Madeleine Aggeler, writing in The Guardian, has an unsurprising story. No one can handle being bored anymore.

People hate feeling bored. We hate it so much that we spend hours mindlessly scrolling through our phones. Many of us would rather experience physical discomfort than sit quietly with our own thoughts, as a 2014 University of Virginia study found. Nearly half of participants sitting alone in a room for 15 minutes, with no stimulation other than a button that would administer a mild electric shock, pressed the button.

On the other hand, we also romanticize boredom. Philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote in his book Illuminations: “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” That is: boredom is a rich, loamy soil of creativity, and stepping back from the constant stimulus of everyday life allows the mind to expand.

So which is it: a fertile, imaginative state or mind-numbing agony?

The answer, according to experts, is both. Like life’s proverbial lemons, boredom is what you make of it.

“Boredom is what you make of it” sounds about right to my ear. I admit, it has been a long time since I’ve been bored. Having a Smart phone with access to the entire planet is a boredom killer. Boredom itself isn’t bad. How you handle it can be.

A few days ago, the University of Illinois Athletics program raised a banner for Terrance Shannon Jr., which went poorly. The lead up to it was flawless. An incredible signing with Shannon happened earlier in the day. Everyone attending received Shannon T-shirts on their seats. A bobblehead was available for purchase.

Shannon came out at halftime to thunderous applause. He spoke eloquently about his love for Illinois, his time wearing the orange and blue, the coaching staff, and the fans. There was an incredible video package. It was going great.

And then he pulled the string to unfurl his banner, which was upside down.

Me and thousands of fans in attendance were in shock. Shannon laughed about it on the court, but it left an awful sour taste in everyone’s mouth.

Athletic Director Josh Whitman handled it with class and accountability with his postgame comments. On top of that, Illinois basketball lost the game after not scoring for the final nine minutes. To make matters worse, freshman rebounding machine Morez Johnson Jr. fell on his wrist and is now out indefinitely.

It was an omen. It was, dare I say it, a curse.

Shannon’s mother made a couple of warmly received tweets saying how indicative the upside-down banner was to his final year playing college ball with the rape accusation and ultimate acquittal, turning the basketball program upside down.

However, Terrence Shannon Jr. made light of the situation as he always does and broke any talk of omens or curses with one perfectly timed tweet. He turned a public relations fiasco into a way to use the spotlight that turned negative into a positive.

Selling a new shirt and leaning into the upside-down banner and upside-down final season was perfect.

You can buy the shirts at Gameday Spirit.

With Morning Pages, you can write a stream of thought journal entry, but there’s a twist. The typed letters slowly fade until they are almost completely transparent. If you look closely, you can see what you wrote, but this feature keeps you from editing or getting hung-up on your words so that you can more easily enter a flow state.

You can click the magnifying glass in the top right corner to reveal your text when you’re done and click the scissors to copy it. The thought process here is having your writing disappear (temporarily) makes it easier to just write and not think too hard about it.

I use Notion for my daily journal, but this seems like a fun place to write before I copy and paste it into my digital journal. I like how it pushes you to focus one word or thought at a time. I might have to try this for a couple of days and see how it goes.

The wink…

Alan Jacobs, writing at his site, has a few thoughts on activism that I think are spot on.

I’ve pretty much stopped writing about politics, for reasons explained here, but that doesn’t mean I hold no political views and take no political action. Here’s how I think about political activism.

Premise: Every government does unjust harm to some persons and groups of persons. (One’s general political philosophy will be largely determined by how much harm one thinks that any government does as a matter of course, and one’s voting patterns will be largely determined by that philosophy, but none of that is relevant to this particular post. What I’m about to say is, I think, universally applicable.)

From this premise I think some questions should arise:

1. In the current regime, what persons or groups are most harmed or most likely to be harmed?
2. Where can I find those vulnerable people in my community?
3. What organizations serve and seek to protect those people?
4. How can I (placed as I am, with certain specific gifts and resources) assist those organizations?

Once I have answered those questions, I have a plan for meaningful political action. Note that this plan will differ according to the political party that happens to be in charge.

This is the way. I’m going to talk with my wife about these steps and what we might do in our community. One thing we’ve already done is join our local YMCA. It has, among many other things, a dedicated program for people with special needs and that’s incredibly important to my family.

Seth Godin on smartphones:

The smartphone is the most expensive device most people own, and the one they use the most.

