Buried at the bottom of today’s Apple press releases was this tantalizing tidbit:

VIP: Yankee Stadium premieres this Friday, April 4, featuring an all-encompassing look at how elite athletes, die-hard fans, dedicated staff, and epic moments make the Bronx ballpark legendary. Bono: Stories of Surrender pulls back the curtain on the deeply personal experiences that have shaped Bono as a son, father, husband, activist, and U2 frontman. The groundbreaking film from Apple TV+ premieres May 30, and will be available in 2D and in Apple Immersive Video.

I originally presumed both films were being announced today for the first time, but Bono was announced February 26—which I missed because, well, Bono—and VIP: Yankee Stadium was mentioned in the new season announcement of Friday Night Baseball on March 3—which I ignored because, well, Friday Night Baseball hasn’t been that great.

I’m sure the Bono film will be heartwarming, and I’ll eventually watch it (there’s only so much immersive video), but it was VIP: Yankee Stadium that really caught my attention.

From the early March press release:

Apple today also announced VIP: Yankee Stadium, a new Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro that gives viewers an all-access pass to one of the world’s most iconic sports venues. In the film, available for free next month, broadcasting legend Joe Buck welcomes viewers to Yankee Stadium for a June 2024 “Friday Night Baseball” matchup between the Yankees and their longtime rivals: the Los Angeles Dodgers. From early morning prep scenes to a tense nighttime finale, viewers will go far beyond the front row — with an all-encompassing look at how elite athletes, die-hard fans, dedicated staff, and epic moments make the Bronx ballpark legendary.

Readers of this site know I detest the damn Yankees with all of my being—a fervent and deep-seated hatred borne of two decades of living in New York with a family that rooted for the Bronx Bombers while I cheered on my oft-suffering New York Mets—but I absolutely cherish baseball history, and I’m especially captivated by the majesty of ballparks. I can’t deny the Yankees are the most storied team in baseball—and Yankee Stadium is baseball’s most storied ballpark.

You can bet I’ll be watching this one in fascination and awe—even though it was filmed during last year’s World Series matchup between the two teams I hate the most.

More intriguingly, VIP is listed on Apple TV+ as “Episode 1 Yankee Stadium.” I think (and hope!) this implies the series will (eventually) showcase all 30 major league ballparks. An immersive tour of every stadium would be exhilarating. I’m crossing my fingers!

(Goodness though, corporate naming rights have royally screwed the game. VIP: Citi Field? VIP: Oracle Park? They don’t have quite the same solemnity, do they? Get rid of corporate naming deals and call the parks by their team names. I’d much prefer to see VIP: Giants Ballpark.)

Two press releases and five new OS releases top today’s Apple headlines.

First up:

Starting today, with the availability of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4, Apple Intelligence features are now available in many new languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified) — as well as localized English for Singapore and India — and are accessible in nearly all regions around the world.

In addition, iPhone and iPad users in the EU have access to Apple Intelligence features for the first time, and Apple Intelligence expands to a new platform with an initial set of features available in U.S. English with Apple Vision Pro […]

The second press release offers more details on “the first set of powerful Apple Intelligence features” for Vision Pro:

visionOS 2.4 is available today, bringing the first set of powerful Apple Intelligence features that help users communicate, write, and express themselves on Apple Vision Pro […] visionOS 2.4 also introduces the Apple Vision Pro app for iPhone to help users easily find new content and apps, and enhancements to Guest User make sharing Vision Pro experiences even easier.

Added are Writing Tools, Image Playground, Genmoji, Smart Reply, natural language search, Create a Memory Movie, plus—

Priority Messages in Mail, Mail Summaries, Image Wand in Notes, Priority Notifications in Notification Center, and Notification Summaries.

Apple Intelligence on Vision Pro is only available for US English.

Also available is the Apple Vision Pro app for iPhone, which:

offers a new way for users to discover new spatial experiences, queue apps and games to download, easily find tips, and quickly access information about their Vision Pro […]

Most useful, at least for me, are improvements to Guest Mode:

visionOS 2.4 lets users start a Guest User session on Apple Vision Pro with their nearby iPhone or iPad. To make it easier to guide a guest through the Vision Pro experience, users can now choose which apps are accessible to their guests and start View Mirroring with AirPlay from their iPhone.

This is a good start, and it’ll make it easier for me to share my Vision Pro with my wife, but Vision Pro desperately needs a real “multi-user” experience, like Mac has had for decades—but which iPhone and iPad have never gotten. A $3,500 device needs to be shareable within a household.

Five OS Updates

Enabling all of these new features are five new OS updates: iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, macOS 15.4, tvOS 18.4, and visionOS 2.4.

In addition to the above-noted features, these releases also add Apple News+ Food, eight new emoji (the Face with Bags Under Eyes may become my personal avatar) and a whole host of “bug fixes and enhancements.” 

Apple developers can download the releases and read detailed Release Notes.

After Thursday’s Opening Day whiff, I knew MLB would apologize to their MLB.TV customers for the outage. It didn’t come on Thursday. Nor on Friday. It wasn’t until Saturday at 12:06 p.m. that I got an email:

Dear Loyal Subscriber,

Opening Day is one of the most exciting days on the Baseball calendar. It’s the first chance to watch your favorite team and players start competing for a World Series Championship. And for over 20 years, MLB.TV has consistently given you the chance to stream those Opening Day games from wherever you are.

Our PR people tell us that every great apology starts with gratuitous, self-congratulatory backslapping. We’re also going to pretend the blackouts that prevent you from watching “your favorite team and players” if “wherever you are” is in a designated home region just aren’t a thing.

Unfortunately, MLB.TV experienced a technical issue yesterday that resulted in a temporary inability to access our live game streams. 

By “temporary,” we mean “at least a third of the average length of a ballgame.”

While our technical team addressed this issue immediately…

Got on the phone and yelled at people. So much yelling.

… and restored access as soon as possible,…

The credit card charge finally went through.

we understand how disappointing this was to fans who were eagerly awaiting the start of the season. 

We have no idea how disappointed fans—many of whom took the day off—were at missing the first game of the year, the game that sets the tone for the rest of the season, the one they’ve been looking forward to since their team was eliminated last year, and instead spent two hours staring at error messages and yelling at us. So much yelling.

For that, we apologize.

For that, we apologize.

MLB fans deserve the best streaming experience possible and we will continue to strive to provide that. 

We paid upfront for service through November. Also, we’re reopening negotiations with ESPN. (Apple? 🤙🏻 Call us, mmmkay? )

To thank you for your support of the National Pastime, MLB would like to offer you $10 off any purchase of $25 or more at MLBshop.com. See details below. Enter code [REDACTED] at checkout on orders over $25.

There’s no better way to say we’re sorry than to give you a discount on merchandise you had no intention of buying. What’s better than giving us at least $15 more for completely screwing up? Did we mention there’s a minimum shipping fee of $8.99? But don’t worry about that, we’re currently running a free shipping promotion. Of course, you can only use one coupon code at a time, so you can either save $8.99 or $10, so really, this is a $1.01 coupon. This is so much better than the $0.93 you’d get with a prorated refund of your $150, 162-game MLB.TV subscription. Math is tough. Let’s go shopping!

We thank you for continuing to support the game we all love and look forward to an exciting 2025 season.

Please don’t cancel your MLB.TV subscription! Please, please, please!

I included this footnote in my aforelinked Timothy Snyder/John Lithgow piece:

Linked reluctantly to Snyder’s Substack site. I wish he would leave Substack already. While I’m at it, he should stop posting to X/Twitter, too. He already has a vibrant Bluesky following. His continued presence on those sites drives revenue and attention to them.

It made my point, but I wanted to expand slightly on one aspect of the impact of Snyder’s X/Twitter presence. It became too unwieldy for a footnote, so here we are.

First, regarding Substack: There are plenty of really good, long-standing reasons why Snyder should abandon Substack. I won’t belabor that.

As for X/Twitter, Snyder has a “Verified” account. This means he signed up to pay the execrable Elon Musk at least $7 a month for a blue checkmark next to his name. So did John Lithgow and many businesspeople, brands, authors, influencers, and activists—many of whom, I’d wager, would express personal distaste for the man whose business they willingly support with their money and attention, thus fueling his ability to continue wreaking havoc on our democracy.

Paying for Premium is the only way to get a blue verified checkmark today:

Starting April 1, 2023 we began winding down our legacy Verification program and accounts that were verified under the previous criteria (active, notable, and authentic) will not retain a blue checkmark unless they are subscribed to X Premium.

Let’s put aside the obvious protection racket of having “paid verification systems”—which amount to little more than “it would be a shame if someone impersonated you”—because what’s more irksome is that X/Twitter uses the fact that these well-known, supposedly respectable people have paid for protection—I mean, Premium accounts—as a way to drive more subscribers to Premium by prominently placing ads for the service on the site, with this come-on:

Get your own Blue badge

Verification boosts your credibility and visibility, like @TimothyDSnyder.”

Every verified account you view displays this ad (until you dismiss it)—they’re paying to be exploited.

Gross.

As is tradition this time of year, Apple announced the dates for its annual developer conference: June 9–13, 2025.

Apple is basically following its COVID-era playbook: pre-recorded presentations, and, for the third year, a one-day “in-person experience” the Monday of the show.

The modern WWDC is somewhat emblematic of the modern Apple: high production values, efficient, and with enough humanity and playfulness to distract us from the intricately choreographed nature of the beast.

In many ways, I miss live, in-person WWDC. I mean the whole thing, not just the one day event. It was a hellacious week for those of us working the show—and for many in Apple, a hellacious several months—but the experience cannot be matched, from the crucible of rehearsals and related preparations to the energy of a live presentation to bumping into old friends you see but once a year.

COVID restrictions made preparations somewhat easier, as pre-recorded videos can be more easily honed: script every word, read off a teleprompter, repeat until perfect, and edit as necessary. Live presentations required as much as half-a-dozen rehearsals, and the speaker might still get nervous up on stage and flub a line or a demo.

And I loved helping speakers craft and hone their presentations. It was, and remains, one of the highlights of my job.

The other part of WWDC I miss dearly is the in-person labs. Once the exclusive domain of DTS, these labs were expanded to include all of engineering. Eventually, once videos were easily available for streaming on demand, the labs became the big draw for many developers. There’s nothing like a ten-minute in-person conversation with an Apple engineer to unblock a stalled project.

Each year, I eagerly anticipated my role as a lab “concierge”—ensuring every developer met with the right engineer (or App Reviewer or Evangelist) while also acting as an escalation point for developer complaints—even though it meant “performing” an extremely extroverted version of myself. It allowed me to meet amazing developers and connect them with equally amazing Apple people to solve their pressing issues. It was a deeply fulfilling week.

(But goodness, was I emotionally—and physically!—drained at the end of that week! I usually needed at least the weekend, if not the full week after, to refill my battery. Still, totally worth it.)

Pre-COVID, only the 4,000–5,000 in-person attendees benefited from labs. After COVID, and the creation of a virtual lab experience, thousands of developers from around the world were able to meet with DTS and other Apple engineers. That was a huge win for the developer community, expanding who benefited from these conversations. Still, while we extended our reach, I can’t help but feel we lost some of the humanity. Labs became less fluid and more transactional. Gone missing was the ability to pull in a colleague, or walk someone over to another lab, or share the learning experience with other developers. The community aspect of in-person labs dissipated online.

And I definitely missed the random in-person developer conversations I was fortunate enough to have.

Apple is again hosting a special event at Apple Park on “opening day.” In years past, attending WWDC was an experience for the privileged few. You had to be wealthy enough, employed enough, or simply fortunate enough to get in, and if you were outside of the US, it was an additional burden, even in the best of times. During COVID, these special events were further limited to those who were healthy enough—or foolish enough, depending on your perspective—to brave a brush with COVID and lucky enough to get picked in the “random selection process.”

Regardless, WWDC is a career highlight for many a developer.

This year, attending WWDC from outside the United States is a much scarier proposition considering the sharp authoritarian turn this country has taken, and the very real threat of visitors being detained for weeks, deported, or illegally rendered to a hostile country.

Many developers coming to the US for WWDC must first receive a visa letter from Apple “inviting” them. Historically, those invitations and visas were routine (except for some countries, like China), and there was seldom a safety concern for those visa recipients.

Today, not so much. I’m confident that inside Apple, there are conversations (or at least, people trying to have conversations) about the safety concerns—and the ethics—of issuing those visa letters. You can bet your bottom dollar Apple lawyers and public relations folks are busily gaming out scenarios for what to do if a developer “invited” by Apple is held at the border, or worse.

Apple will not publicly comment on this, of course. How can a $3 trillion US-based multinational company possibly express concern about the eroding civil liberties of their home country?

As an individual citizen of the United States, though, I cannot in good conscience recommend a developer come here for WWDC. It’s simply not worth taking the risk that some overzealous border control or ICE agent will consider you a threat. No conference is worth that.

There is something Apple could do to ease any developer anxiety about traveling to the US, while reducing the potentially overwhelming sense of FOMO that may drive many developers to chance it anyway.

Instead of making Apple Park the center of the developer universe, hold events in any of the many cities where Apple has a presence. Battersea in London, for example. Outside of the US, Apple has a dozen and a half Developer Academies in five countries and Developer Centers in three more.

These locations already host developer events. Do something special for WWDC. Commission unique t-shirts and pins for each location. Have senior executives show up and take selfies. Go wild!

With no shortage of stunning spaces in which to host developers, Apple could make WWDC a truly global event. And it would quietly demonstrate to developers that Apple understands the moment we’re in.

You’ve no doubt noticed the series of posts linking to The Pudding that landed here in rapid succession. A quick explanation may be in order.

When I linked to how animals sound in various languages, I originally ended it thusly:

Another engrossing piece from the brainy folks at The Pudding.

My plan: To link to my previous entries from The Pudding, but to my utter surprise, those entries did not exist.

Wut?

I double-checked, and sure enough, despite first bookmarking The Pudding in late September 2024—likely after seeing this—and saving several individual stories since, I had indeed neglected to actually share any of those links.

Oops.

The Pudding was new to me, even though they’ve been creating interactive, data- and visualization-driven stories since 2014. I was immediately enamored of their work: unique, engaging stories which start from a place of genuine curiosity and open-mindedness, with a large dollop of data nerdery, and then are presented in novel, compelling, downright fun ways, which help transform mere data into information and knowledge.

Some stories start with a deceptively simple question, a personal observation, or a distinct perspective; others challenge assumptions or resolve personal obsessions; still others aggregate disparate data or simply encourage discovering something new.

In short, The Pudding is perfectly calibrated to flip every one of my nerdy, inquisitive, learning-for-the-sake-of-learning switches. It’s a deeply satisfying, absolutely delightful site, and I’ve spent more hours exploring its rich archives than may be wise to admit.

