This charity puzzle pack includes twenty-two (22) themed, themeless and variety puzzles, all worked on by a team of professional crossword constructors and editors.
A great crew of constructors for a good cause!
🎵 180 Songs That Turn 40 Years Old in 2024
Well, this makes me feel rather old!
Anhedonia sucks. That is all.
Claudine Gay and such
Talked to my mother today and she was mad about the President of Harvard resigning because Rep. Stefanik was doing a victory lap, and thought I would be upset, too. And I am not upset because I am a horrible person and have come to grips with that. No, I hate that Rep. Stefanik is thrilled- fuck her. But after what I have been through the last year with the bullshit at WVU, there will be no rending of garments in this household when anyone in college administration gets fucked over. Claudine Gay may be a delightful person and splendid neighbor, but she’s a college President and wouldn’t hesitate one minute to fuck me or any other faculty or staff member over and then hand everything off to the team of lawyers, so fuck her. My solidarity ends at the admin.
—from Balloon Juice - Another Eventful Day in Tempe [archive]
Could Claudine Gay have handed Stefanik’s questioning better? Absolutely, yes. Did Gay plagiarize? Eh… Can I work up any sympathy for a university president? Not really, because I’m also a horrible person who has seen too much of the insides of the higher education education widgetization complex.
🔗 📚 Wrapping Up 2023. Looking Toward 2024
I think Warner has one of the best explanations of, and takes on, the Substack problem that has led me to drop all my subs there. And some good book recommendations too :)
I don’t think I’ll ever adjust to the pace (and relatively limited space) of the quarter system.
🔗 Top 20 charts of 2023 – Kevin Drum [archive]
By the way: by “interesting,” I mostly mean “something you might find surprising.”
(includes “Remote teaching didn’t cause learning losses during COVID,” “Kids are pretty safe these days,” and more)
Not Exactly Resolutions
Since I didn’t expect to survive to see 2024, and I can’t predict the end of the battle, these aren’t really resolutions, just a few things I hope to figure out or do better with:
- cultivate intentional communities
- cut the dosage of toxic nostalgia
- (re)discover one pursuit I can lose myself in
- get over myself a little
Back on the horse?
Wordle 925 2/6*
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Currently reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers 📚
![GOD: my latest creation will have
&10;the body of an ape, the voice box
&10;of a parrot, the skin of a pig, and
&10;the intelligence of a dolphin. I call it
&10;Human, and it will destroy everything
&10;else I've made
&10;ANGELS: [confused applause]](https://mini.clorgie.me/uploads/2023/img-1115.jpeg)
“(Since the study published) I’ve been receiving a lot of emails from people telling me how grateful they are, because from just a cleanliness standpoint, this is a massive, massive upgrade,” Hendon said. “What I would recommend for the home user is to start with a single drop of water and build up from there — there is a substantial amount of nuance in this process.”
There’s also a catch: The water improves cleanliness regardless of your brewing method, but a brewing benefit only occurs with espresso and, to a lesser extent, filter coffee. When using a cafetiere, French press or AeroPress, nothing much changes because, given the coarser grind required with these, “all of the water is already touching all of the coffee,” Hendon said.
—from The secret to a perfect cup of coffee, according to science [archive]
But the latest PISA survey isn’t the only evidence that phones in schools are weapons of mass distraction. Studies have shown that students on their phone take fewer notes and retain less information from class, that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs, that students who text a lot in class do worse on tests, and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests. As Haidt, a psychologist, has written in The Atlantic, the mere presence of a smartphone in our field of vision is a drain on our focus. Even a locked phone in our pocket or on the table in front of us screams silently for the shattered fragments of our divided attention.
—from Are Phones Making the World’s Students Dumber? - The Atlantic [archive]
What everyone knows on some level, I think, is that speech has the power to incite action because speech itself is already a material act. Yes, anti-Zionism is an idea, not a rock; but if it were only an idea, without any practical potential, then there would be no point in throwing it. The difference right now is that, given the tremendous political and ideological instability introduced by the war, a number of powerful people in America currently believe that talking about freeing Palestine could actually end up freeing Palestine, and it is this cascade of actions that they are ultimately trying to suppress. This tells us something very important: They are afraid. The question is not whether intifada, which means “uprising” in Arabic and invokes both civil disobedience and violent resistance, is a threatening term; if it were not threatening, the House would never have convened an entire hearing about it. The only question is whether threatened parties — the Israeli apartheid regime, American foreign-policy hawks, all the board members and lobbyists and donors and hedge-fund managers — deserve to be threatened.
They do…
But, Kurzman and Katz conclude, [crossword] puzzle parochialism is actually deepening: “the [Times] puzzle today uses one-third fewer non-English clues and answers than it did at its peak in 1966, and makes two-thirds fewer international references than its peak in 1943.” Globalization, waves of immigration, and hiring efforts encouraging diversity may have remapped the newspaper’s reporting desks, but “when we turn from the New York Times news pages to the puzzle page, the rest of the world fades away.”
Sad that Small Beer Press will no longer be publishing new books (another victim of Long Covid, but they have a great catalog. I highly recommend Elizabeth Hand’s modern noir novels. 📚
Beginning in medieval times, Christians writing in English sought to mimic the Greek approach by abbreviating “Christian” as “Xpian”—with the “Xp” visually evoking the old letter combination—or, eventually as “Xtian,” probably as the original association waned with time. And when the name of the holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus came to be called “Christmas,” a shortened version of “Christ’s mass,” it got further shortened with the Greek-style “X.”