Here’s everything you can’t have, can’t afford and won’t get, right here.

Here’s everyone you want to have an argument with, one click away.

Here is every piece of bad news we can imagine, much of it imagined instead of real.

Connection is powerful and magical. It’s also enervating, subject to manipulation and addictive.

SNL’s Season 50 Anniversary Special was alot of fun. Here are a lot of highlights on YouTube.

If you missed it or just want to relive it, I’d start with the monologue, Weekend Update, Audience Q&A, Chad in 8H, New York Musical, Adam Sandler’s song, then watch Paul Simon and Paul McCartney sing and marvel that they are both in their 80s.

Herman Martinus, the creator of Bear blog, had an interesting thought on spending time in silence.

I’ve come to appreciate time spent with nothing but my thoughts. It’s something I’d escaped for years. In the modern age it’s so easy to always have some kind of entertainment streaming.

I don’t often do this. It’s not that I can’t be alone with my thoughts, but I find when I’m relatively alone, such as when I’m driving to work or walking the dog, I like to listen to a podcast or music.

However, when I’m alone in my car, and I’m on the interstate, I often turn off the podcast or the music and enjoy the silence. Again, this doesn’t happen often, but I enjoy the silence and the solitude. It’s interesting to me that it isn’t that I’m actively trying to be bored or to let my mind rest. I believe the act of driving on the interstate specifically allows me to escape more readily.

Cultivating more times that I can experience silence and solitude would likely do wonders for my mental health.

M.G. Siegler, writing on his site Spyglass, has found a new word that perfectly describes the here and now.

Warning: I may have found my new favorite word to use in relation to various tech topics. At least my favorite since “anagnorisis”.¹ “Ultracrepidarian”, beyond being an awesome word, is defined as follows: someone who has no special knowledge of a subject but who expresses an opinion about it. I mean, how is this not the main word for the entire internet? Certainly social media. And actually, in the age of AI, I think we can even bend the idea of “someone” to include machines.

I believe that social media, while still fun in ways, has gotten worse over time when it comes to sharing actual information. Some of this is intentional product and policy decisions, but some of it is also just the fact that charlatans have gotten more emboldened with time to spew nonsense to their followings. And this has bred more charlatans as a result. Because there’s no downside to spouting bullshit. The only thing that matters is the volume.

Right or wrong, say it loud. Time has revealed the ultimate truth: no one remembers when you’re wrong and you’ll remind everyone when you’re right. That mixed with the fact that news cycles move at lightspeed these days just exacerbates it all. People want bold stances that rise above the noise, no matter how ludicrous. In fact, the more ludicrous the better.

And that, in turn, has fueled the rise of ultracrepidarians. If someone is known to be knowledgeable (or at the very least sounds knowledgeable) talking about a topic, people will tend to listen to that person on other topics. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest they should be trusted for anything beyond their area of expertise, but it doesn’t matter. The press has long played to this notion by giving us various celebrity opinions on the big issues of the day. And politics has always dabbled in this idea. But now it has seemingly become the M.O. of the current administration.

Look, nominating obviously unqualified people to important positions is not going to end well. I just hope it doesn’t mean the end of everything.

Paul Krugman, writing on his Substack email, has a useful analogy to what Musk is currently doing to our government.

Last month SpaceX carried out a test launch of its in-development Starship rocket. Liftoff was achieved, but as the company later announced, “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn.” In other words, it exploded.

It would be wrong to think of this explosion as a disaster; new products often experience failures during testing. That is, after all, why we test them. Still, the euphemistic language reeks of unwillingness to take responsibility and admit that things didn’t go as planned. But then again, what would you expect from a company owned by Elon Musk?

And here’s the thing: If a rocket blows up, you can build a new rocket and try again. “Move fast and break things” is sometimes an OK approach if the things in question are just hardware, which can be replaced. But what if the object that experiences “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is something whose continued functioning is crucial to people’s lives — say, something like the U.S. government?

This isn’t a hypothetical question: Musk, with backing from Donald Trump, is blowing up significant parts of the U.S. government as you read this. And we can already see the shape of multiple potential disasters.

The Muskenjugend — the mostly very young people Musk has hired to work at the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t actually a government department in any legal sense but which Trump has effectively given huge and probably unconstitutional power to remake federal agencies — generally seem to share three characteristics.

