Microscopes show us how large we are and telescopes showed us how small we are.

Alex Pareene, writing for The Baffler, has an incredible long read about Trumpism, young boys, and race. He opens with this perfect paragraph.

A bit of symbolic generational warfare has always suffused American politics, with various cliques of self-appointed “adults in the room” dismissing challengers to the status quo as immature, idealistic, or juvenile. But when it comes to figuring out what This Whole Trump Thing really means, actual juveniles are reading at several grade levels above the sophisticated adults. While editors send reporters to do anthropological fieldwork in the Rust Belt, and Democratic senators from red states fret over precisely how many unqualified ideologues they must confirm for lifetime seats on the judiciary in order to win re-election, teenagers have had the whole deal figured out from the beginning. They present their findings regularly, if you know where to look.

The teenagers get it because Trumpism is nothing more than adolescent sulking, raging, and ranting. They not only sympathize, they understand the well-spring of bullying and misogynistic tendensies and embrace it.

When will the adults in the room take over?

Chavie Leiber, writing for Vox, has an incredible profile on Dooce.com founder Heather Armstrong. I admit, I had not heard of her prior to reading the article, but I learned a great deal.

The sun could have blown up seven minutes ago and that would really ruin the rest of your day.

A blogger named bgh, writing on his Cardinals site On The Cardinals, wrote an inspiring piece about St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright. It features one of the best uses of a movie quote I’ve ever seen.

If I would have read the following sentence as a kid, I’m sure I would have thought it was a science fiction daydream — “In the second decade of the 21^st century everyone owns a hand-held computer capable of video communication with anyone on the planet and off, access to libraries of information, a global positioning system, in-depth health information for the user, and more.”

I just fished two tennis balls from under the basement couch with an old lightsaber so I could play with the dog. So, happy Star Wars Day.

Curtis McHale, writing for The Sweet Setup, has an in-depth comparison between three of the most well-known note-taking, writing, and research apps: Ulysses, Bear, and Apple Notes.

For me I’m want to use Ulysses more, but I seem to revert back to Google Docs because I can write on different platforms easier since I use a Windows computer at work and a Mac for everything else.

I’ve been testing Bear for a few weeks now. I’m not sure it’s significantly better than Apple Notes. I like the colors and the fonts better so there’s that.

What works best for you?

I used to have a site on Tumblr.

It was kind of a commonplace book of quotes, images, and videos. It took up loads of time to no one’s benefit, so I killed it after about two years. I kind of miss it. Every now and then, I get the urge to make another Tumblr site and unload all the quotes, images, and videos I accumulate. I dunno. It probably isn’t worth my time.

I know there are some amazing Tumblr blogs still in existence, but I’m not sure the reason why people have kept them. Of course, there are likely millions of abandoned Tumblr blogs too. Apparently, there are 465.4 million blogs and 172 billion posts on the site. Those numbers still mean something, although I’m not sure what other than people still really like the service. And it’s free.

Tumblr, as a platform, is in a weird spot. It doesn’t really have a direction or a focus. There’s plenty of community there still around, but I can only imagine how jaded many of them are with all the ownership changes and the banning porn debacle. It used to be a place for digital creatives and a hub for the weird internet.

Recently, Verizon, who somehow now owns Tumblr, wants to unload the service. Not a huge surprise because they lost billions when they bought all the Yahoo! properties and squandered any goodwill the platform and its users may have had with its corporate overlords.

I have no idea who should buy it or for what reason a responsible company could have for doing so. Molly McHugh, writing for The Ringer, made a list that includes Pornhub and Giphy. I don’t know.

Who could actually reenergize the platform?

Patrick Rhone with some thoughtful insight -

Consider the value of doing nothing when there is nothing of value to be done.

Consider the value of saying nothing when there is nothing of value to say.

Consider the value of simply being present, listening, and bearing witness, as something of value to be done instead.

The story of Bob is amusing to me.

H/T: Laura Olin

Michael Wade writes about how people view major events now through a prism of a political point of view.

There are moments when it seems that a sign of our times is that large groups of people can watch the same event and walk away with completely opposite descriptions of what happened.

Perhaps that has always been the case but it is more noticeable now due to social media. One aspect that may be new is the intensity of feeling and the eagerness to designate political opponents as evil. That is not a healthy development for any society.

You do not, to borrow language from YouTube descriptions, OWN or DESTROY or SCHOOL your opponents. You argue with them. It is particularly helpful if that process includes listening.