For those of you who didn’t command-click every inline link above, I’ve collected them here; a Pudding Starter Pack, if you will:

• How do animals sound across languages?
• Deciphering the logic of China’s censorship using one hundred episodes of The Big Bang Theory.
• How You Play Spades is How You Play Life unpacks the African-American experience through the lens of the popular card game.
• A thoroughly engaging exploration of the evolution of the love song.
• Examining “the relationships between the main characters, and the recurring phrases associated with those characters” in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.
• Thousands of satellite photos of basketball courts, because they exist and deserve to be assembled in one place.
• “An exploration of rhythm and grooves that break the rules,” an interactive musical playground decoding “Dilla Time.”

I hope this makes up for not linking to these sooner.

I mentioned above that I first bookmarked The Pudding on September 27, 2024, but that’s not the only link from that day I neglected to share!

Outrageous!

Here’s my dirty little secret: I bookmark way more links than I will ever have time to write about. For every link I share, there are a dozen more I don’t get around to.

In an effort to further assuage my guilt, here is every bookmark from that day:

• AlphaGuess, a word game that is simultaneously enjoyable and frustrating.
• A Mastodon post advocating against adding your government ID to your phone and The Verge story that sparked it.
• A Vulture story on Mapping the Apple TV+ Universe.
• Rudy Giuliani’s DC Disbarment. (Having previously gloated over his New York one, it seemed only fair to mention this one too. I regret not doing so at the time.)
• A WordPress vs. WP Engine think piece about the Wordpress debacle making the internet worse.
• The Verge on X/Twitter ’s decision to block the J.D. Vance dossier and Ken Klippenstein’s decision to publish that dossier.
• NPR’s story about the BBC opening access to their vast library of sound effects.
• A fascinating piece on who should benefit from the nearly 400 million batteries’ worth of lithium sitting in Imperial Valley, CA. (Spoiler: It’s unlikely to be the local community.)
• A maddening story of a Google decision forcing a small independent app developer to kill their Android app.
• Emirates’ No-Nonsense Safety Video (an antidote of sorts to the British Airways’ safety video).
• And my favorite, the very silly 3 Most Popular Cocktails in America (except for Hawaii and Louisiana). (They linked “martini” to a vodka martini recipe. I mean, c’mon people.)

I did manage to share one story I bookmarked that day—Saving the Internet Archive (published three days later)—plus Member Update #3, exclusively for Workshop+ subscribers.

Regrettably, I’ll always be in a deficit—we’re halfway through March and I’ve already captured 260 bookmarks!

I’m sorry, that’s wrong. That should be “Trump Celebrates Immigration Arrest of Columbia Student, Vows to Target Others.”

We regret the error.

That headline is from the Washington Post story covering Mahmoud Khalil’s “arrest” (a word meant to lend a veneer of legality):

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, called Khalil’s arrest “genuinely shocking.”

“Arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world’s most repressive regimes,” he said. “Universities must recognize that these actions pose an existential threat to academic life itself. They must make clear, through action, that they will not sit on the sidelines as the Trump administration terrorizes students and faculty alike and runs roughshod over individual rights and the rule of law.”

Repressive regimes is overly polite. Brutal dictatorships seems more accurate.

Let me be clear: Regardless of your “politics”—whether you agree or disagree with what Mahmoud Khalil was protesting—detaining, arresting, and disappearing a legal American resident is a violation of due process and the First Amendment. It is an act of aggression against this country and its citizens (and legal residents), and it won’t stop with just Khalil, nor with people who engage in, as Trump sees it, “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”

The regime’s justification for this chilling action is based on a broad interpretation of the law:

The administration did not publicly lay out the legal authority for the arrest. But two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.

The provision says any "alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable."

Taken to its extreme—and no, Khalil’s snatching is not yet the extreme—the Trump regime could use this interpretation to detain and expel any green card or visa holder. You disagree with Trump’s threats to invade Canada, Greenland, or Panama, his Ukraine policies, or simply enjoy mocking him? That’s a serious adverse foreign policy consequence for the United States. Begone.

That’s not even the end of it. Even naturalized citizens (hi!) can have their citizenship revoked. One reason your citizenship can be revoked?

[…] if the U.S. government can prove that you joined a subversive organization within five years of becoming a naturalized citizen. Subversive organizations are groups deemed to be threats to U.S. national security. Examples include the Nazi Party and Al Qaeda.

Guess who gets to determine what a “subversive organization” is? How long before the Democratic Party itself is deemed “subversive”? There is supposed to be due process, of course, but due process is clearly not much of a deterrent for this regime.

First undocumented immigrants.

Then green card holders.

Then birthright citizens.

Then naturalized citizens.

Then you.

In a statement on Friday to John Gruber of Daring Fireball, Apple acknowledged a delay in the release of Apple Intelligence-powered Siri:

Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like Type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.

(As far as I can tell, Apple provided this statement only to Gruber; no other outlet appears to be reporting it independently.)

I’m among the many people disappointed, but not surprised, by the delay. In my first piece on this site, I expressed my excitement for the just-announced Apple Intelligence. In it, I highlighted three demos which delighted me, all tied to Siri’s deeper integration into and across the system.

Today, none of those examples work yet, and seemingly won’t for quite some time.

I’ve previously expressed my sympathy for the Siri team. In that same piece, I referenced a Bloombergstory suggesting longtime Apple exec Kim Vorrath is moving to Apple Intelligence, commenting:

I’ve watched Vorrath and her Program Office teams operate from the inside for many years. The biggest impact she and her team had across engineering was instilling discipline: every feature or bug fix had to be approved; tied to a specific release; and built, tested, and submitted on time. It was (is!) a time-intensive process—and engineering often complained about it, sometimes vocally—but the end result was a more defined, less kitchen-sink release each year. To a significant extent, her team is the reason why a feature may get announced at WWDC but not get released until the following spring. She provided engineering risk management.

It seems like Vorrath is already making an impact.

Most of those commenting on this delay have focused on internal technical issues as the cause. That makes sense and is most likely the case: all of the demos at last year’s WWDC for Personal Context were based on Apple apps and features—Photos, Calendar events, Files, Messages, Mail, and Maps (plus real-time flight details). Most of what they’re dealing with is likely tied to Apple Intelligence- and Siri-specific issues.

But another thought occurred to me, an important aspect to Apple Intelligence that may be overlooked. What is the impact of third-party developers on this delay? Not the impact on them—of.

Apple’s statement says that “a more personalized Siri” has “more awareness of your personal context” and “the ability to take action for you within and across your apps.” Much of that functionality would rely on third-party apps and the knowledge those apps have about us.

I can’t help but wonder: Have enough developers adopted the necessary technologies (App Intents, etc.) to make Apple Intelligence truly compelling?

Of the three WWDC demos I noted, it’s the last one described by Kelsey Peterson (Director, Machine Learning and AI) that’s the most extensive example of what “a more personalized Siri” would be capable of. Here’s how I summarized it:

You’re picking your mom up from the airport. You ask Siri “when is my mom’s flight landing?” Siri knows who “my mom” is, what flight she’s on (because of an email she sent earlier), and when it will land (because it can access real-time flight tracking). You follow up with “what’s our lunch plan?” Siri knows “our” means you and your mom, when “lunch” is, that it was discussed in a Message thread, and that it’s today. Finally, you ask “how long will it take us to get there from the airport?”. Siri knows who ”us” is, where “there” is, which airport is being referenced, and real-time traffic conditions.

(Watch the video, starting at 1:22:01.)

Imagine if, instead of Apple Mail, Messages, and Maps, Peterson was using Google Gmail, Messages, and Maps. Or Proton Mail, Signal, and Mapquest. If any of these apps don’t integrate with Apple Intelligence, the whole experience she described falls apart.

The key takeaway from the demo is that users won’t have to jump into individual apps to get the answers they need. This positions apps as subordinate to Apple Intelligence. 

Considering Apple’s deteriorating relationship with the community, will third-party developers want their app to be one more piece of Apple’s AI puzzle? How many developers are willing to spend time making their apps ready for Apple Intelligence, just so Apple can disintermediate them further? Unless customers are clamoring for the functionality, or it’s seen as a competitive advantage, it’s work that few developers will consider a priority—witness the reportedly low native app numbers for Apple Vision Pro as an example of the impact developers can have on the perceived success of a platform.

Much of the long-term success of Apple Intelligence depends on widespread adoption of App Intents by third-party developers—many of whom, at least initially, may see little reason to participate. While Apple is unlikely to delay Apple Intelligence just because of third-party developers, it could seriously hamstring the feature if there isn’t ample adoption of App Intents. Perhaps Apple, in addition to addressing technical issues, will use the extra time to drive that adoption. Apple Intelligence cannot succeed on first-party apps alone.

I am tragically late to rapper/singer/songwriter/actor Doechii.

My first exposure to her came a few weeks ago via a link to her rapping and singing her song Anxiety, which samples the hook from Somebody That I Used to Know. Her energy and enthusiasm were boundless and infectious, her voice ethereal yet raw. I couldn’t stop watching. I felt like I was discovering a new talent.

That video, it turns out, was from five years ago. Then, just last month, she won a Grammy for Best Rap Album for her mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal.

Is this what middle age feels like? Still, better to be in the caboose than stranded at the station.

Her Grammy win brought her NPR Tiny Desk concert from December back into rotation, and that’s what toppled me fully into the Doechii rabbit hole.

Doechii is irresistibly magnetic, utterly captivating, at once frenetic and nonchalant. I was absolutely mesmerized as she and her band performed at that desk. And her voice!—delicate and wispy one minute, rough and prickly the next—vulnerable and defiant in equal measure.

She’s a breathtakingly clever lyricist—dense, intricate, playful—and an evocative storyteller. She likewise brings considerable musicality to her arrangements, showcasing substantial range, from lush and orchestral beats (reminiscent of lo-fi), to textured, bouncy, and anthemic bops.

(Her Tiny Desk compositions brought a jazzy, ’90s hip-hop flavor, at one point with a brief but explicit reference to Digable Planet’s Rebirth of Slick’s sample of Art Blakely’s Stretching.)

She’s also blessed with a natural theatricality, possessing the dramatic spirit of a gifted musical theatre performer, despite no such experience. I’m hoping she’ll pursue this path; she has Future Broadway Star energy. In fact, I’ll wager she’ll need to clear space for the rest of the EGOT trophies within the next decade.

(Seriously. Watch the first few minutes of the music video for Denial is a River for a glimpse. She’s got some acting chops—natural, comfortable (likely honed over a decade of performing on YouTube and TikTok), and the ability to quickly and believably escalate emotionally. It’s evident in the Tiny Desk concert too. She was also in a 2023 movie, Earth Mama, her first acting gig. It won’t be her last.)

You can bet I’ll be watching Doechii’s career with tremendous interest.

My favorite kind of apps are those created by developers to scratch their own itch^[1], who then realize, Hey! This could be useful for others!

Hyperspace is that kind of app. John Siracusa—writer, critic, podcaster, and file system aficionado—initially created Hyperspace to validate his intuition that it should be possible to recover space on his ever-growing disk without deleting files, by using clones, a well-known but underutilized feature of today’s macOS file system:

If I could find files that had the same content but were not clones of each other, I could convert them into clones that all shared a single instance of the data on disk. I took an afternoon to whip up a Perl script (that called out to a command-line tool written in C and another written in Swift) to run against my disk to see how much space I might be able to save by doing this. It turned out to be a lot: dozens of gigabytes.

(In his inimitable style, Siracusa’s announcement is long, detailed, and peppered with hyperlinks. The documentation is likewise quite extensive, including an explanation of exactly how the app works. Also: of course Siracusa released a file systems-based app 🛎️.)

The result of his experiment is a thoughtfully designed app that elegantly solves the “duplicate files” issue many of us face, while preserving important file hierarchies—an underrated consideration without which files could be “lost” for apps (like Apple Photos) that rely on the file system for organization (as do many people, like me). The app also offers just enough options to exert control over which files and folders are impacted by the reclamation process.

(One welcome option: You can specify a folder as the “source,” ensuring that files in that location are never modified, useful if you have, say, a main photos library and several incremental backups you’re pruning.)

Over the years, as my storage space grew, unbounded, I’ve wondered whether an app like this was possible. It’s become especially problematic as I accumulate many copies of copies of backups—the same files, across different folders and drives. I’ve tried many apps that find and delete duplicate files, but the results were always unsatisfying: It was difficult to mark which files were the “original”, which duplicates should be deleted, and after dispatching those dupes, files were no longer where they should be. I was always left with a sense of unease—it felt like data loss, even though technically, it wasn’t.

Using Hyperspace, on the other hand, is deeply satisfying. In the end, everything on disk looks exactly the same, all my files are just where they were before, but now there’s more space on my drive. It’s indistinguishable from magic.

Hyperspace is, to use Siracusa’s own words, “an incredibly dangerous app.” Its clever conceit manipulates your files in ways which could end in catastrophic data loss. I recommend running this app (really, any duplicate removal app) on a clone of your drive, just in case. (I suggest Carbon Copy Cloner, my cloning app of choice for 20 years, to make that copy.)

That said, if I trust anyone to be hyperaware of potential data loss, it’s John Siracusa. His love of and experience with file systems, his four decades of Mac expertise, and his, shall we say, obsessive nature when it comes to backups (data and otherwise), are all reflected in the careful construction of his app. He has a clear understanding of the complexities and potential consequences of using the clone technique, and takes several precautions in the app to protect you from losing data during what is an undeniably delicate process. He is extremely circumspect about which files the app acts on; the app won’t even touch system or cloud-based files, which he deemed too dangerous for his initial release, and the app will stop at the slightest sign of trouble (with actionable error messages) rather than proceed down a potentially unsafe path. That he ran it against his own precious Photos library was itself a compelling convincer.

The app is free to download and scan your drive to identify files to be reclaimed, with a $10 In-App Purchase to complete the reclamation and free up space.

(Siracusa could have easily justified charging based on the amount of space recovered. Even his Lifetime Unlock ($50) is undervalued.)

Hyperspace is Siracusa’s most Siracusa-y app yet. I think it’s a winner.

Two weeks ago, Joseph Menn at The Washington Post reported that the United Kingdom had secretly demanded that Apple create a backdoor into iCloud, not just for UK residents, but worldwide, for all of Apple’s customers.

The uproar was nearly universal in its condemnation for its authoritarian overreach. When I linked to it last week (under the headline U.K. Government Wants to Spy on Every Apple Device in the World), I noted:

It’s extraordinary for the U.K. to demand this disastrous, privacy-wrecking access for its own citizens. It’s beyond audacious to do so for the 2.35 billion Apple devices in use in the world.

In an apparent response to the news story, Apple provided this statement to several outlets:

Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature. ADP protects iCloud data with end-to-end encryption, which means the data can only be decrypted by the user who owns it, and only on their trusted devices. We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before. Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in the future in the United Kingdom. As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.