He goes on to explain exactly what Musk and his group are doing, why they are incredibly ignorant, stupid, and likely racist, and the consequences therein. I must admit I had to look up where “Muskenjugend” came from. If you don’t know, Krugman is playing with Hitlerjugend which is the German word for the Hitler Youth. So, there’s that lovely image.

The last week has shown not only how destructive this administration is, but also how incompetent. Elon doesn’t understand how COBOL works, the DOGE team doesn’t know how to secure their own website, and Trump accidentally fired the people safeguarding the country’s nuclear weapons.

If you need a short video, Hank Green describes the situation perfectly.

Basically, a lot of people are going to die from preventable mistakes in the next four years.

John Gruber has some smart insight into the reason for the meaningless renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s the smallness, the relative unimportance, the spiteful pettiness of the renaming in the first place — down to the fact that until Trump’s executive action, there was no controversy, zero, none, nada, anywhere in the world, amongst any group of people, regarding the name of the Gulf of Mexico — that makes it interesting to examine in detail how Google and Apple have chosen to deal with it. It’s only because this particular issue is so spectacularly piddling that we can consider it in full.

The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily could, but he won’t. And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the United States can change to stick it to Mexico, a country Donald Trump has objectively racist feelings toward. Trump never campaigned on building a wall at our northern border with Canada, nor has he (yet?) attempted to rename Lake Ontario. It’s about Mexico, and asserting power by fiat. Trump has a lifelong history of putting his name on buildings he didn’t own. He’d rather have his name emblazoned on a building he doesn’t own than own a building that doesn’t bear his name. To Trump, the name on the sign is more important than the deed. So too, now, with the name on a map. The Gulf of Mexico is an international body of water that belongs to no nation, but declaring this new name implies that it heretofore belonged to Mexico, and now belongs to us, which is to say belongs to him, our unquestioned dear leader. That Trump took it from Mexico, without firing a shot — when in fact all he did was order a string to be changed in a government database.

Trump is all id with an underdeveloped and fragile ego and no superego.

Warren Ellis on the news —

Dunno about you, but for me this year quickly became The Year Of I’ve Had Enough. I turned off a bunch of news service notifications, unsubbed from a few news provisions entirely, and now I skim the papers on my phone over coffee in the morning and then check out of the news entirely until the evening, when I catch up with newsletters and read some longer articles.

…

Thing is, not only is the news all the bloody same, all about the same country and the same handful of main characters, and every news service reports all the incremental updates to the same bloody stories every sixty seconds: but that constant battering tide of zone-flooding shit compresses time and shrinks space to think. And I want this year to feel like a year and not three bloody weeks.

It’s not about “taking a break from the news,” which various newsletters have suggested is now A Thing. And, you know, if you live in certain places right now, taking a break from the news might feel a luxury at best and a wilful ignoring of alarm bells at worst. On a single evening last week I talked to three people setting plans to bug out of the US..

It’s more about putting the news in its damn place and creating more space to live in.

Ray Ratto, writing on Defector, has the story on Nike and Major League Baseball rolling back the new crappy uniforms they introduced this past season. He tells it in his unique style.

Nike and MLB have apparently walked back their shitty-uniforms-are-just-as-good-if-we-say-they-are stance of a year ago, when the 30 MLB teams were outfitted as shoddily as they have since the 1940s, back when the pants were flannel and could comfortably house a regulation-sized player in each pantleg. Those uniforms looked cheap, were occasionally worryingly translucent, and shredded on first slide. The players hated the uniforms, and the fans hated buying the Fanatics replicas of those jerseys. (Fanatics is a genuinely separate problem that reminds us that “let the buyer beware” is not just an old saying but a scream in the customer’s face.)

But now the fix is finally in after a year of MLB baseball being played in uniforms that landed somewhere between hand-me-down chic and Shein-grade fast fashion disposability. In fact, when Nike’s head of global grief-absorption Denis Nolan said, “We’re listening to the players and our fans; their input and opinions are important to us," the fact that he made it seem like the user experience was a brand-new concept that Nike just invented was a reminder that Nike and MLB would like credit for both the repair and the original blunder. They even called the rollout of the new quality duds a “remediation schedule,” which for all its Superfund vibe is finally just a loftier version of claiming victory in appalling defeat—a Super Bowl winner’s ring for the Kansas City Chiefs.