While he’s not wrong, he’s absolutely, totally wrong. Let me explain.

It would be wonderful if “argue with them” meant “healthy debate,” but it doesn’t. Not anymore. I don’t have to listen to white supremacists justify their actions. I already know their justifications are incorrect and morally bankrupt. I ignore that debate because it can’t be won. It can’t be won because neither side is going to go into the “argument” with the same set of facts. We can “argue” the facts, but not really. Facts are facts. The other side “willfully ignores” or twists these facts to fit an agenda.

And here we are screaming at the other side because, as Steven Colbert once said, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” There is no bias. Reality is reality. Facts are facts. The rest is goddamn noise, and no amount of “listening” is going to make a difference.

The only thing that matters is removing the cancer.

It saddens me to note Star Wars actor Peter Mayhew, forever known as Chewbacca, has passed away. He died on April 30 at the age of 74.

For those of you not in the know, Joonas Suotamo took over the role of Chewbacca beginning in 2015. However, Mayhew was a consultant and helped Suotamo with the character.

Personally, I have a strong memory of seeing Mayhew and Kenny Baker resting by a window at one of the Wizard World Chicago’s I attended. It was an odd juxtaposition of extremely tall and extremely short.

I bought the latest Mario Kart game for my nephew’s birthday a couple of weeks ago. I had a fleeting thought that Nintendo clearly missed an incredible marketing opportunity by not naming their Mario Kart games Mario Speedwagon.

Mark Manson has a new book coming out May 14th called Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope. He gives us a sneak peak with two posts to his blog, The Paradox of Progress and The Uncomfortable Truth.

Both are long, but inventive and smart reads. I’m looking forward to getting the new book soon.

Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief at Lawfare and writing for The Atlantic, outlines in simple terms his conclusions after reading the Mueller Report. They are damning. His five conclusions are:

1. The president committed crimes.
2. The president also committed impeachable offenses.
3. Trump was not complicit in the Russian social-media conspiracy.
4. Trump’s complicity in the Russian hacking operation and his campaign’s contacts with the Russians present a more complicated picture.
5. The counterintelligence dimensions of the entire affair remain a mystery.

He goes into a lot of detail under each of these points. If you aren’t going to read the Mueller Report, please take the time to read Wittes piece.

It’s fun to imagine 50-year-old me time-traveling to visit 15-year-old me just to tell him I’d seen the latest Star Wars movie trailer and that I’d watched the latest episode of the most popular television show on the planet. It’s a Dungeons and Dragons-type show, and I enjoyed the latest superhero movie based on Marvel Comics. His tiny little head would explode.

It seems unfathomable to me that these genres are today the world’s biggest and most successful entertainment franchises.

When I was 13–15, there were amazing movies like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Clash of the Titans, E.T., Return of the Jedi, Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Dark Crystal, TRON, and Superman III (ok, that last one doesn’t count). However, not all of these were as universally accepted, praised, and mainstreamed as the same type of films today. Back then, superhero movies were barely made. Now we have 23 Marvel movies to unpack with ten years of story culminating in a three-hour tour de force. Star Wars was restarted, and the new films are more popular today than the original movies. Game of Thrones is what every kid playing D&D saw in his head as he was rolling 20-sided dice.

The generation that played with action figures, bought comics for 75 cents, and memorized the Monster Manual is making entertainment. I couldn’t be happier.

In any case, I’ll try to keep my head from going ka-blooey.

The University of Virginia’s NCAA championship-winning men’s basketball team has declined an invitation to visit the White House. I’m sure the decision was made on the advice of the team’s nutritionist worried cold fries and KFC would be served.

They also probably wanted nothing to do with the man who occupies the office who called the white supremacists who descended on their campus “very fine people.”

I wish more championship sports teams and individuals would do the same.

Seth Godin has some thought on the snooze button.

The snooze button is a trap. It’s a trap because not only do you have to decide later, but you just expended time and energy to deciding to decide later.

Do it once, move on.

‘Decide once’ is a magical productivity commitment.

There is a certain class of decision that benefits from time. Decisions where more information is in fact useful.

But most of the time, we’re busy making decisions that should be made now or not at all. You end up with a ton of decision debt, a pile of unanswered, undecided, unexplored options. And you’re likely to simply walk away.

If you open an email, you’ve already made the commitment to respond and move on. Not to push it down the road.

In or out, yes or no, on to the next thing.

Decision debt is my life. I probably just need to stop hitting snooze.