief. You cannot separate the reason the conservative right is excited for a Justice Barrett from her religion. Her legal scholarship is infused with her religion, and her record on her religious beliefs is thicker than her record as a judge.

So yes, her personal Catholicism and what we know about it is going to be deeply entwined with any rigorous discussion of where her jurisprudence will steer the country. That’s not an attack on Catholicism, her religion does not disqualify her, that her religion impacts her morality and legal scholarship does not disqualify her.

Amy Coney Barrett holds views I find personally abhorrent. So do other members of the court, Catholic or not, and so do many members of the GOP and the conservative movement. I oppose them for those beliefs. I oppose them because I believe that they will lead to the material deprivation of the people I share this country with. I oppose them because I believe they will lead us away from America’s moments of radical pluralism. I oppose them because I believe they are wrong for me as an individual and wrong for this country. I oppose them because the Christian Conservative movement oppresses, no matter how much they claim oppression for themselves.

If you think this means I am anti-Catholic, it is probably because you believe that I cannot consider a narrow set of your beliefs as abhorrent while practicing radical acceptance for you in the society we share. This is not true. I can love you in spite of your beliefs. I can protect your right to those beliefs. I can love you in the beliefs that we share and welcome all of you with radical pluralism. The ends of my acceptance lie when your personal power and exercise of those beliefs endanger the “institutions of liberty” ¹.

A Justice Barrett on this court certainly qualifies.

McGhee, the former Demos president, framed progressives’ decision-making as a matter of priorities. “You have to be committed to winning real gains for the people at every step of the way as you build power,” she said. Progressives “stopped fighting on Medicaid expansion in predominantly Black states, and people are dying because we only want to talk about Medicare for All.”

This great profile of Sean McElwee is also the perfect description of why I think the Left, and especially the DSA, are both horrificially bad at politics and making it harder to achieve the progressive goals I mostly share with them.

Hey #rstats, so I do a pattern like this all the time— essentially fill in missing values from some other data source. I feel like there must be some *_join or other incantation that does this cleaner… is there or should I just write my own utility function?

1
2
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transactions %>%
  left_join(po_vendors, by = "po") %>%
  mutate(vendor = coalesce(vendor.x, vendor.y)) %>%
  select(-matches("\\..$"))

The one liberal value blands tend to elide is inequality, because while blands are, by definition, not opulent, neither are they bargain-basement. For the rich, blands are an ironic normcore trifle; for the aspiring middle, blands offer a fleeting facsimile of prosperity; and for the poor, blands are either the products they make, or the services they provide.

— Ben Schott, Welcome to Your Bland New World

I both loathe and love Blands myself. I am the target market, of course, but often find them disappointing relative to the standard bearers.

What I find attractive about most direct to consumer companies is not discussed too much in this article, which rightly criticizes their faux ethics and VC-backed rise and fall. No, what I like about most blands is an uncomplicated, consistent buying experience. Blands and their marketing buzz means I can get access to sufficient reviews and testimonials to know if the product is good. I can rely on an easy online shopping experience. Shipping is consistent and tracked. Return policies are reasonable.

It wasn’t long ago that none of this was a given on the web, and therefore your choices were in person shopping or Amazon. Or at least it seemed that way to me.

In that sense, the really disruption to Blands has not been their proliferation beyond what the market can bear, nor has it been the Instagram dropshipping clones. The real change has been Shopify, and to a lesser degree Stripe and Square, which have made it easier for small businesses to have the same solid online shopping experience that Blands had.

Increasingly when I buy online, I recognize the same store design, the same email confirmation, and the same shipping tracking. Thi s is not bland— my experience in stores is consistent when buying in brick-and-mortar stores, and this consistency online is welcome. It increases my personal trust. It’s enabling small businesses with quality products to have presence.

Most of the Blands don’t have much to offer me anymore. They can’t differentiate amongst themselves, and they can’t compete with quality products from companies who sell great products for a profit instead of blitzscaling.

Worth It is an occasional series on this blog where I post a bunch of links to things I’ve read recently.