(Hold onto that link. I’ll get back to it in a moment.)

It’s certainly better for Apple to outright disable ADP for its UK customers, rather than weaken it for everyone in the world. The former reflects the status quo: your iCloud data is encrypted, but Apple—and therefore governments, upon request—can gain access. The latter asks Apple to mislead its customers—lie—about a feature whose primary selling point is “No one else can access your end-to-end encrypted data, not even Apple,” while also granting unfettered, uncontrolled, undisclosed access to every customer’s private data.

From Apple’s perspective, it was a no-brainer.

It also, conveniently, shifts the blame squarely onto the UK government. Your data is less secure than it could be because of them.

Of course, disabling ADP for UK customers does not address the underlying concern: the demand was for access to all devices worldwide, not just those of UK residents. That demand still stands, Apple remains subject to it, and ADP remains available to non-UK customers.

This move also provides no assurance that Apple won’t (be forced to) create a backdoor in the future.

So why bother pulling it in the UK? I think Apple is sending a very subtle, tightly calibrated message that indirectly acknowledges the UK’s pressure without explicitly stating it.

Let’s look back at the statement Apple provided, and the link they included:

As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.

That link is to Apple’s Government Information Requests page, which explains the types of requests they get from governments, and how they respond to them.

It also contains, as of February 21, 2025, the following clear and unambiguous statement (screenshot):

Apple has never created a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services. We have also never allowed any government direct access to Apple servers. And we never will.

This is a clear warrant canary and Apple is conspicuously drawing our attention to it—the most they can likely do without violating a secret gag order.

I’d wager the reason Apple pulled ADP in the UK in the first place was precisely so they could put out this very statement, thus implicitly acknowledging the UK demands are accurate, and putting those customers—and the rest of the world—on notice that something is going on there. They can’t say what, because of legal constraints, but: clearly UK-based, clearly related to end-to-end encryption. It’s left to us to draw the (obvious) conclusions.

Apple has a second, equally insidious problem though. If they were to concede to the UK’s preposterous demands for a secret backdoor to every device worldwide, every government that wants to spy on their citizens will pass—and enforce—similar laws. Clearly this would be untenable.

Yet, by defiantly disabling ADP in the UK, Apple provided every government in the world another path: apply the right pressure, and Apple will disable ADP for you. You run the play, it’s in the playbook.

Am I being overly cynical or naïve to suggest this irrational request was a ploy from the UK to eliminate full end-to-end encryption and keep their current access?

Perhaps.

But I’ll suggest it anyway.

There’s a mistaken belief in some circles that Apple pulled all end-to-end encryption for UK customers. They haven’t. Only the data covered by Advanced Data Protection—an opt-in, off-by-default feature—is impacted by this move. Everything else that was previously end-to-end encrypted—passwords, health data, Messages in iCloud, and so on—remains end-to-end encrypted, but, the encryption key is stored with Apple, so while your data is E2EE, it’s also viewable by Apple—and therefore by governments. This is how everything worked before Advanced Data Protection was announced in December 2019. Which is to say, governments already had access to your iCloud data, in or out of the UK, unless you have ADP enabled.

Governments are desperately trying to forestall the move to full end-to-end encryption. The access they have today may not be comprehensive, but it gets them some of the most sensitive customer data, upon (legal) request.

The status quo ante doesn’t gain the UK any additional access, but—crucially—they don’t lose the access they currently have. Demanding secret entrée to every Apple device worldwide is so outrageous, it can’t have been their real goal. It’s looks like an intimidation tactic, one with such dire consequences that it simply could not be ignored. It is, in the end, a warning: Kill ADP, or “full iCloud access” will be the least of our demands.

I believe Apple would like nothing more than to be able to say “we have no way to grant access to customers’ data”. I’m confident they would make ADP the default if they could, and the reason they haven’t is primarily out of concern for their customers, who could lose access to their data if they lose access to their accounts or devices—the same reason I believe most customers haven’t enabled it (along with a naïve belief that only criminals are targeted by the government).

But keeping ADP opt-in rather making it the default may also act as a hedge against backdoor demands, buying Apple time to boost public support (and awareness) for stronger encryption options.

But here’s Apple’s conundrum: They’re subject to the laws of the countries in which they operate, and those countries hold surprising sway over them, because, as I noted in my earlier piece:

… governments are recognizing they can coerce Apple via threats of sales bans, catastrophic fines, or tariffs.

Or, I’ll add, existential attacks on a fundamental Apple value.

My wish would be for Apple to take itself out of the E2EE equation completely: enable Advanced Data Protection by default. Once enabled, Apple can’t disable it—only the customer can do so. Apple can throw up their hands when approached by an overreaching government: Sorry, old chap, nothing we can do. Pip pip, cheerio.

I know they’d never do this, though. It’s a provocative move, one likely to trigger immediate legal backlash. Even with privacy, I doubt there’s a bright red line that Apple would never cross and would make them walk away from a market. Principles usually take a backseat to profits, eventually. Apple remains subject to government coercion until and unless they’re willing give up money—an action I seriously doubt they’d ever take. And governments know it.

On Monday, Google announced that Gulf of Mexico would be renamed to Gulf of America, as demanded by Donald Trump.

That evening, in response to a post from @luckytran about this change, I wrote:

This will surely change as Apple bows to pressure, but for now, I'm sharing my appreciation.

I included screenshots of Apple Maps still showing Gulf of Mexico and a “No matching places found” error when searching for Gulf of America.

My appreciation was short-lived. Today, Apple bowed to the pressure:

I actually thought it would take Apple longer to acquiesce, that they’d employ some simple sabotage to slow things down, insist they needed to get “community input” or “global acceptance”, or merely needed to “follow procedures,” a process Apple knows quite well.

But no. They acted quickly, almost eagerly. Here you go, sir. Can I get you anything else, sir? Thank you, sir.

I understand that map names are driven by governmental decree, and, having been thus decreed, Google, Apple, and other map providers might feel they had no choice but to comply—though, as of this writing, only Google and Apple have done so.

Yet I can’t tell what consequences there’d be if they hadn’t complied. It appears there are no direct legal penalties for companies (or individuals) for simply ignoring the change. Apple and Google could have defied Trump and all he could do is impotently yell at them. Perhaps they are fearful of punitive action from Trump’s regime—punishing tariffs? mean tweets?—but they didn’t even test his resolve.

Tim Cook could have insisted that there are four lights^[1] and defied Trump to call him a liar.

Instead, the rest of the world laughs as we insist it’s the Gulf of America.

As it always has been, of course.

As my wife and I have done for the last several years, on Sunday we sat down in front of our oversized LG TV to watch the most American of events:

The Super Bowl Commercials.

Neither of us cares much about the football game that keeps interrupting these commercials (she’s not much of a sports fan, and I vastly prefer baseball), so some may call it a waste to sit here for four hours so we can catch 30 minutes of ads, but here we are.

I highly doubt any of these will prove memorable, but a few stood out—though not always for good reasons.

• Instacart took an early lead for the best ad of the game with their assemblage of grocery store mascots. It was great to see Old Spice Guy. “I’m on a porch.”
• David Beckham and his “twin brother” Matt Damon pitching Stella Artois was adorbs—especially the in absentia diss of Ben Affleck.
• Disney-Hulu’s what if… spot annoyed me, mainly because so few of the properties shown were actually Disney creations—I caught only Frozen and the live-action Lion King; the rest were acquired from Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel, Fox, even Hulu. And it felt vaguely threatening, somehow. Also: The YouTube comments are hilarious—and brutal.
• Ritz’s “salty” made me snort, which made me salty. Also: Weird hearing slang my co-workers were using 15 years ago, in a cracker commercial.
• Rick Ross’s Hustlin’ as the soundtrack to Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara’s pickleballing for Michelob Ultra was hilariously incongruous. They looked like they were having fun. Whip it, whip it real hard.
• The pointillist OpenAI piece—“All progress has a starting point,” suggesting generative AI and ChatGPT will be (is?) as fundamental as fire, the wheel, and the internet—felt like a still-too-early, self-congratulatory self-assessment. It also reminded me, at least in its dot-based design, of Apple’s “Intention.”
• Meta’s Ray-Ban AI-powered glasses perfectly captured the boorish behavior I assume of its wearers.
• NFL’s “I am somebody” ends with “Any kid can be somebody. If they have somebody to show them the way.” Which, OK… but suggests that kids aren’t simply somebody by virtue of being themselves? They need to have their somebody-ness externally validated? I loved the message right up until the end.
• On the other hand, Nike’s You Can’t Win was absolute perfection. 10/10, no notes.
• The breast screening spot from Your Attention Please/Novartis was… eye-catching—and hopefully equally effective for convincing more women to get screened.
• I loved the mid-’80s high school dramedy-inspired push from NFL Flag 50 to grow girls’ variety flag football. “I’m Brad./I can read.” The YouTube comments are—shocker!—filled with a bunch of pissed-off (what I assume to be) men.
• Harrison Ford for Jeep was moving and welcome, and the end cracked me up. “This Jeep makes me happy, even though my name is (Ford).”
• Energy Transfer’s “life without oil and gas products” was just disgusting. I’m OK with the world needing petroleum products, but why advertise it during the Super Bowl—and in a hospital devoid of these products, with a pregnant woman on the verge of giving birth? Tellingly, comments are disabled on YouTube. Just as well, they’d surely get roasted.
• I don’t think I saw this Uber Eats football conspiracy during the game, but it was part of a collection I caught beforehand, and it’s a Top Three contender.
• And of course, the reunion we’ve all been waiting for: When Harry Met Sally for a Sandwich. “I’m competing with a condiment.”

There were also a handful of needle drops designed to make me feel either old or co-opted. Or both.

In addition to the (at least time-relevant) use of Rock You Like a Hurricane in the flag football spot and the previously noted Hustlin’, Hims & Hers scored their weight-loss medication to Childish Gambino’s This is America, while Poppi pitched flavored bubble water with Deee-lite’s wonderful Groove is in the Heart. This last one killed me a little, much as Microsoft selling Zunes using Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock did 17 years ago.

People Magazine offers a full Super Bowl ad recap, along with comprehensive coverage from TV Insider and Adweek.

Oh, and the Philadelphia Eagles dominated the Kansas City Chiefs, 40-22, in a game that wasn’t nearly as close as the final score suggests.

John Gruber has a long, thoughtful piece at Daring Fireball about the complications (and relative importance) of creating bootable backups in the modern Mac era (triggered by a now-fixed Apple bug):

I don’t think anyone would dispute that “creating a bootable startup drive clone” has gotten complicated in the Apple Silicon era, which began with MacOS 11 Big Sur in late 2020. Not to mention the complications that were introduced with the switch from HFS+ to APFS with MacOS 10.13 High Sierra in 2017, and the read-only boot volume and SIP with MacOS 10.15 Catalina in 2019. M-series Macs boot weirder than Intel-based Macs. Not bad weird. I think it’s all justified in the pursuit of security (SIP stands for System Integrity Protection, and is aptly named) and elegant system architecture. But booting is now makes-things-much-more-difficult-than-before weird for tools like SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner.

He goes into deep detail about how bootable backups work with SuperDuper, his backup tool of choice. (For what it’s worth, my preferred app has long been its “archrival”, Carbon Copy Cloner, which I’ve been using—and recommending—for at least two decades, though the earliest reference I can find to it is a 2008 post on my now-defunct personal blog. I also worked with the author, Mike Bombich, when we were both at Apple.)

Gruber concludes:

Having my SuperDuper-cloned backup drive be bootable is nice to have, but I really can’t say I need it any more. 20, 15, even just 10 years ago, that wasn’t true — I really did want the ability to boot from my backup drive at a moment’s notice. But that’s really not true any more for me. It probably isn’t for you, either. It definitely isn’t true for most Mac users.

But it remains true for some people, who are using (or responsible for) Macs in high-pressure tight-deadline production environments. Live broadcast studios. Magazines or newspapers with a deadline for the printer that’s just hours (or minutes) away. Places with strict security/privacy rules that forbid cloud storage of certain critical files. If the startup drive on a production machine fails, they need to get up and running now. Plug in a backup drive, restart, and go. Anything longer than that is unacceptable.

I agree with Gruber broadly: I was also once a “bootable backups” guy, and I too haven’t used one in at least a decade. And certainly production environments need fast recovery options to handle time-critical failures.

But booting from a backup drive “at a moment’s notice”? Well, that’s just straight-up bananas!

OK, let me be clear: Gruber is a smart and technically savvy fellow, and I’m confident he doesn’t mean it the way I’m (overly dramatically) interpreting it here. But let me state for the record:

A backup you boot from is no longer a backup. It is now a production device.

(I’d originally added to the end of that, and the sole copy of your data, but that’s not necessarily true (and certainly not what Gruber meant). In an environment like what Gruber describes, there would (should!)never be a “single backup” of critical data. The backup drive that you plug in, restart, and go would likely be one of multiple such drives, kept up to date and designated as, effectively, a “hot spare.” In fact, I’d wager most such environments go beyond mere data redundancy, to device redundancy: Backup computers, not just backup data.)

I spent a significant part of my early career working in technical support and as a sysadmin at various magazine publishers, and later, in early web publishing at marketing companies and advertising agencies. Among other things, I was the person responsible for creating and implementing backup policies. Part of that was having options for handling critical path failures—recovering quickly when computers or drives failed.

Bootable backups were part of that process, but not in the way Gruber appears to imply. We’d never use a backup as a boot drive without having another copy of that drive.

Whether we were continuously making that second backup, or made it at the time we needed it, we always ensured that a second backup existed before we attempted any recovery. The last thing we wanted was to screw up the backup too.

The only time I would use a bootable backup drive directly—without making another copy—was if I specifically made it to boot from it. This wasn’t a backup in the traditional sense, but a clone, a snapshot from which to work. It wasn’t a hedge against the future, but a way of replicating a system to work on now. In this scenario, it didn’t matter if I screwed up the bootable backup, because the data still existed and could be re-cloned.

To be very clear: In the production environments I worked in, we would never use the current and only backup to recover and keep working (or as Gruber put it, to “get up and running now”). Our data was as important as our deadlines, and we invested the necessary time and money into systems that allowed fast recovery without sacrificing either.

One standard process we implemented was having boot partitions and data partitions. We created bootable recovery drives—so computers could be used if the boot partition failed—and separate datadrives, with backups running to those as often as the amount of work we were willing to lose. Thosedrives were themselves also backed up near- or offline.

For any “critical path” data or systems, we also kept “hot spares”—devices we could press into service at a moment’s notice. These were maintained as if they were in active use, because at any moment, they could be.

