🏀 And we’re back!
Busy day today, but there is always time for a few good links:
Adam Mastroianni nails it:
When people revile a degree from Harvard’s Extension School and revere a degree from Harvard College, they’re saying that the value of an education doesn’t come from the fact that you got educated. It comes from the fact that you got picked.
Alas, it is a paid post, and the more I encounter those the less I think of Substack and — this is not rational, I know — people who use it to blog. Because that is all Substack is: a blog with an optional, easy to implement paywall. I am not a fan.
I’ve updated my now page. The update includes where I am right now, which is Savannah, Georgia, where I am attending a medical conference. But you can’t escape DC: I was sitting at the bar having lunch when a couple couldn’t help overhearing where I lived as I was chatting with the bartender. “Hey, we’re from DC too”. Small world! Where in DC? “Oh, we live downtown, we’re both lobbyists.”
Of course they were. One for a private healthcare equity firm, the other for medium-sized pharmaceutical. We did not delve deeper.
Facts about The New York Times, from 2016
Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
No wonder then that NYT crowded out all other newspapers: they brought a narrative gun to a journalistic knife fight. Story wins, reality be damned. (↬Mark Palko)
Sebregondi and Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.
I don’t remember how I came about this history of the Moleskine notebook but oh what a history. “Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse”, yeah right.
And I would have absolutely no complaints if it weren’t so ridiculously expensive for what you get. I want the Costco of premium mediocre notebooks, not the Nordstrom.
Happy to be able to cross-post to Threads, but now that I’ve been fiddling with micro.blog settings I see that Bluesky crossposting stopped working for me around 2 months ago. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.
Venkatesh Rao, while retiring the Ribbonfarm blog, makes a serious prediction:
I do think that the end really is here for the blogosphere though. This time it really is different. I’ve weathered many ups and downs in the blogosphere over my 17 years in it, but now it feels like the end of the blogging era. And what has emerged to take its place is not the blogosphere (and really shouldn’t try to be), even though parts of it have tried to claim the word.
I don’t think there is any single heir to the blog, or to the public social media landscape it dominated, anymore than there was a single heir to the Roman empire when it collapsed. And this is as things should be. Emerging media should emerge into their own identities, not attempt to perpetuate the legacies of sundowning media, or fight over baggage. And of course, many architectural elements of the blog will live on in newer media, just as many patterns we live with today originated in the Roman empire. Chronological feeds, and RSS-like protocols are part of our collective technological vocabulary. So at least in a technological sense, nothing is dying per se. But in a cultural sense, we are definitely witnessing the end of an era.
A few people beg to differ, of course, but there is a generational gap here and my kids may be viewing blogs the same way I saw Bulletin Board Systems, and note that some of those are still around! But maybe not; this post’s main home is, after all, on a blog. Which yesterday had 3 orders of magnitude fewer visitors than a single social media post (about which I will write more soon here, not on X). So it goes…
📚 Finished reading: A System for Writing by Bob Doto, and it is the book Antinet… aspired to be but didn’t quite make it for reasons Doto explains in depth. A slip-box, zettelkasten — call it want you want — won’t make you a better writer, but with good notes any writing will be more fun.
A few good links for the weekend:
🏀 And we’re back!