The reality of Black pain is breaking American sports’ status quo:

The most powerful corporations in this country have said these routine encounters have become unacceptable, thus it is not an embarrassment for the leagues that the players chose not to play, but wholly appropriate, an exacting of the promise. The message players sent was not that point guards are now moonlighting as legislators, but literally, their humanity must come first – that these Black lives literally matter.

Kaepernick was right then, he’s right now, and the conservative, white backlash will be judged poorly by history. It’s thrilling to see athletes use their power.

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?:

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

It’s hard for me not to see a failure to empower experts in favor of proliferating small democracy everywhere as one of the main things that ills American society. Easy for me to say as a white, well-educated technocrat myself. But over and over again, in transit, in health, in education, and land management it seems, we seem to face insurmountable problems creating by decades of failure to value and empower expertise. It’s a dangerous game– just look at the racist impacts of “urban renewal” in the recent past to find ample examples of why we should be cautious of experts. But the unfortunate combination of racism and ideal about individual freedoms have commingled into what at times feels like an insurmountable barrier against positivist action for good.

The Case for Adding 672 Million More Americans:

If you tripled the population of the United States, adding the new Americans only to the Lower 48 and leaving Alaska and Hawaii intact and unchanged, the main part of America would be only about as dense as France and less than half as dense as Germany.

I probably won’t read One Billion Americans, but that’s mostly because I find it hard to imagine I’ll disagree with any of it.

What Does Everyone See in Jesse Plemons?:

Plemons can toggle easily between eggheads and dimwits, good guys and bad guys, and it’s almost impossible to describe what he’s doing differently because he doesn’t appear to be doing anything at all.

A fascinating profile of a recent that guy in Hollywood.

Georgia accused of wrongfully purging nearly 200,000 from voter rolls: report:

Anyone paying attention knows how evil the Georgia’s Secretary of State office has been in recent years. Just another reason to be terrified of the fragility of our system.

Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’:

But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Yes, everyone has read or has read a hot take about this story. Here’s the essence though– Trump cannot fathom the existence of sacrifice or altruism. Individuals can only act in self-interest, and any hint otherwise is not just suspect, but a sign of being a “loser” or a “sucker”. Our country is in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use the word “our” unless speaking in the majestic plural.

Speak no evil: The secret to keeping Connecticut segregated:

One offered that Black people didn’t live here because “they” don’t like rural areas. Or because they can’t afford it. If Will Smith wanted to buy a house in town, he certainly could… Grown men actually argued that there was no segregation here, because the town would welcome the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Not one person in this story would recognize or understand their actions as racist. They would be appalled if you used that word. And perhaps worse, as a result, not one of them would understand that their actions are a part of an entire system chipping away at Black people in America ever day of their lives in this, 2020. This is the use of that small-d democracy from earlier posts to create a system of oppression and deny it– to put ones knee on the neck of Black America and then claim that the knee never existed, no matter how many times we’ve all seen the footage. This is the worst kind of racism, because it is so hard to eradicate even as it is so effective at stopping liberation.

Today’s Hike

Today’s Lunch

And some updates on our Lettuce Grow

What have I done?

In my attempts to reduce doomscrolling in this triple tsunami of pandemic, recession, and election, I began subscribing to Twitter accounts in my RSS reader using Feedbin.

The idea was, hey, it’s really easy to choose just a few accounts. I want to actually see what these, say 50 people say, and make sure I don’t miss things. But I can read these 50 outside of the algorithm, in a place that’s harder to mash the retweet with comment button, in a place that won’t encourage me to post and jump into The Discourse ¹.

Two fucking hundred unread. 36 accounts, one day, two fucking hundred unread. Dread.

What have I done?

I didn’t want 200 things to read from across the day in chronological order. This feels like doomscrolling in a new place. Why are you all tweeting so much? Why can’t I get rid of some of these accounts without a feeling of remorse?

So I did two things that helped make me feel sane. First, on many days, I just Mark All as Read and clear it out. It doesn’t matter if I’ve read these posts are not. No one is checking. There’s no penalty to opting out if it feels pointless, or overwhelming, or uninterested.