Rebuilding a Backup Process

Gruber mentions that he’s “suffered very few disk calamities.” He’s fortunate. I’ve had seemingly more than my fair share of catastrophic disk failures—some caused by my own poor backup hygiene. Over the years, my backup process has oscillated between very disciplined and a totally laissez-faire approach.

Today, it leans toward the latter, in part because a lot of my data is in The Cloud™ and I can get to it from multiple devices—it almost feels like a backup. It’s not, but I might be excused for acting otherwise. 

Many of us keep irreplaceable information in the cloud: Photos of your kids. Early email flirtations with your now-spouse. Tax records. Software serial numbers. The list is endless. We trust Apple and Dropbox and Google Drive to keep our stuff safe. But they’re not backups. You delete it here, it deletes it there and everywhere. Or, worse still, they delete it without having adequate backups of their own.

This is why I enable iCloud Photos to “Download Originals to this Mac” and disable iCloud’s “Optimize Mac Storage” in System Settings. If the files are local, I take responsibility for them.

It’s also why I have dozens of old hard drives with copies of copies of backups of data I’ll probably never look at again, but which makes me happy knowing I have them, just in case.

My backup process works fine but is not as regimented as it could be. It currently relies on a combination of Carbon Copy Cloner for local backups (semi-automated on drive connection, not done as regularly as I should, sadly) and Backblaze, which I’ve used since at least 2012, for automatic, remote backups. Both have saved my bacon more than once, but it’s unfocused, made worse by having multiple computers in various states of sync.

I plan to revamp my backup process soon. I’m thinking of reintroducing Time Machine for more granular, local backups; with Carbon Copy Cloner handling replication of those (and other) backups; and Backblaze acting as my online-and-offsite copy. I’ve been eyeing a Synology since my Drobo died several years back (and the company went out of business), but I’m considering a Mac mini with a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). And I’m looking into a local offsite backup with friends and potentially cold storage with family in another state.

My biggest challenge is the sheer volume of data I have—approaching 80TB across several drives. How much of that is duplicate data? Who knows! (Prolific podcaster John Siracusa has a brilliant new app (currently available in TestFlight for ATP members) that would help here. I’m excited by its potential.)

I’m open to hearing about experiences with and alternative strategies for backup solutions.

I’d been reading raves for days about the seven-minute musical cold open for this Questlove-helmed documentary, so when it popped up in my Peacock “For You” list Saturday night, I figured I’d catch the intro before jumping into another episode of Columbo or Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Two hours later, as the credits rolled over the rousing finale of Hey Jude intercut with a synced montage of musical acts, I wondered not whether Ladies & Gentlemen… would win an Emmy, but rather how many.

First, that much-ballyhooed opening sequence: It will certainly go down as perhaps the greatest musical mashup ever created for a documentary. Questlove’s decades of DJing is on full aural display as he overlays and intertwines dozens of performances, all perfectly beat-matched, weaving sonic stories from juxtaposed two-second clips.

The musical collage offered several moments of jaw-dropping awe: the divine inspiration of blending Bobby McFerrin’s Drive with Busta Rhymes’ Tear Da Roof Off and TLC’s Creep. The fulfilled expectations—as soon as Queen’s Under Pressure came on, you knew Vanilla Ice’s legally distinct™ Ice Ice Baby would soon follow. And sheer delight that can’t be logically explained—I got all verklempt when Cher’s I Found Someone segued seamlessly into Hanson’s MMMBop.

These moments carried through to the end as Questlove masterfully interwove Taylor Swift, Billy Preston, Ed Sheeran, Backstreet Boys, Salt ’N’ Pepa, Simon & Garfunkel, Spice Girls, and Tina Turner into one triumphant all skate. Only Questlove—with his deep musical knowledge, ambition to create, and attention to detail—could pull off this audacious act.

In a New York Times interview, Questlove explains how this sequence came to be:

It’s impossible for me to phone anything in, even if I wanted to. I just wanted to throw the ultimate D.J. gig and hook you in from the gate. It started off small, and it couldn’t stop.

In the beginning, I was just going in five-year intervals — what’s the three strongest moments between ’75 and ’80? — and do it that way. But I’m so programmed as a D.J. it’s physically impossible for me to gather a group of songs together and not start — that’s my version of improvisation. And once you put, like, 17 songs together, you have a conversation with yourself: “OK, are we really doing this?”

The documentary probably claims its Emmys on the strength of these seven minutes alone.

But the rest of the two-hour show makes an even stronger argument, as it explores the remarkable impact SNL musical performances have had on our culture: The first rap artists on television; performers from Adele to Frank Zappa; Dick in a Box. SNL has both shaped and reflected the music we listen to in ways that I’d forgotten—or perhaps taken for granted—until watching this documentary. Just the sheer scope of genres represented is overwhelming. Or, to quote Jem Aswad’s MSN review:

In terms of its musical guests, “SNL” has no real parallel in American television history.

Out of the hundreds of performers that were showcased, there may have been three or four I’d never heard of before. (The group Fear was among them, but gosh, I loved that segment!) That is a remarkable achievement for a show that’s best known for comedy. Yet I’ll admit, when I watched SNL more regularly, it was often driven by the musical guest even more than it was by the host. I’m guessing that’s true for a sizable portion of its audience.

The film goes well beyond a simple retrospective of musical guests. It tells stories of classic sketches that almost never aired, and spotlights the many parodies, music-driven sketches, and controversies from the show’s 50-year history, and contextualizes them—in some cases with backstage footage, which proved particularly revealing and, as a TV nerd, especially rewarding.

Questlove has achieved legendary status in the music industry and is already a multi-award-winning documentarian. His latest foray into the genre cements his place as one of our top musical filmmakers.

If the goals of a documentary are to educate, entertain, illuminate, and inspire, Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music hit the superfecta.

I’d like you to take a listen to this eleven-minute podcast; it’s a “deep dive” into JAG’s Workshop:

It might sound like a pair of professional podcasters decided to talk about this humble site, but no—it is, as you may have already sussed out, completely AI-generated. Every word, every breath, every “ummm,” “ahh,” and “like.” From voices to content to structure, it’s AI all the way down.

Last fall, the tech-adjacent world went gaga over the release of these “audio overviews” from Google NotebookLM. The idea is, you toss data (articles, URLs, audio, and so on) into NotebookLM, and Google’s AI “becomes an instant expert in those sources”, allowing you to query it for insights—or generate these two-person podcasts.

I pointed it at my site and grinned giddily as I listened to the result. Even knowing it was entirely made up, I found it remarkable for how real it sounded. I was impressed by the audio quality, the conversational style, and the “insights.” It made the site (and its author!) sound extraordinarily impressive and worth reading.

It wasn’t perfect, but I loved so much about this podcast. The opening description is an ego-stroke of massive proportions, capturing what I think is the essence of the site:

Host A: Ever get the feeling your brain just kinda bounces between totally different things? One minute you’re knee-deep in some tech spec from, like, the 90s, next you’re trying to perfect a vintage cocktail recipe?

Host B: And then bam! You’re analyzing political commentary, but through the lens of, like, The West Wing or something.

Host A: Tell me about it! Well, get ready for that times a thousand. We’re diving into JAG’s Workshop, the digital playground of this guy, Jason Anthony Guy, and trust me, it’s a wild ride.

Host B: This isn’t your grandma’s blog, that’s for sure. It’s tech nostalgia, it’s cocktail culture, it’s—honestly, it’s all over the map, but in the best way possible.

They also call me a “tech geek political junkie” and “a storyteller at heart.” It’s something I’d write about myself, were I a tad less modest. I like it so much though, I may clip some of it for my About page (it’s OK: someone else said it, not me!).

From a pure “does it sound like a podcast?” perspective, it hits all the expected notes: two surprisingly enthusiastic hosts bouncing off each other on a series of loosely related topics they awkwardly try to transition between while adding personal takes meant to sound insightful. The only thing missing was a sponsor break from Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for creating your website^[1].

Using the posts on this site as their starting point, the hosts added context, connected ideas, and drew conclusions in ways that sounded remarkably human. They even added facts that were not part of the original content, but which reflected the knowledge a real person might have about the topic.

For example, when introducing my post on the death of John Amos, they say:

Host A: Remember John Amos? Played James Evan Sr. on Good Times.

I hadn’t included the character’s full name, only “Amos as James was my first TV dad”; the host added that extra detail. They also riffed on my passing references to Amos’s other roles, recognizing Good Times, Die Hard 2, Coming to America, and Psych as movies and TV shows of different genres and time periods, and used that knowledge to add a reflective coda:

Host A: It’s like how one actor’s career can have this crazy impact even across, like, completely different genres and decades.

These small moments added to the believability of “two people talking.”

I also enjoyed the range of emotion the hosts expressed: disbelief, empathy, even exasperation—which you can hear during their discussion of my The West Wing obsession:

Host A: There’s another pop culture thing this guy is all about: The West Wing.

Host B: Oh, tell me about it!

They’re also imperfect speakers, interjecting “ums,” “uhhs,” and “likes” as they speak. These disfluencies made them sound more human and conversational, and the “audio production” added to this humanness; at one point toward the end, as one of the hosts tries to remember a supposed quote (I’ll get to that later), they say “... wait, I wrote it down...,” and their voice fades off slightly as if leaning away from a microphone to reach their notes.

There are also moments that feel genuinely perceptive. At one point, they juxtapose a post about The West Wing and one about a Trump/Vance Downfall parody:

• Host A: He goes from loving The West Wing—this very idealized view of politics—to sharing a Downfall parody video about Trump... it’s like he’s holding up this mirror, right: this is what we wish for, this is what we got.

I’ve been talking about the hosts as if they’re human, because it’s hard to listen to them and think of them as AI. But AI they are, so not everything’s perfect, or even true.

There were a few speech oddities you probably caught. Multiple times the hosts spell out words, like “a-n-d” or “u-s-e-d” instead of saying “and” or “used.” They also overstate and embellish a lot in their efforts to sound erudite^[2]; for example, three sentences linking to a YouTube video becomes “a whole post about the Nintendo Gameboy,” where I go “deep” about how these games “are what I grew up with” and “shaped me.” While I did admit I still have several Nintendo systems, the idea that these games shaped me is a bit of lily gilding.

And of course, being AI, they simply make stuff up. I mentioned earlier a moment when a host appeared to lean away from the microphone to retrieve a quote they attributed to me. That quote was “Life’s too short to be a snob about your passions.”

Except… I never wrote it. It’s a complete and utter fabrication. It was presented so convincingly that I briefly believed I’d forgotten writing it—but it seemed too turgid, even for me. Only a search through my entries convinced me it wasn’t mine.

They also bestow on me “degrees in both computer science and theatre arts.” While I studied both in college, I hold degrees in neither. (Indeed, I hold no degrees at all.) This invention is clearly a misinterpretation of my About page, where I write that “In college, I pursued degrees in both computer science and in theatre, television and film production.” Of course, pursued does not mean completed.

There are a dozen or more of these embellishments and outright fabrications throughout the podcast, which, taken together, help make this site (and this author) seem utterly fascinating, maybe more than is warranted^[3]. But despite these examples of AI bullshit—or maybe because of them!—I found the discussion delightful.

I’m excited about the future of this technology. The quality of the podcast is already good enough to convince some that it’s two real people having an engaging discussion. My good friend Ron shared with me his experience of driving his daughter to school and listening with her to a podcast study guide for her AP Psychology class. Only after it was done did he learn from her that it was AI generated.

A former co-worker uses this technology to create podcasts on a wide range of topics. He spends a few hours on a weekend filling out spreadsheets with sources of information, pours them into NotebookLM, adds intros and music, and uploads the results to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The results are credible and riveting. (No link because he doesn’t disclose it’s AI generated, and I don’t want this to be the thing that outs it!)

Over the next couple of years, the audio will only improve; it’s already nearly indistinguishable from human voices today, though NotebookLM is currently limited to just two English-speaking, American-accented voices. Other companies offer more voice options—accents, languages, tonality, and so on. I expect those to eventually find their way into NotebookLM.

I also anticipate more control over the kind of podcast (or more broadly, audio) that’s generated. A one-person podcast, perhaps; or a panel discussion where one person acts as host to a team of opinion-makers; maybe even a round-table style discussion where each person brings a topic and gives their takes. Video would be a natural next step.

And, of course, some much-needed improvements to the AI’s “intelligence.” Inaccurate summaries and hallucinations continue to be among the biggest issues in the industry—especially when presented as fact—and it’s not clear how long it will be before these issues go away.

Despite this—and the many other issues AI has—I’m excited about the game-changing potential of using AI as a personal knowledge base and information retrieval system, especially when paired with audio and video as the method of sharing the results.

This space continues to fascinate me.

Yesterday I wrote:

Everyone’s hair is on fire because a president pardoned his son. Unprecedented? Sure.

Early this morning, I came across an Esquire article from Charles P. Pierce in Apple News+, headlined:

A President Shouldn’t Pardon His Son? Hello, Anybody Remember Neil Bush?

The deck was as straightforward:

Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by the fact that he pardoned his progeny. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.

The article included the following paragraph (emphasis added):

But the luckiest thing about this lucky American businessman is that his father and brother were both presidents of the United States, and that his father exercised his unlimited constitutional power of clemency to pardon The Lucky American Businessman for all that S&L business way back when. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil, whose brother, George, later became president of the United States himself.

I bookmarked it, prepared to post an update to my “unprecedented” comment, but in tracking down the direct web link, I instead got a “Sorry, this story isn’t available in Apple News” error.

Hm. The article was still available in Apple News+ when visited it directly, but both the headline and the deck were now changed. It now read:

Hunter Biden Isn’t the First Presidential Son Caught Up in Controversy. Anybody Remember Neil Bush?

Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by his son’s struggles or the pardons he issued on his way out of the White House. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.

It includes an Editor’s Note:

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated. An earlier version stated incorrectly that George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the error.

The paragraph I quoted also removed the reference to a pardon:

But the luckiest thing about this lucky American businessman is that his father and brother were both presidents of the United States. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil, whose brother, George, later became president of the United States himself.

On the Esquire Politics site simply pulled the article, giving it a title “This Column Is No Longer Available,” with the content of article itself also replaced by an Editor’s Note.

It appears Pierce, the article’s author, got caught spreading misinformation, possibly originating on Threads (archive). The Threads post itself now has a Community note linking to a fact-check.

I wanted to believe that H.W. Bush had pardoned his son—and no one has thought about it since—because I also believe Hunter Biden’s pardon would have absolutely zero impact on President Biden’s legacy.

I’m not sure if Pierce wrote the story based on the misinformation, or added the “pardon” bits to an existing story.

Either way, it’s a reminder of the importance of double-checking what you read, especially when it validates your own viewpoint.

President Joe Biden, in a direct and unapologetic statement:

Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.

When the news broke Sunday evening that President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, my first thought was good for him. I also knew I’d awake to a string of pearl clutching.

