Duck (🦆), North Carolina.

This morning’s story in The Washington Post on a slow-rolling climate disaster has this as the subtitle:

Maryland’s iconic Smith Island faces one of the nation’s most dire forecasts for rising seas, but real estate is booming

In the story we learn that the “booming” real estate market means that

More homes have sold on Smith Island in the last three years than in the previous 11 combined, according to sales data.

…

Woutila and Pueschel lived in the Baltimore suburbs for years, but she always dreamed of living on a sailboat and he of owning waterfront property. As they scouted real estate listings, they hit upon a marshy plot in the middle of the Chesapeake: Smith Island.

Waterfront homes run roughly from $100,000 to $200,000 — far less than most spots on the mainland — so it was one of the few places that fit the couple’s budget. In comparison, a two-bedroom condo on the water in Annapolis recently sold for $530,000 and a small home near a dock in Shady Side, Md., went for $360,000.

Framing is everything: a journalist’s “real estate boom” is a thinking person’s exodus.

If there was my type of a long-form article, it would be the making-of any complex project. Like of The Last Unicorn (via Robin Sloan), or Back to the Future (warning: Twitter thread), or Frasier (to which I keep coming back).

And I have never even seen the first one — though I do plan to now!

This is our second time traveling to the Outer Banks. Henceforth OBX. The first was seven years and two children ago, when I attended a grant-writing workshop held at an upscale resort in Duck, NC.

We were further down south this time, in Kill Devil Hills, ⊕ Yes, these are actual town names. There is also, of course, Kitty Hawk, as well as Nags Head. I’ll take those over European place names — looking at you, Vienna VA — any day. in accommodations that were decidedly more homely — and it was great!

1. Not sure how general knowledge of OBX is — I certainly didn’t know anything about them before coming — so I will summarize the geography thusly: a thin strip of sand oriented north-to-south parallel to the Eastern coast of North Carolina, famous for being the Wright brothers’ chosen site for their glider tests and, ultimately, humanity’s first flight.
2. That thin strip of sand is perilously close to perishing: there was a moderately severe storm on our first day and parts of the road closest to the beach were half-flooded for days; waves are picking at the beach little by little, often helped by clueless beachgoers who make coastal erosion into a family event, little shovels at the ready; so, you’d better see it while it’s still there.
3. And there is more than the beach there to see: the Wright Brothers National Memorial, for one, but also Jockey’s Ridge state park which was even better for being so unexpected (we found out about it by my scrolling around the map and wondering what the big yellow splotch was — incidentally, a random scroll around the map is an excellent way of semi-spontaneous trip planning, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron).
4. I still find it amazing that, with everything else being commodified and price-tagged, the beaches of North America are still mostly free. And that there are so many of them. Yes, the Mediterranean see is warmer, friendlier, better to swim and wade through, and just plane nicer. But the beaches, on top of being hostile to feet, are also much more crowded and much too often open only to those who can pay for a lounge chair.
5. Last month the digitizer on my 5-year-old iPhone Xs Max stopped working and I could no longer postpone an upgrade. What a good thing that I did! It turned out that the touch screen was not the only broken part — the image stabilizer was also dead for who knows how long and I thought I was just very bad at taking sharp photos. Anyhow, this was a well-documented trip.
6. Photo processing has… changed in these 5 years, to the point that this is probably the last time I would bring a DSLR on vacation. I barely got it out, I still haven’t transferred the few photos that were there, and I shudder to think I will have to process them myself — mostly by lightening the shadows beneath the glaring sun, something the 14 Pro Max that I got can do much better on its own and without being asked. It’s magic.
7. Sun blocking technology has also changed. Yes, the sunscreen is now amazing, but the better news is that you don’t have to use that much of it with all the clothes and headwear protects from the sun without being uncomfortable to wear or (this is the new part) get wet. My pale-skinned easy-to-burn 10-year-old self would have loved going to the beach a whole lot more if these were around back then.
8. To the last two points, here is some of that breakthrough technology in action:

“After ‘Barbie,’ Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox”:

I.P.-based filmmaking has become so commonplace that Gerwig—who made her name acting in tiny mumblecore projects—was caught off guard by complaints that she’d sold out.

I.P. being, of course, the acronym for intellectual property — amusing, since there is absolutely nothing intellectual about the properties in question. The movies have never been so colorful yet depressing as they are now.

I recently attended a residency graduation party at an academic medical center, for the first time since the pandemic. Two things struck me:

1. So. Many. Awards. For the residents. For the faculty. For the ancillary staff. There were nearly as many awards as there were graduating residents.
2. No roasting of the graduating house staff, or even a hint of humor of any kind. This used to be the highlight of any graduation party.

Award inflation is akin to grade inflation: they have become currency for further post-graduate training and, more importantly, faculty promotion. With the recent focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, a whole new spectrum of accolades has opened up. So yes, there is a reason for all those plaques being thrown left and right, but it was funny nevertheless to see faculty speed through the list of graduates, then spend the next hour patting themselves on the back.