The second thing was more interesting. I thought a bit about how I organized my own webpage, chronological by day. I did this because I wanted my own stream of thoughts to be read in order. I want my first post of the day to be read first, and my last post to be read last. This is a personal blog, and the narrative on here is my life and there’s no reason why looking at my blog that my life should be running in some bizarre reverse order.

So I sorted and read the Tweets I subscribed to the same way. Rather than putting each of the accounts in a Twitter folder and attempting to recreate a chronological feed, I instead pretended that each Twitter account was a blog, and I read those blogs in chronological order, person by person. And you know what? Their lives had narrative too. Reading their posts in order, together, and each account I followed this way had a narrative. It was not this mixed up jumbled feed of different thoughts and ideas and topics and voices coming at me all at once, whether reverse chronological or algorithmically sorted. Instead, I was reading what people were writing.

And it turns out done like this, 200 posts can be churned through in tens of minutes. That includes me clicking over and reading full articles or blog posts that are linked to, one of the main reason I follow these accounts anyway.

What’s overwhelming and terrible about Twitter, what I contribute to that I hate so much, is the Twitter conversation. There are only a few true conversations each day worth following and paying attention to in my feed. Most of the time, what’s actually quite nice about Twitter is that it’s where people write microblogs. It’s the ideas they’re thinking about, stories they’re telling, and great articles I would otherwise miss that they’re sharing throughout the day.

I knew it back when Facebook introduced the News Feed, but I forgot about it over the last 14 years or so– the feed is the problem, not the posts and not the people.

Based on the data, there’s no question in my mind that NYC should be leading the country in showing us how to get back to in-person schooling, safely. Cases are clearly now at 100-200 per day, hospitalizations in the low tens, deaths in single digits in a city of millions.

It’s ok to start cautious– elementary school only, maybe even not a full 5 days a week. This isn’t really supported by the data, but it’s good to build confidence in procedures and confidence in parents. Show that you can do contact tracing when a student or teacher gets sick– it will happen. Show that you have a plan in place to respond to some event. But NYC is as safe for children as anywhere will be for quite some time.

Real political leadership in New York starts now. Cuomo and de Blasio fighting, among other things, disastrously delayed the initial coronavirus response. Since then, NYC has succeeded at a level only seen outside of the US at flattening their curve to as near 0 as is possible. That is in spite of the disaster forecasting of, frankly, ignorant media commentary about how density would be the end of New York. We should look at NYC’s curve and recognize it as the global city it is– having faced uniquely horrific consequences of COVID-19 followed by success that is somewhat unique in the United States but common elsewhere. In the beginning, NYC unfortunately looked like Italy, but so to now, months into the crisis, NYC fortunately looks more like Italy.

It is time to say, “We are going to reduce other forms of opening that we have successfully done for a period of time now to give schools a chance to ramp up. We want all NYC schools students to be able to safely enter classrooms, so we’re going to reduce other forms of contact, ramp up schools in a deliberate manner, and then, having shown we can do this safely, re-open other parts of the city again. We’re going to show the country that no one responds to crisis like New Yorkers do.” It would work, and NYC would be better for it.

I had hard time choosing just one.

When I first learned that Automattic ran a remote team on Wordpress, I thought that it was a crazy strange example of dogfooding. Of course, eventually I realized that was foolish– a CMS is a great tool, not unlike Basecamp or any other intranet, and could easily be used as an internal company knowledge base, project planning tool, and more.

Today Automattic has made P2 free. My understanding is that P2 is a heavily custom theme (maybe even whole instance?) of Wordpress that is used to run all of their internal systems. Seems like a great idea, although I’m surprised it took them this long to make it available.

I think Slack, and chat in general, is a dead end for collaboration. As excited as I was for tools to advance beyond IRC and have good work chat with mainstream acceptance, I’ve come to realize overtime that Slack has gotten more wrong than right. At work, we’ve started to mix in Basecamp over the last year as we implemented Shape Up for our product development strategy. It’s pretty ok– the best thing about Basecamp is that it is reliable and inexpensive. But using Basecamp has really piqued my interest in non-chat, asynchronous-first ways of working on remote teams.

P2 just exposes one more way to do this kind of work, tried and tested by a very large company for over a decade. I hope we’ll see many more tools like this.