Sure enough, the deluge of denunciations came fast and furious. Almost every story led with the “reversal” of President Biden’s “previous pledges” to not pardon his son, with the “hypocrisy” of his decision “sparking backlash.” Republicans called him a “liar”, Democrats were “disappointed.”

I can’t get into President Biden’s head, but I think that once Trump won, a pardon was a fait accompli. I’m sure the prosecutors knew that, too, at least at some level. There was no way he’d let his son twist in the wind ahead of a vindictive incoming president who nominated Matt Gaetz/Pam Bondi as Attorney General and Kash Patel to lead the FBI. He may have “broken” his promise, but I believe that promise was made under very different circumstances, before the American public elected a criminal. At this point, I think there’s a bit of “fuck it” happening, and I’m OK with that.

I’m only surprised that he did it now, and not at 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2025, as a massive, Dark Brandon middle finger to the incoming administration.

If Donald Trump’s children were facing jail time, is there any doubt in your mind that he would immediately use his one incontrovertible power as president and pardon them? Heck, I suspect he might do it preemptively as soon as he’s sworn in, just in case.

May I remind you that Donald Trump pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law four years ago, and then, last week, nominated him as ambassador to France?

Beyond that, Trump has a litany of self-serving pardons. I don’t recall the Right raising a ruckus about it four years ago.

Everyone’s hair is on fire because a president pardoned his son. Unprecedented? Sure. But only because the president’s son was prosecuted for a crime few other people would be charged with. As Biden notes in his statement:

Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form.

From that previously linked list of Trump pardons and commutations:

The rapper Kodak Black […] was granted a commutation. In 2019, he was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for lying on background paperwork while attempting to buy guns.

Sounds familiar. Except:

[Black] admitted to lying on background check forms while buying multiple firearms […].

Prosecutors said two of the guns were later found by the police at crime scenes, including one — with Black’s fingerprints and a live round in the chamber — that had been used to fire at a “rival rap artist.” […]

Another weapon was discovered in the trunk of a car as the rapper and his team attempted to cross the Canadian border into upstate New York in April. Black was charged with unlawful possession of marijuana and criminal possession of a firearm.

The underlying crimes are superficially similar. If Trump can commute a stranger’s sentence in this situation, why shouldn’t President Biden pardon his son for a less serious version of the same basic crime?

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times has the pearl-clutchiest of takes. Under the hed “Broad Pardon for Hunter Biden Troubles Experts,” writer Kenneth P. Vogel suggests the pardon

[…] is raising awkward historical comparisons and sharp questions about the use of presidential clemency.

Vogel then quotes one of those experts:

“It is extraordinarily hazardous to use the pardon power in a case where the person is an intimate of the president,” said Aziz Z. Huq, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

It’s unclear why the good professor believes this, providing no evidence to support his belief, only that:

[…] President Biden’s pardon of his son “really does strike at the rule of law.”

Except it doesn’t. The president has the absolute authority to issue pardons, which Vogel himself immediately notes:

Presidents have unchecked authority to issue pardons, which wipe out convictions, and commutations, which reduce prison sentences.

We may not like how some have used that authority, but it is very much within “the rule of law.”

I’m not big on bothsidesism, but in a world where the president-elect is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, who was granted “presidential immunity” by a stolen Supreme Court, and who successfully ran out the clock on his own prosecutions, I’m perfectly comfortable with President Biden exercising his power as a president, and as a father.

The hypocrisy of the Right and everyone else handwringing over this is staggeringly vomitous. Their side has—and will do—much, much worse.

Now, I’d like for President Biden to take it a million steps farther, and offer preemptive pardons and commutations to everyone incarcerated for minor drug offenses, sitting in jails pending bail, and all the people the president-elect has suggested will be targeted by his incoming “Justice” Department. To quote Keith Olbermann:

Literally offer a pardon to anybody Trump might go after for prosecuting him, criticizing him, covering him, or looking at him funny. I want a 1-800-PARDONME hotline. I want 10 million pardons.

After all, if the President’s decision to pardon his son will, says the reliably execrable Jonathan Turley,

be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics.

he might as well go all the way. He’s got nothing to lose.

I’m visiting my mom, sitting on my bed with my Vision Pro, legs stretched out in front of me while scrolling through immersive images, and marveling at how good 2D-converted-to-3D photos look. The room has a door to the left and a blank wall to the right.

I’m flipping through images, and suddenly I’m in the bedroom at my home, 2,500 miles away. There was the bedroom door to the left, slightly ajar. The bathroom door to my right, light shining through. Air purifier on the floor. For the briefest of moments, nothing felt odd. I was on my bed at home. I’ve seen this view through my Vision Pro dozens of times.

Then my brain flipped out as it realized I wasn’t looking at reality. The bathroom door wasn’t there. The glowing blue light of the air purifier wasn’t there.

The photo aligned perfectly with the room I’m in: a door where a door was; the bathroom door to the right filling in the blank wall, and the bed, stretched out before me.

I stared at the photo for several seconds trying to figure out what was actually real and what wasn’t. Even though I knew where I was and what I was looking at, I had to lift the Vision Pro to confirm my surroundings.

It was surreal.

The Vision Pro has several issues. It’s expensive. It’s heavy. It stresses my eyes. There aren’t enough compelling apps and content yet.

But goodness, it absolutely nails that tangible sense of being there.

It’s not without some mild reservation that I note the 18th anniversary of the release of the Nintendo Wii. One of my favorite gaming systems is now an adult.

The Wii hit the shelves on November 19, 2006, and quickly became the biggest holiday gift. Waiting lists—and the lines of people wanting to buy—stretched long. People who were lucky enough to reach the front of those lines would sometimes buy two or three and sell them at absurd markups.

In honor of Wii’s birthday, let me tell you the story of how my good friend Torrey Walker (aka THW) made my Christmas that year.

I first wrote about this as it happened in my now-defunct personal blog. Here are those entries (lightly edited for length and clarity).

It started just a few weeks after the release, just as the frenzy was reaching fever pitch.…

December 05, 2006: Don’t Buy A Wii

I must implore you: Don’t buy a Nintendo Wii.

As you’ve no doubt heard, both Sony and Nintendo have new gaming systems this gift-giving holiday season, Sony with its sequentially named Playstation 3, and Nintendo with its oddly named Wii.

When I younger, and more dexterous, I loved playing video games. I owned a Playstation and SuperNES; I now own a PS2 and Nintendo GameCube. But I don’t play anywhere near as much as I used to, so the thought of buying a new video gaming system didn’t catch my fancy. Especially one that costs $600 (PS3) or was a minor advance graphically (Wii).

My friend Torrey, though, is an avid gamer, to the point where he stood in line to buy a Wii. Me being the curious sort, and him being the generous type, he brought his Wii over to share with [my then-girlfriend] Ying and my friend Elliot.

We played with Wii for several hours, and it was an absolute blast; from the clean and minimalist Apple-like design, to the Wii-mote (the wireless Wii remote controller), to the surprising physicality of the Wii Sports games.

Ah, the games. Wii comes bundled with a sports pack: Bowling, Tennis, Boxing, Golf and Baseball. You use the Wii-motes as you would use the appropriate sports implement: with Bowling, you pull your arm back and roll it forward as if you were releasing a bowling ball; with Tennis, you swing as if you had a racquet; with Boxing, you hold them in your fists and punch; etc.

Of course, these are video games, and you would expect that you’d be sitting on your couch, waving these Wii-motes around and jamming buttons, but no: we found ourselves getting into the physical motions of playing the games. We’d swing the Wii-mote like we really had a tennis racquet in our hands, even though a sharp wrist flick would be enough. Or we’d deliver huge roundhouse punches in Boxing, even though fast jabs would get the job done.

Both Elliot and Ying were especially interesting to watch. Elliot really got into Tennis; he was leaping back and forth across the floor, reaching for the balls as they whizzed past him. Ying took Boxing to heart, punching and jabbing like her life depended on it, and working up a sweat.

In fact, that would be the hallmark of the Wii afternoon: by the end of the day, all four of us had gotten some amount of physical activity we would not have gotten if we were playing any other video game. That’s right, a workout. Elliot, Ying and I all “boxed” for 15 or 20 minutes, and by the end of it, not only had we started sweating, we actually felt pain in our shoulders and arms!

From a video game!

By the time Torrey was re-boxing the Wii, I was already considering buying a new video game system. I concluded my initial review:

So again, I must beg of you: don’t buy a Wii. If this post tempted you, resist. If you find yourself in a Toys ‘R’ Us or Wal-Mart, and you see that gleaming white rectangle sitting on the shelf, you don’t want it.

But do me a favor will you? Hold on to it and give me a call, OK?

Two weeks later, things escalated.

December 17, 2006: A Wii Bit of Madness

It’s 5:30 on a Sunday morning, and I’m about to go stand in line for a Nintendo Wii. What am I, crazy?

Indeed, I was clearly suffering from Wii-thdrawal after playing with the system but not having one of my own, so I figured I had to at least try to get a Wii. It didn’t go as I’d hoped.

[Ying and I] have returned from our Wii excursion, and other than memories of long lines and cold people, we are empty-handed. We visited ten locations (which includes repeat visits to one), and each store had a line longer than we could have imagined.

Waking up at 5:30 am was, it turns out, an amateur move.

We happened to be [at Westgate Mall Target] last night about 8pm, and three families had already lined up (one at 6pm) for an 8am store opening. When we returned this morning, about 7am, the line was over 100 people, for a store claiming 100 units.

Had we decided to stand in line at 8pm the night earlier, we would have come home with a Wii. Ah, Wii-grets.

Ying is a little disappointed by the lack of Wii; she’s second-guessing her decisions to wake up at 5:30, to go to certain stores in a certain order, etc. For me, it was more of an experiment. It was interesting to see which stores had longer lines, and how many people were willing to brave the cold (37 degrees, by my car’s gauge) for a game system.

I’m willing to wait until the excitement subsides a bit.

Yep, I’d pretty much Wii-signed myself to not owning a Wii for weeks, possibly months, and I was OK with that.

Then Torrey Did A Thing.

December 20, 2006: THW comes through, Wii is in the hizz-ouse!

In 1984, my mom woke me up early Christmas morning. Sitting next to my bed was the unopened box of an Apple //c computer and monitor. My uncle owned one of those, and I’d spent time at his house hacking with it. He’d once promised he’d bring it over to my house so I could have more time with it. Even in my sleepy state, when I saw the box, my initial shot of excitement was quickly replaced with cold logic: “What’s my uncle’s computer doing here?”

I was told nope, it’s not your uncle’s, it’s yours, and it’s your Christmas gift.

I believe the ceiling still has an imprint of my head, and the floor a dent from my jaw [from] the extremely unexpected present.

Today, THW sent me an email.In today? What time can I stop by to say hi? I’m leaving... tomorrow and won’t be back until just before New Years. /thw

Stop on by, I told him. I figured we’d BS for a few minutes, catch up on what’s been going on the last couple of days, chat about plans for the holiday break we’re about to start. You know, typical friend stuff before you don’t see each other for two weeks or so.

In he walks. We chat about two minutes before he steps back outside my office, and I hear some rustling of plastic. He steps back in and hands me a white box with “Wii” written on it in huge letters.

Let me go through my thought process here.

On seeing it: Fucker! You got a me a gift and put it in a Wii box? That’s cold.

On holding it: It’s heavy.... Oh! You’re loaning me your Wii for the week you’ll be away. That’s fucking sweet. What a good friend.

I thanked him for loaning it to me, and he says, nope, that’s yours. That’s your Christmas gift.

I couldn’t quite get my mind around it. You’re giving me your Wii?

“No”, he says (silently adding “you idiot”, I imagine), “it’s yours.”

Through a series of circumstances, he had an extra one. When he read my entry about waking up at 5:30 to stand in line, and coming back empty-handed, he made his decision: as his Christmas gift to me, he would sell me his extra Wii. I guess he decided that getting up that early to buy one was a worthy endeavor, and instead of making beaucoup bucks scalping it on eBay (as he rightly could), he decided to sell it to me.

Wow.

Last Saturday, when Ying and I had decided to wake up early the next day, I called Elliot, and offered him the chance to buy a Wii, should we find ourselves lucky enough to find two. He declined, but was touched that I would give up a potential financial benefit for him. I didn’t quite understand it at the time. He’s my friend, and of course if I’m buying a Wii I’ll pick up a second one for him.[…]

Now, I get it. What Torrey did was a selfless act. Not in the same realm of giving up a kidney or the last taco, but still remarkable. He passed up the chance to make money so his friend could have a Wii-filled vacation. I was actually tearing up a bit when he [handed] it to me.

Unsurprisingly, I still have that Wii, and it was a source of joy for many years. While I haven’t played it in a long while, it—and the hours and hours of fun it generated over the years—remains a treasured touchtone of my friendship with Torrey.

Thank you Torrey for that unforgettable act of friendship, and Happy Birthday Wii!

It’s an odd feeling to be—in even a small way—celebrating seven years as an American citizen, just days after American democracy gave us, for the second time, a Donald Trump presidency.

Yet it is also fitting, as the reason I became an American citizen seven years ago was because American democracy gave us, for the first time, a Donald Trump presidency.

In 2016, despite living in America for thirty-five years, I wasn’t ever motivated to pursue my citizenship. There was no real reason, merely inertia. Lack of citizenship never stopped me from doing anything: As a permanent resident I could work legally, had most of the protections of being a citizen, and while I wasn’t always thrilled with the people America elected (hello Reagan, Bush, and Bush), the impact on my daily life was minimal.

In my Member Update #2, I wrote:

For my first decade or so in the U.S., I didn't care much for politics, and didn't really identify with a political party.

I only really started paying attention to politics during the Clinton administration. Because politics wasn’t huge in my life, neither was voting. I came close to applying for citizenship as I tracked Barack Obama’s rise—from a junior senator speaking at the DNC, through his historic nomination, election, and reelection—but the inertia was powerful. I deeply regret missing the opportunity to vote for him, or to be naturalized under his presidency.

After eight years of Barack Obama, I was excited by the possibility of following our first Black president with our first female president, but my first hint this wasn’t the timeline I thought it was came on February 16, 2016. I wrote in Day One:

Tonight, I fear for America.

Donald Trump won the Republican New Hampshire primary. […]

Trump would be an unmitigated disaster, and it’s going to ensure that I have my citizenship, so I can leave the country for more than six months at a time....

I wonder if there’s any chance of my getting it in time to vote?

It wouldn’t have been enough time, but it didn’t matter: I didn’t start the process.

Then this, on March 8:

It’s Time.

Trump has won Michigan and Mississippi. He won Michigan with over 37%; his nearest competitor is Kasich with 25% and Cruz with about 24%. He won Mississippi with 49%, with Cruz at 35%. This terrifies me. Trump has a legitimate shot at the nomination, and the presidency.