The lack of a proper roast was more concerning. Has the environment become so fraught that the residents are concerned about offending anyone? Humor is to dialogue what beavers are to a river: sometimes a nuisance, but also the hallmark of a healthy ecosystem. Or should I say good humor; when done lazily and as an afterthought, roasts too often devolved into a series of racial and sexual stereotypes. I imagine that is why some places have done away with them, which is also a lazy, unimaginative thing to do — you would think that with all the stress on DEI, the graduates would if anything be more capable of doing a character/personality rather than race/orientation-based roast.

What I hope DEI workshops did not teach them is that they should go out of their way to avoid making people uncomfortable. Sometimes people should be uncomfortable, and making them squirm just a little bit at the highest peak of their career-to-date is the best time for it. They will have the entire rest of the night to pat themselves on the back.

Suitcase words are imprecise, mealy-mouthed pieces of verbal dreck whose purpose is to rouse emotion while masquerading as vectors of information. ⊕ Yes, yes, this is itself an emotional reaction, and they can indeed be useful — follow the link to read how and why — but most suitcase words are useful for thought and dialogue in the same way that semi-automatic rifles are useful for pest control: caveat usor. Oncology is full of them — from immunotherapy to survival — but all examples I encountered there came to me fully packed, zippers bursting, ready to confuse. Live long enough, however, and you will see a suitcase word being formed in front of your eyes as you stare in horror, incapable to do anything but mourn the sacrifice off a perfectly adequate concept to the gods of sophism.

Take “gaslighting”. The term — this may be common knowledge by now, but it is worth repeating — comes from the 1944 American movie Gaslight ⊕ Or maybe the 1940 British movie, or the 1938 British play — who knows? in which the husband of an heiress drives her insane by way of psychosocial manipulation — Wikipedia’s example is his secretly dimming and brightening the indoor gas-powered lighting but insisting that she is imagining it, making her think she is going insane. Note that there are three aspects to the original gaslighting:

1. The manipulator originates the stimulus that is to be misinterpreted;
2. The manipulator questions the victim’s initial interpretation, despite agreeing with it, or knowing it to be correct;
3. The manipulator’s intention for doing this is to “drive the victim insane”, i.e. question everything else about their reality.

And let’s all agree that intentionally pushing someone into psychosis is a very bad thing indeed. The emotional reaction to the action of gaslighting is therefore deservedly negative, more so than plain old lying, bulshitting, or scheming for a different purpose.

The first aspect of gaslighting dropped off early on. The very first mention ⊕ The link is to the Internet Archive version of a most excellent writeup on its etymology, now behind a paywall. of the term as a verb went “It is also popularly believed to be possible to “gaslight” a perfectly healthy person into psychosis by interpreting his own behavior to him as symptomatic of serious mental illness”, which eliminated number 1 but strengthened the criteria for number 2: to be the gaslighter you should not only question the interpretation, but you yourself should interpret it as a sign or symptom of breakdown. Undeniably bad! And for decades the word lived quietly in psychotherapy circles as a helpful shorthand for a type of behavior, usually from an abusive spouse.

Then 2016 happened, and everyone is gaslighting everyone else: politicians are doing it to their voters, doctors to their patients, and parents to their children, when in fact what they are doing, respectively, is bulshitting, misdiagnosing, and following guidelines you don’t agree with.

And all this is in writing, supposedly the more formal of the methods of communication. In everyday speech, gaslighting gets thrown left and right for any behavior with which people disagree, and has become a stand-in for lying, bullshitting, or just plain old making me feel bad. Note that in each case you can see a kernel of a connection with actual gaslighting — usually it is the questioning part — but the supposed gaslighter’s questioning is genuine, and/or the intent behind the questioning is — possibly misdirected but also genuine — care for the wellbeing of their “victim”.

So, whenever I hear or read the word now I have to stop, think, and unpack it. What is the actual process it is trying to describe? Would a different word better describe that process without implying things that aren’t true? ⊕ All good things to do when encountering any suitcase word. This is why I am slightly skeptical of speed reading. Did whoever (mis)used the word know its original meaning and broaden it to creatively express themselves, or did they have an agenda? Dismissing any argument which uses it would be the easy thing to do, and as most easy things also wrong: while its imprecise use may make me think slightly less of the person using it, they may still be making a valid point.

None of this is news: therapists have raised concerns about the misuse of the word and explained the issue much more eloquently than I just did, but also not as concisely, so if this piqued your interest this article quoting a few of them would be a good next stop.

My love for Google Reader — may it rest in peace — will never die, so when The Verge comes out with a 4,000-word piece on its creation, flourishing, and untimely demise, I must link to it.

Google killed Reader before it had the chance to reach its full potential. But the folks who built it saw what it could be and still think it’s what the world needs. It was never just an RSS reader. “If they had invested in it,” says Bilotta, “if they had taken all those millions of dollars they used to build Google Plus and threw them into Reader, I think things would be quite different right now.”

Pour one out…