And most times, it is! It doesn’t take an advanced degree in hospitality studies to figure out that most things in the family vacation gauntlet that is Pigeon Forge, Tennesse ⊕ For the uninitiated, Pigeon Forge is the closest neighbor of Gatlinburg, the gateway to the Smokey Mountains. This website helpfully lists all the “attractions” available to those who would rather not hike, most of which line both sides of the highway you need to take to get to the Smokies. It is — especially to my European eyes — quite the sight. are, indeed, tourist traps — empty flashes of light and puffs of smoke meant to relieve you of some expendable income.

But in that most lies the trouble. For a decade now we’ve driven past a gigantic banner in the Shenandoah valley advertising the Luray caverns as if they were the eight Wonder of the World. And for a decade or so I avoided going because it was clearly a tourist trap. Only, it clearly wasn’t.

So I’ll tell you a secret: we did end up going to one of the “attractions” in Pigeon Forge that’s a mini-resort of it’s own call The Island and that too was charming in a fake lego-land sort of way. Dollywood is there too, and we will go some time soon.

Between everything that’s within walking distance in D.C. and driving distance up and down the East Cost — being loose with the definition of the coast as I will count the Smokies in there too — even if 99% of attractions are pure tourist traps, the 1% can fill a lifetime.

Two caveat: first, maybe your Tourist Trap Radar is better calibrated than my own, as my frugal-by-necessity parents instilled in me the sense that anything that charges money is a tourist trap. We saw many a historic landmark — from the outside, of course — in my childhood.

Second, it may occasionally happen that you pay for something and then, as you step through the entrance, get a sinking feeling that there is no there there and that the place is indeed a tourist trap. But so what! You can’t be a good surgeon unless you’ve occasionally taken out a healthy appendix, and you can’t be sure you’ve seen everything that’s good unless you’ve occasionally visited a clunker.

I sense this advice applies to more than just general surgery and vacationing.

When all is said and done, Twitter will have been a net negative for humanity regardless of leadership.

Because it combined flat social interactions with costless message amplification, it led to too many pile-ups of tens of thousands-to-one, too much reality distortion that pushed people into doomscrolling, too deep of an insight into often anonymous but always scarred psyches which we would subconsciously mirror.

Most people remember the precise moment when they realized how dangerous these dynamics are. My own came on the night of January 3, 2021, after the public flagellation of one John Roderick, known henceforth as “Bean Dad". Note that this is a link to an article in Forbes, of all places, which I found the most in line with my own thinking. This is how social media radicalizes you. I wasn’t exactly Robert Oppenheimer reciting from the Bhagavad Gita, but a sense of Twitter being a psycho-nuclear weapon formed, and why would I want to spend too much time around it?

And now a billionaire wants to mold Twitter into the human hive-mind, or the everything app, or a bank. To overuse an analogy: this is very much like Edward Teller — a real-life mad scientist and an overall horrible human being — proposing to use his brainchild, the hydrogen bomb, to terraform Alaska, extract oil from tar sands, and control hurricanes. There’s so much power there, don’t you just want to use it?

No. Just stop.

So it is with giddiness and delight that I follow the flourishing of micro.blog, and wt.social, and even the overcomplicated for its own good Mastodon, and most of all what Dave Winer is doing with FeedLand, because there is an alternative timeline out there where Google never shut down the Reader and RSS is the dominant language of social networks and whatever foibles of that other world may be — the 2012–2020 Romney administration, the complete and utter dominance of webOS, mere existence of the DC cinematic universe — at least we’d have known it got on-line social interactions right.

Eleven years have passed since the 11/11/11 release of Skyrim. Tempus fugit.

Guillermo del Toro is single-handedly saving Netflix, first with his Cabinet of Curiosities, now with Pinocchio. I have my popcorn ready.

The Wizards’ new cherry blossom styling is quite fitting for DC, and even more pink than this photo conveys.

This is when you spend a couple of extra minutes in your car, parked in the driveway, because you want to finish that truly engaging episode of a podcast. I just made it up, but I’m sure it’s been used before.

This interview with Roland Fryer by Russ Roberts easily passed it. Roberts is a sharp interviewer who does not throw out easy questions, and more than once he asked one milliseconds before it crystalized in my own mind. The truly engaging part is that Fryer had well thought-out answers to each.

It helps that the topic was close to my heart, of course. Some of the experiments in education — paying students per book read, etc. — were done in Washington DC, and I am a DCPS parent myself. Lucky that we won’t need to implement the scheme in our own household, since we would have to file for bankruptcy faster than a crypto billionaire.

Today is Election Day in America. By law, this is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

Why pick such an impractical day for voting, when people need to take time off work and kids have to miss school?

Because Americans used to be a bunch of farmers. Of course.

Turning Red for adults. It works.