I included a link to 10 Steps to Naturalization, Understanding the Process of Becoming a U.S. Citizen.

I’d finally started the process, but there was no real urgency. I had faith in the American democratic system, and, like many people then (and many people this year) I was certain beyond any doubt Trump could not possibly win. I could wait, and would get to be naturalized under America’s first female president.

Yeah.

January 19, 2017:

Awake in a Marriott in Annapolis.

The end of Barack Obama’s administration is near and I’m sad and scared.

I never completed my citizenship papers and a small part of me worries it won’t go through.

Also sad that I’d be sworn in under Trump.

Sad indeed, but not enough to allow that distasteful prospect to deter me. His inauguration was the motivation I needed to finally complete the process: I felt it necessary to cloak myself in the protections of American Citizenship.

February 2, 2017:

Just mailed my citizenship application. I’m slightly short of breath.

I had a biometrics appointment a month later, and on August 30 I went in for my in-person interview, where they assessed my English reading and writing ability, along with my knowledge of U.S. history, the Constitution, and current politics.

The interview was a little nerve-racking, mostly because I feared vapor-locking while answering the civics questions, but I got through them with no issues.

At the end, the interviewer handed me my result form, with a big “X” next to “Congratulations! Your application is recommended for approval.” I unexpectedly choked up when he wished me luck, and only barely kept my emotions in check as I rose to leave.

I went home and poured myself the most American of spirits, bourbon—Jefferson’s Reserve, a hat-tip to our founding fathers.

Then, on November 9, 2017:

American Citizen!

So here I am, seven years after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, celebrating my citizenship and my right to vote, just days after millions of other Americans exercised theirs to vote for Donald Trump. Again.

Deja vu is a weird sensation.

It’s just after 4 a.m. on the East Coast as I post this, and I haven’t been able to sleep because it’s now clear that Donald Trump will again be president of the United States.

While it hasn’t yet been officially called by the AP or others, Trump sits at 267 Electoral College votes, with AK and its three electoral votes the only thing standing between him and victory. I suspect by the time the sun breaks over the Atlantic Ocean, Trump will have been declared the winner, with as many as 312 electoral votes.

What has become of this country?

Tens of millions of my supposedly “fellow” Americans consciously chose a demagogue and the vile hatred he and his followers represent. They knew the nastiness he offered, and they wanted it.

I admit that in my heart of hearts I was hoping for a Harris landslide, a blowout victory that repudiated MAGA politics. Instead, Trump has solidified his grasp on this country (when you’re a star, they let you do it).

Don’t ever tell me again this country isn’t deeply racist and misogynistic.

This election was about power: Who has it, who wields it, and who benefits from it.

Americans voted for their own self-interest: To keep themselves at the top of the food chain.

They understand that being a white male makes you untouchable, and being a white female confers the privilege of white men upon you.

A significant number of Latino voters also aligned themselves with Trump, perhaps out of a misguided attempt at self preservation, but equally likely out of an anti-immigrant “fuck you, I got mine” mentality.

I’ve seen a lot of people on Mastodon (and I’m guessing across most social media) saying they’ll fight Trump for the next four years.

Cool cool cool.

What makes them think he’ll allow that fight? Where will they take it? The courts? The press? Congress? The streets?

They have a lot of faith in the strength of institutions he’s pledged to destroy—or which have already capitulated well before his election.

The Supreme Court has granted him immunity. The press already has demonstrated deference. Congress will be a feckless lapdog. And protesters in the streets are likely to be met with a military presence—whether it’s U.S. military or Trump’s “Proud Boys.”

After what we’ve observed over the last decade+, and especially what Trump and his MAGA party have done and said they’ll do, what reason is there to believe he won’t shut down any protesters, with intimidation if not violence? We’ve seen it already.

And here’s a truth: Those with the energy to fight are often the ones who can just walk away from that fight without consequence.

The rest of us who can’t “blend in” are tired of having our souls crushed by an America we thought had our backs.

I’ve also seen people trotting out “we are better than this” and “this is not who we are”.

Bullshit.

It’s time to retire both phrases. We’ve proven we’re not “better than this.” We’ve shown this is “who we are.”

It’s been true for a long while, but there was always some amount of plausible deniability. It’s pretty damn hard to deny it now after this electoral outcome.

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump gets sworn in for the second time. On that day, I expect The Great American Experiment will come to an end.

Seventy-five days.

It feels impossible to overstate the importance of this election. “The fate of our democracy hangs in the balance” seems somehow both overwrought and woefully insufficient. Yet that seems to be the stakes at play. We are choosing between Kamala Harris, who supports democracy; and Donald Trump, who has repeatedly expressed disdain for it.

An election between these two candidates—one, a prosecutor, Senator, and the sitting Vice President; the other a convicted criminal, adjudicated sexual assaulter, and twice-impeached former president—should be a cakewalk. That it’s a coin flip is terrifying, and for the next few days we’ll all be bundles of raw, vibrating nerves as we await the results.

While we’re unlikely to have a definitive winner tonight, I’m hoping we have a clear trend: that undecideds break for Harris, Democrats turn out in huge numbers for her, and Republicans, tired of the circus, vote for a president they can oppose without fear of retribution.

As I write this approaching 11 p.m. EST on election night, it’s not clear that America will repudiate Trump for a second time in two elections; in several places he’s doing better this year than he did last. It’s obviously still early, and there’s a lot of vote counting still to be done, but Trump’s continued (and growing) strength with a certain portion of the electorate is deeply concerning. The trends don’t seem to be trending toward Harris.

Keith Olbermann noted on a recent episode of The Countdown that

[…] there are people voting for Donald Trump today that were nine when he began his first campaign. They don’t know an America without a subculture of boastful stupidity and conspiracy.[…] They only know this shit.

Those 18 year olds have known only the divisiveness and anti-democratic rhetoric of Trump and MAGA Republicans. Many have grown up believing Trump is a “normal” politician, that his and MAGA policies are mainstream, and that democracy is about demonizing the other side.

That mindset may carry the day.

Like many of you, I’ll be glued to my screens tonight, in both anticipation and fear.

I started my evening feeling nervous but optimistic. Right now, as I write this, that optimism is starting to wane. The evening has shades of 2016, and that scares me beyond measure.

Apple had a busy week of product announcements, in an unusual format. Instead of an in-person event, or a single keynote-style video presentation, three classes of products were announced over three days via press release and 10-15 minute videos.

Monday: iMac (video):

Apple today announced the new iMac, featuring the powerful M4 chip and Apple Intelligence, in its stunning, ultra-thin design.

The new iMac now offers a $200 nano-texture option for the display; I have it on my M4 iPad Pro and it’s fantastic for eliminating reflections and glare. As with the iPad Pro, though, it’s not an option on the entry-level configuration, so you’ll also pay at least another $200 just to unlock the nano-texture, technically making it a $400 upgrade, assuming you weren’t already in the market for the extra CPU power, gigabit ethernet, and four total Thunderbolt 4 ports.

The new colors are very pretty (if muted); great for those who, unlike me, want a pop of color in their computer. As before, the mouse/trackpad/keyboard accessories are color-matched, and now sport USB-C instead of lightning (finally!), although the mouse still charges from the bottom—a location I’ve never understood. I did appreciate John Gruber’s recent defense of its placement, though.

The iMac can also drive two 6K external displays alongside the built-in 24” display, which makes for a phenomenal battlestation. If I was an all-in-one person (rather than a laptop-and-monitor person), this would be a great system.

Tuesday: Mac mini (video):

Apple today unveiled the all-new Mac mini powered by the M4 and new M4 Pro chips, and redesigned around Apple silicon to pack an incredible amount of performance into an even smaller form of just 5 by 5 inches. […]

For more convenient connectivity, it features front and back ports, and for the first time includes Thunderbolt 5 for faster data transfer speeds on the M4 Pro model.

The big story here is that the new Mac mini is mini-er: Less than half the desk footprint of the previous mini (though a tad taller).

This is a device for which I have zero need yet desperately want to buy, simply for the cool factor. I have a barely used M1 Mac mini that I may have to trade in. The boost in CPU and data transfer might make it a phenomenal Blu-ray ripper and in-home video streamer.

Wednesday: MacBook Pro (video):

[…] the 14-inch MacBook Pro includes the blazing-fast performance of M4 and three Thunderbolt 4 ports […]

The 14- and 16-inch models with M4 Pro and M4 Max offer Thunderbolt 5 for faster transfer speeds and advanced connectivity. All models include a Liquid Retina XDR display that gets even better with an all-new nano-texture display option and up to 1000 nits of brightness for SDR content, an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, along with up to 24 hours of battery life, the longest ever in a Mac.

I’m a huge fan of the 14” MacBook Pro. The Liquid Retina XDR display on my M2 MacBook Pro is stunning, and as I mentioned above, I love the nano-texture display on my iPad Pro; having it on my laptop would be fantastic. Good news: The $150 nano-texture option is available on the base model MacBook Pro.

Adding Thunderbolt 5, a nano-texture display option, a brighter display, and 24-hour battery life makes this a near-perfect laptop. If I could only have one computer, it would be the 14” MacBook Pro. I find it the perfect combination of portable and powerful.

All it needs is cellular capabilities. (Maybe next year.)

Apple Intelligence

Each press release touted—via the same boilerplate—support for Apple Intelligence:

Apple Intelligence ushers in a new era for the Mac, bringing personal intelligence to the personal computer. Combining powerful generative models with industry-first privacy protections, Apple Intelligence harnesses the power of Apple silicon and the Neural Engine to unlock new ways for users to work, communicate, and express themselves on Mac.

I’m excited to experience Apple Intelligence, though most of the features I’m interested in—primarily those driven by “personal context”—won’t come until (I presume) 2025.

My experience so far with the available Apple Intelligence features has been ho-hum. The notification and email summaries are interesting, though not terribly useful in most instances.

For example, a pair of Amazon notifications, the first telling me a package is 10 stops away, the second saying it was delivered, was summarized as “Package delivered, currently 10 stops away.”

I know Apple Intelligence will improve over time, so I’m not going to ding it just yet, except to say Apple is really pushing it as a reason to buy new hardware, and I think most early purchasers will be disappointed, at least initially.

Remember: Never buy hardware for the promise of what it will do in the future. Buy for what it’s capable of doing today.

M4 Power

The new M4 looks pretty damn powerful, and it wouldn’t surprise me if most people buying one won’t need to upgrade it for many, many years. (I wonder what impact that will have on Apple’s sales in the long-term?)

If you currently have an Intel-based Mac (or PC), even the most entry-level M4 Mac will be a massive upgrade in speed. For some, like a medical student I was speaking with recently who owned a 2017 Intel-based Mac, even a refurbished M1 or M2 Mac would be noticeably faster (not to mention lighter and less noisy) than what they now use.

Apple hardware has never been more powerful and capable, and with such low power and cooling needs. I’m salivating at the possibility of some radically redesigned computers in the near future.

A few days ago—after a brutal Mets loss to the Dodgers—I snarked on Mastodon:

A Dodgers/Yankees matchup would be my worst nightmare.

Zero rooting interest. Turn off the television.

Welp, here we are.

Growing up a New York Mets fan, I’m vehemently anti-Yankees. As a San Francisco resident and Giants fan for the last quarter century, I unconditionally detest the Dodgers.

As storied as Yankees/Dodgers World Series matchups have been historically—11 of them going back to 1941, including Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956 (still the only one pitched), Sandy Koufax’s 15-strikeout complete game in 1963, and Reggie Jackson’s 3-home runs on three consecutive pitches from three different pitchers in 1977—the idea of supporting either team makes me violently ill.

My rooting rules are uncomplicated ^[1] :

• Mets and Giants over anyone
• Eastern/Western Divisions over the others
• National League over American League
• Anyone over Yankees/Dodgers

Yes, that sometimes meant rooting for a Central Division or American League team if they were up against the Yankees or Dodgers, but it was always worth it. Nothing was more important than those two teams losing.

But facing each other? Sometimes the rules, much like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, result in an untenable situation which, if left unresolved, may end with a catastrophic core meltdown.

So my solution is easy: Don’t watch the games.

I’m probably not the only one.

Sure, some won’t watch because this is a “coastal elites” match up of Evil New York against Hollywood Los Angeles, both with their big money, big name players—the middle of the country naturally roots against both as easily as I do—there’s a bigger reason this Series is likely to be ignored by the masses.

Keith Olbermann explains on his mosty-politics-but-somtimes-sports Countdown podcast:

The famous Yankees and Dodgers are actually two of the most disastrously underperforming franchises in sports. If you consider the year 2000 as the last year of the 20th century, the Yankees have won one World Series in this century. Even if you don’t, they’ve won one World Series since 2000. The Dodgers have won one World Series in a full season since 1965.

Nobody cares about these teams because they’ve basically sucked for a generation. On top of that, baseball itself has changed—for the worse—since the turn of the century^[2].

Olbermann again:

The long regular season and the quick playoffs were designed to establish which team was best that year. You played and you played and you played from Spring to Summer into Fall and you beat everybody in your league. And then you faced the team that had played and beaten everybody in their league.

And the result was a Series that was always novel and fresh and exciting and faced pitchers against hitters they’d never seen before.

Today, with Interleague play, “balanced” schedules, the extended Wild Card playoffs, and the National League adoption of the Designated Hitter rule (barf), the regular season is boring, the playoffs are boring, and—because the World Series teams already faced each other during the regular season, as the Yankees and Dodgers did in June—the World Series matchups end up being... boring.

Olbermann, once again:

It is believed about 60 million people watched game 7 of the 1986 World Series^[3] on television.

If 60 million people watch the entirety of this World Series on television, if that’s the total audience for seven games, they will hold two parades afterward: One for the winning team and one for all the TV and advertising executives.

And by the away, if they get sixty million total audience on TV, the ad executives and the TV executives will get drunker than the winning players do.

And his coup de grâce:

We’re just amazed that the two best teams on paper are actually in the World Series, and how did they get there? They beat the wildcard teams.

Winning against the fourth place team. Congrats?

When I linked to a study showing police stop Black drivers more often than speed cameras, I wrote:

There’s no denying DWB is real; I’ve experienced it myself multiple times.

Here’s one example. I originally wrote this in June 2008 for my now-defunct personal blog. I’ve updated temporal references appropriately, and lightly edited for clarity.

In late 2005, my buddy Ron and I and several other coworkers volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Ron had asked our company to sponsor an event for the Black employees association, which included buying several boxes of pizza for the volunteers. By the end of the day, there were a lot of half-empty boxes no one wanted, so Ron decided to take them home.

We plopped into my Nissan Altima for the drive back to his place in Mountain View; me, with my baseball cap turned backwards; Ron, many boxes of pizza on his lap; both of us shabby from building houses. As we’re approaching our exit on the freeway, we notice a cop car trailing us. My immediate comment to Ron was “I bet you he exits with us” and, sure enough, he does.