The repair, which for some reason isn’t going to be ready for home uniforms until 2026, supposedly includes the thicker pre-2024 fabric made by Majestic that actually holds up to breaking up double plays and diving catches in the outfield; jerseys will once again feature larger numerals, embroidered sleeve patches, and more professional-looking team fonts. There was no word on whether the MLB people who agreed to the Nike deal are going to be told that they urgently want to spend more time with their families, which would have been a more dramatic way of falling on the corporate sword.

I am envious of Ray Ratto’s writing. He’s so funny and sharp.

James A Reeves –

It’s a strange sensation, living a life divided between today’s liquid crystal and a youth defined by magnetic tape. Audio and VHS cassettes contained my first impressions of the world. Each unit of entertainment was bound in plastic that occupied space and respected the logic of time, its information deteriorating each time it was played until it dissolved into garbled images and hiss. Now the whole world feels like static. No orientation. No sense of time. Perhaps my generation is uniquely positioned to be disappointed by the humiliations of clicking and scrolling. After all, I still remember the optimism of world wide web and information superhighway.

I miss the reassuring kerchunk of buttons and punching out the plastic tabs on a cassette if the recording was good. Or taping them up again when better music came along. It was a tactile world of messing with limitations, a sensibility defined by the boundaries of the physical rather than a never-ending feed coming from god only knows. Was life better in the Era of Magnetic Tape, or am I suffering from the nostalgia of a man settling into middle age?

Paper Apps are pen-and-paper games cleverly disguised as small reporter-style notepads. They are marketed as a “fun, smart alternative to screen time.” Some games are themed around dungeons, space exploration, and golf.

Let’s say you had a bad day. You can’t dwell on it. That doesn’t help. You can only go forward. Tomorrow is another day.

Every new day is a new day to start over, start fresh, and start again. Yesterday is in the past. You went to bed and did a soft restart. No need to jump out of bed but get moving. Roll out of bed as refreshed as you can be. Wipe the sleep from your eyes. Do a little exercise. Have a little coffee. Enjoy that hot shower.

Your eyes will open a little wider. The day may even look a little brighter. The sun will shine. And if it’s raining… eventually the sun will shine. That’s what it does.

It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day. No need to dwell on the past. Go forward.

I recently stumbled onto Kenning Hu as I surf the information highway. Writing at her site, she has some interesting thoughts about building worlds on the Internet.

in this digital age where everyone wants to “monetize” something, you constantly find yourself inside a marketing funnels — filled with shiny things, and quick-fix promises, and slippery slopes.

**marketing funnels are everywhere. **

**digital worlds are rare. **

so here is my strategy:

instead of “building an audience,” build a world. build a digital garden-ecosystem, that exists — first and primarily — for itself. a world that doesn’t need likes, traffic, subscribers, or clicks — in order to validate its existence.

build a world that the RIGHT people — your kindred people — will discover, will gravitate towards, and fall in love with. build a world that no one else can replicate, except you.

build a world expansive enough to HOLD your work, your multi-faceted spirit — and your audience.

I kinda love this.

Remember the asteroid with a 1-in-77 chance of ruining everyone’s 2032 Christmas plans? Scientists now say there’s a 1-in-43 chance it will hit the Earth. The good news? Scientists like Scott Manley are tracking it and creating YouTube videos explaining it. The bad news? They won’t know for sure where it might hit until they get more data.

Right now, the potential impact zone stretches from India across Africa to South America, with a bonus splash zone in the Atlantic. Fun.

Heidi Gardner, Chloe Fineman, and Ego Nwodim, three current cast members of Saturday Night Live, welcomed Architectural Digest to give a rather comprehensive tour of the legendary Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center.

Well worth the time.

Warren Ellis shared some of his flash fiction. These stood out to me.

So tall, so somehow unreal, the unfathomable adults standing over us when we were small, and now they are all dead, and we look in old mirrors and see how tall and unreal and unfathomable we are now.

Even to ourselves.

The first ever time someone takes your hand, and the first thought you have is “this is everything” and the second is “what happens when it’s gone?” The space of time between those thoughts defines the shape of your life.

He put the old, cold gun to the back of her head and the treasure of her memories became scattered rubies on the snow.

I was born into the generations who lived with constant low level planetary fear. Every unexplained flash in the night sky could have been the start of nuclear war. Life seems duller now. And that’s why I bought the bombs. To brighten your nights. Smile.