But then, he passes us on the left and pulls a couple of cars ahead of us. As we wait for a light to change, I think, hey, it was just a coincidence, no ulterior motives.

We turn onto Ron’s block and park. Ron gets out, and I notice there are flashing lights behind us. Ron looks back, his hands filled with pizza boxes, and asks, somewhat incredulously, “Did he just pull us over?”

Yep. He sure did. He’d apparently waited until we turned, then flipped on his lights and followed us.

The cop gets out of his car, strolls over to us and asks for my license and registration, which I dutifully hand over. A well-trained question crosses my lips.

“What seems to be the problem, officer?”

His answer will go down in the annals of justification history: “I noticed your front license plate was missing.”

I glance over at Ron, then back to the cop.

“I know,” I say evenly. “Is that a problem?”

“There are people who steal the front license plates from cars, and put them onto similar vehicles. If you do a plate check, it seems to match.”

“So,” I ask coolly, “you wanted to warn me that my front plate was missing, in case it had been stolen and used on another, stolen, car?”

“That’s correct.”

I took a breath.

“Well, I only have the one,” I fibbed with a small smile, knowing full well the second one was on the back—and had been for some three years.

“Sometimes they come stuck together from the DMV, and you end up with both on the back.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that,” I responded with faux concern. “I’ll have to check that when I get home!”

At some point during this conversation, I’d gotten out the car so the cop could show me the missing plate I already knew was missing, and was standing with Ron, both of us rolling our eyes at each other in disbelief. 

I eventually thanked the officer for his concern and assured him that my front license plate hadn’t been stolen (since one had never been placed there), and that I’d be sure to check my rear plate for a second one stuck to the first.

I also felt compelled to slip in during the conversation, in my best “I’m an educated black man: Your worst nightmare” voice, that we both worked for Apple, had just come from volunteering at Habitat for Humanity after having bought a dozen pizzas for the crew, and were taking the rest home. Just to let him know that he wasn’t dealing with a couple of punk-ass kids.

I asked if there’s anything else we can do for him, and bade him farewell, and we watched, shaking our heads, as he returned to his vehicle and pulled away.

Here we were, two intelligent, well-paid, well-spoken Black men in somewhat shabby clothing, pulled over by a cop who’d followed us on the freeway, run our plates and found nothing, but—still suspicious of two disheveled Black men driving a well-maintained car and carrying several boxes of pizza—“found” a reason to “inform” us that our front plate was missing.

Purely as a courtesy, of course.

If only we didn’t have those pizzas.

Maker’s Mark was the first bourbon I fell in love with, and Woodford Reserve may have been the second. Both remain favorites for an “every day” bottle, but I’ve long left them to explore the broader bourbon world.

My whiskey partner Tammy Tan also claims Maker’s Mark as her first bourbon love, so we—along with other members of the West Coast Whiskey Club—were excited to revisit these two beloved brands in some of their more distinctive forms.

• Woodford Reserve:
  • Distiller’s Select (90.4 proof)
  • 2024 Master’s Collection (118.4 proof)
  • 2020 Master’s Collection (123.6 proof)
• Maker’s Mark:
  • 2023 Cellar Aged (119.3 proof)
  • 2024 Heart Release (111.7 proof)
  • Private Selection from Escaya Wine and Spirits (113.4 proof)
  • Cask Strength (109.6 proof)

Both Maker’s Mark and Woodford Reserve have distinctive flavor personalities. Maker’s, being a wheated bourbon (replacing the usual rye in the mash bill), tends to have a sweeter profile, with strong notes of vanilla, buttercream, and ripe fruit coming through. Woodford often has a drier, somewhat spicier profile, with notes of stewed fruit and burnt caramel.

Those broad distinctions showed up in this tasting, resulting in a nearly clean split of the brands in our final ranking.

As before, we tasted blind and discussed the pours together, then ranked them individually. We compared our rankings, and debated adjustments.

With our sometimes similar palates, Tammy and I again aligned on our top picks:

1. Maker’s Mark 2023 Cellar Aged
2. Maker’s Mark Cask Strength
3. Maker’s Mark Private Selection

We weren’t surprised here: We both love Maker’s Mark in general. We found the Cellar Aged to be the most reminiscent of “classic” Maker’s Mark, but with way more depth and complexity. It was simply the most “interesting” yet “classic” bourbon in the collection.

I liked that it was sweet, smoky, and with a prominent but not overpowering alcohol nose. It was a bourbon I wanted to chew on while pondering a cigar.

The Cask Strength was a close second. Immediate baking spices on the nose, with lots of vanilla and fruit, and a bit of tar on the back. The alcoholic burn was more prominent than I’d like, and the finish a bit shorter that ideal, but that just made me want to go in for another sip. It turned out to be rather well balanced.

The Private Selection snuck up on us. On first taste, we found it had a limited nose and palate, and we were close to dismissing it. But after letting it sit for a while, it really opened up, and the vanilla, chewy caramel, and fruit (figs? dates?) really came out in a lovely way that rewarded our patience.

That left our final four:

Placing the Woodford Reserve Distiller’s Select in seventh place was an early, easy call. We both agreed it was a perfectly acceptable bourbon, but which didn’t have nearly enough distinguishing characteristics to make it stand out in this pack.

We struggled with the ordering for 4, 5, and 6. For a while, I had the Woodford Reserve 2020 Master’s Collection in fourth place (in part due to Tammy’s influence!), pushing the rest of my list down, but I kept coming back to the Maker’s Mark 2024 Heart Release because of its classic caramel and brown sugar goodness, plus a little bit of extra heat and woodiness I found interesting, and which Tammy found slightly off-putting. I had to move the Heart Release up.

Likewise, the Woodford Reserve 2024 Master’s Collection had a lovely nose once it opened up, and some soft caramel and perhaps peppermint on the palate, but it had a sharpness to it that I didn’t fully enjoy. I sense this would do well in a Mint Julep.

The Woodford Reserve 2020 Master’s Collection had me intensely debating its position. In the end, I found its heavy alcoholic burn hid too much of the nose and palate. Once that dissipated, I did enjoy its sugar cookie and cream wafer flavors, but I just couldn’t get past that burn, causing me to drop it a couple of positions.

The West Coast Whiskey Club collectively ranked things in a different order: They placed our favorite, the Maker’s Mark 2023 Cellar Aged, at the four spot, and the Maker’s Mark 2024 Heart Release at number one (with a small handful of members ranking it last or near last).

The Cellar Aged especially seemed quite polarizing: It garnered more 1s and 2s than the “winning” Heart Release, but also a lot more 6s and 7s. Sixteen of the 24 tasters gave the Cellar Aged a top-two or bottom-two rank, vs. just 12 for the Heart Release.

(The only more-polarizing entry was the Maker’s Mark Cask Strength, with 17 of 24 ranking it top-two or bottom-two. It ended up in fifth place in the WCWC rankings, and second for us.)

On the flip side, there was broad agreement on the placement of the Woodford Reserve Distiller’s Select; half the tasters rated in the bottom two spots, and it pulled seven last-place votes, more than double anything else. Only two people ranked it as their top two. It was clearly outshone in this competition.

These were all good bourbons, though. I expect most of them would be even more enjoyable outside of a taste test, whether on their own, or in a cocktail. The ranking is definitely not a reflection on their quality. It can be difficult to judge quality from a half-ounce pour, and more difficult still with five or six other whiskeys clamoring for the attention of our nose and taste buds. I’m sure if we did this tasting again tomorrow, we’d end up with a different ranking.

I know, for example, that despite landing in the seventh spot, that I would gladly partake of a Woodford Reserve Distillers Select most any day. I’ve done it many times before; it makes for a wonderful Manhattan, for example.

Taste, as always, is subjective. Personally, I think I’ll seek out a Cellar Aged for my collection.

In “The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself”, Kate Knibbs at Wired writes: 

It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive--and that, as the world's knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned--without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.

I, too, am rhapsodic about the Internet Archive. I use it regularly to find previous versions of websites, or content not otherwise available. Preserving our digital history is a noble and worthy effort that should be applauded. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, some would prefer to sue them out of existence:

Since 2020, it's been mired in legal battles. In Hachette v. Internet Archive, book publishers complained that the nonprofit infringed on copyright by loaning out digitized versions of physical books. In UMG Recordings v. Internet Archive, music labels have alleged that the Internet Archive infringed on copyright by digitizing recordings.

The book lending was a decade-old program, where they bought (or were donated) a physical copy of a book, scanned it, and loaned it out to a single person at a time, similar to a physical book from a library. It was expanded during the pandemic:

In March 2020, as schools and libraries abruptly shut down, they faced a dilemma. Demand for ebooks far outstripped their ability to loan them out under restrictive licensing deals, and they had no way of lending out books that existed only in physical form. In response, the Internet Archive made a bold decision: It allowed multiple people to check out digital versions of the same book simultaneously. It called this program the National Emergency Library. “We acted at the request of librarians and educators and writers,” says Chris Freeland.

Here’s what the Internet Archive wrote when they announced the National Emergency Library:

To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. 

During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist, ensuring that students will have access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar, and that people who cannot physically access their local libraries because of closure or self-quarantine can continue to read and thrive during this time of crisis, keeping themselves and others safe.

Students and libraries didn’t have easy access to books during the pandemic, and the Internet Archive tried to help, at no cost to readers. Instead of supporting the effort, or providing access to ebooks themselves, book publishers and authors sued. It’s unclear how much money the book lending cost these publishers and authors; I’m guessing it’s far less than the lawsuit amount. I doubt a significant percentage of those book loans would have been purchases.

The recordings were of records in the “obsolete” 78 rpm format:

In 2023, several major record labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony, and Capitol, sued the Internet Archive over its Great 78 Project, a digital archive of a niche collection of recordings of albums in the obsolete record format known as 78s, which was used from the 1890s to the late 1950s. The complaint alleges that the project "undermines the value of music." It lists 2,749 recordings as infringed, which means damages could potentially be over $400 million.

I’m guessing these record companies weren’t making any money from these 78s, certainly not $400 million worth. I’d bet they haven’t made that much combined since those records were first sold. They’re suing because it’s the only way for them to make money on works that otherwise make them nothing. It’s rent-seeking in the form of copyright infringement lawsuits, a transfer of wealth from a nonprofit to a very-much-for-profit.

As a nonprofit, the Internet Archive is supported by some very large foundations (and individual donations), with reported revenue around $30 million and expenses of nearly $26 million, yet I’d be surprised if that’s sufficient to continue archiving the ever-growing digital world—and to defend itself from lawsuits. The UMG judgement is thirteen times more than the Internet Archive’s revenue, and may be enough to put the Internet Archive out of business.

The BBC’s Chris Stokel-Walker writes about the potential impact of losing our digital history:

38% of web pages that Pew tried to access that existed in 2013 no longer function. But it's also an issue for more recent publications. Some 8% of web pages published at some point 2023 were gone by October that same year.

This isn't just a concern for history buffs and internet obsessives. According to the study, one in five government websites contains at least one broken link. Pew found more than half of Wikipedia articles have a broken link in their references section, meaning the evidence backing up the online encyclopaedia's information is slowly disintegrating.

Stokel-Walker goes on to note that:

[…] thanks to the work of the Internet Archive, not all those dead links are totally inaccessible. For decades, the Archive's Wayback Machine project has sent armies of robots to crawl through the cascading labyrinths of the internet. These systems download functional copies of websites as they change over time – often capturing the same pages multiple times in a single day – and make them available to public free of charge.

“When we then went and looked at how many of those URLs were available in the Wayback Machine, we found that two-thirds of those were available in a way," [Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine] says. In that sense, the Internet Archive is doing what it set out to do – it's saving records of online society for posterity.

Wikipedia gets a lot of attention as the world’s store of knowledge, but many of the “verifiable facts” that support Wikipedia articles are “backed” by the Internet Archive. Does Wikipedia pay anything to the Internet Archive for making their service more trustworthy?

(Worth noting: Wikipedia had 2023 revenue of $180 million and expenses of $168 million, six times that of the Internet Archive.)

Stokel-Walker, again: 

One thing is clear, though, [Mar Hicks, a historian of technology at the University of Virginia] says, we should all pay up to support the fight for preservation. "From a very pragmatic perspective, if you do not pay these people and make sure that these archives are funded, they will not exist into the future, they will break down and then the whole point of collecting them will have gone out the window," says Hicks. "Because the whole point of the archive is not that it just gets collected, but that it persists indefinitely into the future."

If companies don’t want to maintain archives of their content themselves, rather than suing, why not partner with the Internet Archive to handle the archiving?

Just this September, Google and the Internet Archive announced a partnership to allow people to see previous versions of websites surfaced through Google Search by linking to the Wayback Machine. Google previously offered its own cached historical websites; now it leans on a small nonprofit.

It’s unclear how much—if anything—Google is actually paying for this partnership, though. Perhaps they donate, then take a tax deduction, saving themselves potentially millions of dollars while offloading the technical—and legal—burden?

I donate to the Internet Archive (and Wikipedia), but foundational aspects of the internet (see also open source projects) should not rely on the largess of individuals—or even massive foundations—to sustain them.

We also need to address the “single point of failure” nature of the Internet Archive. These recent lawsuits—or future ones—could very well kill the nonprofit, and with it, petabytes of valuable archives.

Perhaps every content company and publisher over a certain valuation should be encouraged (required?) to pay into a fund to ensure their content is archived for posterity, along the lines of FRAND licensing. Or they can maintain archives themselves, as long as they agree to make those archives available to the public in perpetuity.

Or perhaps indemnify the Internet Archive (and other nonprofits with similar goals) from these types of lawsuits. They aren’t selling access to this content, and there are no ads on the site. It’s not a money making venture.

Perhaps such an organization needs to be certified, or adhere to specific behaviors, to be indemnified.

Or perhaps the copyright laws need to be changed to allow for the explicit right to archive content and make it available online in some form.

(I’m not anti-copyright, unlike some critics of these lawsuits. I believe authors and publishers deserve the right to control the use of their content (especially in this AI-driven environment). That fundamental right needs to be balanced with the important goals of preservation and access.)

I’m not sure what the right answer is here, only that we need to preserve our books, movies, tv shows, music, and the rest of our human creativity.

I wrote at the top that I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive. I really do appreciate their work. For example, it enabled me to see the earliest versions of my first technology consulting company’s website. (Cringe.)

A perhaps more useful example: As a cocktail enthusiast, I enjoy drinking out of “Nick & Nora” glasses, named for the main characters in The Thin Man movies. But I’d never seen the movie, and it was challenging to find it to purchase or stream.

But the Internet Archive had a copy, and I was able to finally watch and enjoy this absolutely delightful movie.

(It’s now available almost everywhere, from Amazon to Apple TV+ to YouTube. Progress, I suppose, but what happens when the studio—or the streaming service—decides to pull it? This is also why I buy movies I care about on Blu-Ray, and rip/archive them myself.)

We need to ensure gems like these aren’t lost.

I’ve known Kira, the daughter of my good friends Ron and Irene Lue-Sang, since she was a day old. She was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) nearly a decade ago. Since 2015, the Lue-Sang family have helped raise funds to end T1D by walking in the annual Breakthrough T1D Walk (formerly JDRF). They’re fundraising ahead of the next walk on October 13, and I’m asking for your help in reaching their goal of raising $10,000.

If you’re unfamiliar with T1D:

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease that is diagnosed in both children and adults and has nothing to do with diet or lifestyle.

As the Lue-Sangs note on their fundraising page:

When you have T1D, your body stops producing insulin—a hormone essential to turning food into energy. Managing the disease is a constant struggle that involves monitoring your blood-sugar level, administering insulin, and carefully balancing these insulin doses with your eating and activity.

Kira wears a continuous glucose monitor to check her blood sugar levels, and an “insulin infusion set”, which, Ron explains, are:

steel needles that stay embedded in her thigh or tricep to slowly do the work of providing the insulin her pancreas no longer produces.

Managing T1D is challenging for anyone; it requires constant attention: measuring carbs, checking blood sugar levels, injecting just the right amount of insulin around meals, adjusting throughout the day as needed, replacing those steel needles and sensors every few days…. It’s a lot, especially for a teenager who just wants to be a teenager. As Ron put it,

There’s simply too much life to live for an active teenager to be bothered…. 

But bother she must, because failing to be vigilant every day could mean having

blood sugars so low that she shouldn’t walk around unaccompanied, or blood sugar so high for so long that she might not be getting insulin at all. Either situation could end in her passing out, ending up in the hospital, or damaging her internal organs (eyes, kidneys, heart) a little bit at a time.

Parents may expect to argue with their kids about various dangers in life (like riding a motorcycle, or driving too fast), and to be dismissed as being overprotective and paranoid. As a T1D parent, those arguments unexpectedly shift from “Check your mirrors before changing lanes!” to “check your blood sugar before starting the car!”

Elizabeth Stone said that having a child is “to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Raising a T1D teen must be like having your heart roar off to school on a motorcycle every day.

The work Breakthrough T1D does helps further the science of living with T1D. Ron tells me:

One hundred years ago, science had barely discovered insulin. Before that, people with Type 1 Diabetes just wasted away a few months or years after diagnosis. 

Ten years ago our standard of care was pricking Kira’s fingers to check blood sugar levels at least four times a day and injecting insulin by hand. We’re grateful for the advances technology has brought, including modern insulin, continuous glucose monitors, and insulin pumps. But we believe—it’s an article of faith—that there are still more advances to come, if only we pursue them. 

If you can, please make a contribution to Breakthrough T1D to help them pursue those advances. Any amount helps, whether it’s $1, $10, or $100. No parent should agonize over the health of their kid, and no kid should have to stick steel needles into her thigh.

The Lue-Sang family thanks you, and I thank you.

Four years on, and this day—September 9, 2020—remains my most surreal and enduring memory of the pandemic.

Waking up during the 7 o’clock hour in early September in San Francisco usually means blinking away sunlight as it streams into our bedroom, while I fumble to snooze my iPhone alarm. Instead, it was curiously dark.

I didn’t think much of it as I stumbled through my morning ablutions and overnight work email catchup. It was 9 a.m. before I happened to peek out of our back window.

Six months into the pandemic lockdown, and I legitimately thought we’d finally reached Armageddon.

Our usually bright, almost Autumn morning was dark. Street lamps remained on, and morning songbirds stayed eerily silent. The pandemic lockdown already meant our neighborhood was quieter than usual, but this morning the streets were Zombie Apocalypse-level deserted.

It was hauntingly quiet.

Between meetings, I wandered down to Cole Valley. The N Judah station looked like the long-abandoned remnant of a distant civilization, and the usually bustling corner of Cole and Parnassus had but a few hardy souls brunching, as a lone dog walked its human.

My SFBA Friends iMessage group chat blew up that morning as we commiserated. “It’s the rapture,” cried Michael.

“I’m officially done with this year,” lamented Lisa.

“Me too,” agreed Kelly. “I think today’s orange sky is the day I finally lost it.”

We weren’t the only ones. Bay Area Twitter lit up, and the skies made national headlines, with some incredible photos.

The combination of the usual San Francisco fog, coupled with massive wildfires throughout the Bay Area, had conspired to blot out the sun and turn the sky a dusky orange this day four years ago. These images are now indelibly etched into my brain.

Every month or so, a few friends and I gather for a whiskey tasting. For July, Tammy Tan (SpiceHound, Kitchen 519) and Anton Yulo (Meryenda) joined me in a West Coast Whiskey Club (WCWC) blind tasting of seven Russell’s Reserve whiskies. 

This represents most of their lineup, minus the Single Barrel Rye. Here’s what we poured:

• 10 year Bourbon (90 proof)
• K&L Exclusive Warehouse TY-K, Level 4 (110 proof)
• 13 year Bourbon (114.8 proof)
• 15 year Bourbon (117.2 proof)
• Single Rickhouse Bourbon Camp Nelson F (117.6 proof)
• WCWC Exclusive Camp Nelson E (110 proof)
• 6 year Rye (90 proof)

We tasted and discussed the pours together, then ranked them individually. While the three of us have similar, yet distinct preferences in our whiskies, throughout the tasting our preferences were clear and those differences didn’t really show up. Two bottles were early favorites, and another two were immediate dislikes. The battle, really, was for the middle of the pack.

As whiskey drinkers, we are trained that “older is better,” and our assumption was our two favorites were the 13- and 15-year bourbons, and our least favorites were the 6-year rye and 10-year bourbon.

We were half right.

We ended up ranking our top four whiskies in exactly the same order:

1. K&L Exclusive
2. WCWC Exclusive
3. Single Rickhouse
4. 13 year Bourbon

Our final three is where we diverged, slightly:

This differed from the overall WCWC rankings, which put the 13- and 15- year at the top, though we did align on the 10-year bourbon and 6-year rye being among our least favorites.

The 10-year is an approachable introduction for new bourbon drinkers; for cocktails which need the alcohol and flavor profile of bourbon, but won’t miss the nuance (say, a Kentucky Mule); or perhaps in baking.

The rye will appeal to those who enjoy its spicy profile (and, I think it would make for a killer Manhattan).

The 13- and 15-year, and Single Rickhouse bourbons are all limited releases, and retail for $150, $250, and $300, respectively—though you’d be hard pressed to find them for those prices; more likely double that. They would make great gifts for the bourbon lover who appreciates hard-to-get allocations.

The Exclusives, though, can be smoking good deals, usually $75–$100 a bottle. Most large retailers are likely to have one (e.g. BevMo, Total Wine), and smaller shops with a strong whiskey selection (like K&L) are likely to have their own picks, too.

If I were spending my own money, I’d grab a single barrel exclusive pick from Warehouse TY-K or TY-Q (e.g. this ParisTown from K&L). If I were spending someone else’s money, I might splurge on the Single Rickhouse—or maybe just explore a few exclusive bottles.

While I was writing about the Dungeons & Dragons stamp, I discovered—for reasons unknown, and much to my annoyance—that the USPS Postal Store prevents you from copying text from its website. 

This annoys me on any website, but for a government-run agency, it seems like an especially misguided idea. Heck, it might even be disallowed under Section 105 of the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17), which says 

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government….

This suggests there should be no reason they’d prevent copying. More broadly though, I don’t understand the desire for any website to block this basic functionality. It’s user hostile. Anyone motivated enough to copy stuff will find ways of doing so, even if it means retyping it, screenshotting it, or, as any self-respecting geek would do, finding a technical workaround to the problem.

First, let me acknowledge that the effort I put into addressing this issue, while minimal, was still greater than simply retyping the text from the site, or taking a screenshot and copying the text that way. The effort, of course, is beside the point for us geeks. It’s the principle of the matter. Information wants to be free, and I’ll be damned if I can’t copy text on my own computer!

Fortunately, USPS.com made this easy on me by using a method to prevent copying that’s easily worked around: The user-select CSS property.

I assume you know at least the basics of CSS. If not, I recommend reading this primer, but very briefly, CSS lets you style how content looks on a website, and how people interact with it. A style sheet contains the definitions, or instructions, for that styling. One of the features of CSS is you can override styles by providing new definitions. Safari provides a mechanism to add your own styles to all websites. I’ll use that ability to override the USPS.com user-select definition with my own.

(Note: This is Mac- and Safari-specific. There are ways of doing this in other browsers, and on Windows/Android, but I don’t use them.)

First, I’ll create a new style sheet that disables the relevant property. Then, I’ll tell Safari to use it. Finally, I’ll reload the page and copy copy copy!

Create a style sheet. user-select tells browsers how to handle content selection. USPS.com sets it to none, preventing any content selection. I want that to be auto (the browser default) which allows selecting—and thus copying—content. I need the !important flag so the browser gives my new definition a higher priority than the one coming from the website. Finally, I want this to apply to everything on the page, so I’ll use * instead of a specific HTML tag, class, or identifier.

I created a file, which I called nof—you.css, with the following content:

* {
    -webkit-user-select: auto !important;
    user-select: auto !important;
}

(Surprisingly, user-select is not a web standard yet, so most browsers prefix it to indicate it’s a browser-specific implementation. -webkit-user-select is for Safari’s current implementation, and user-select is for when the property (eventually) becomes a standard. Other prefixes exist, such as -moz-user-select and -ms-user-select, but again, I care only about Safari.)

Tell Safari to use this style sheet. In Safari, I opened Settings, then the Advanced tab. I clicked on the Style Sheet popup menu and selected Other…, and chose my nof—you.css file. Safari will now use this css on any website I load.

Reload the page. After reloading the USPS Store page, I’m now able to select and copy the text.

What’s great about this solution is it works for any site that uses user-select. I can either leave the CSS file always enabled (so I won’t even notice that a site was blocking selection); or I can disable it (select None from the Style Sheet popup) and re-enable it when necessary.

I think I’ll do the latter so I can emphatically spit out F— me? No, f– you! as I enable it.

Bonus Screenshot Option: I mentioned above taking a screenshot as a way to get around copy blocking. Here’s a brief overview of how you do that. (Again, this is only for Apple systems.) Take a screenshot on your Mac, iPhone or iPad, or take a photo with the Camera. In Photos, use the Live Text feature to select and copy the text. Voila. It still feels like getting away with something, but ultimately, gives me a less visceral f—you! experience.

Your mileage may vary.

This poster hangs prominently in our home, visible to your left after you enter the front door, as you take off your shoes. It’s a newspaper ad that ran in the San Francisco Call in March 1913 to stoke sales of the yet-to-be-built Forest Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, where we now live.

The ad—one of a series of at least ten published by the Newell-Murdoch company—touted the virtues of the new neighborhood, including its proximity to downtown, the return on investment, and the fresh air and sunshine. Many were implicitly or explicitly directed to “the man” who provided for his family (“Where do your wife and children live?” asks one). All contained the typical flowery language of real estate developers. And they all referenced “restricted residence.”

At the end of June, I wrote about the difficulty Willie Mays had when he was buying a house in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood of San Francisco, in the late ’50s; in it, I said:

He later bought another home, this time in Forest Hill, the neighborhood I currently live in, where the neighbors seemed less racist.

We love Forest Hill. We’ve lived here for about eighteen months now. It’s walkable, easily accessible by public transportation, and quiet. It’s a five minute stroll down the hill to West Portal, which has a cute “downtown strip” filled with lovely shops and restaurants.

It’s a great area; and while it may have been more welcoming of Black residents in the 1960s compared to Sherwood Forest, like much of San Francisco—and America—when it comes to housing discrimination, it has a racist past.

When we moved into the neighborhood, the homeowners’ association provided a packet sharing some of the history of the area. Part of Adolph Sutro’s vast estate, it was originally a large forest on a hill—talk about your creative naming! The forest was mostly leveled and converted to a residential planned community in the early 1900s.

Learning that Willie Mays lived here—helping to integrate the area in the ’60s—piqued my curiosity. I found the Forest Hill page on OutsideLands.org. Not much about Willie, but this caught my eye:

Forest Hill followed the example of other residence parks, imposing strict requirements on everything from building design to the racial identity of its residents. (Read a typical flyer.)

“Racial identity of its residents,” eh? I knew what that meant. I’ve seen enough homeowner CC&Rs—Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions—which needed to have discriminatory language struck because it no longer comported with modern sensibilities.

This was different.

The “typical flyer” mentioned by Outside Lands was a textual recreation of the newspaper ad at the top. It starts with the expected flowery language: Forest Hill as an Investment, distinctive exclusiveness, the finest place in San Francisco to live, and so on.

Then, in the fifth paragraph, things turned.

So shocked was I by the language in the ad, I refused to believe it could be real. There was no image, no link that might lend it credence.

I needed to find a copy, and see it in context for myself.

For all the issues modern search engines have, one undeniably great thing is they make it easy to find the proverbial needle in a vast internet haystack. Twenty years ago my eyes would be bleary from spending my afternoons scrolling through microfiche in a stuffy library. Instead, I was able to plug in the remarkably specific phrases and almost immediately pulled up the scanned newsprint.

There was the ad, taking up three quarters of the broadsheet. I stared at it on my screen, reading the copy, slack-jawed. At the bottom of the center column above the fold, were these words:

There are restrictions that safeguard the person of taste and refinement who seeks exclusiveness. There are no Mongols, Africans or “shack builders” allowed in Forest Hill. When a man selects a homesite in this tract it is done with the positive assurance that there will be nothing disagreeable to mar the serenity of the most fastidious.

I was gobsmacked.

I am Black (or “African”); my wife, Chinese (“Mongol”). I’m not exactly sure who “shack builders” was meant to impugn , but I’m confident it’s a slur against some immigrant community. (The Irish contractors who remodeled our home believe it meant their people.)

What shocked me about this ad wasn’t the language, which I understand was commonplace in everyday life in the early 1900s—jarring to read, but not shocking.

No, what truly shocked me was to see those words in an ad. In a newspaper. Published for all to see. It’s not coded. There’s no “dog whistle.” It’s perhaps a bit less direct than “only persons of the White or Caucasian race” but it’s pretty damn close.

Some people may shy away from this racist history, ignoring it in the hope that it recedes into the mists of time.

Not me. Forgetting means repeating. We keep this in a prominent place in the home we would’ve been denied buying a century ago as a striking reminder to us and everyone who visits that history is neither static nor abstract. Living in this house, displaying this ad, it reinforces the truth that ideas and ideologies shift. Change may happen slowly, but change does happen.

I’m remembering our past so I can imagine our future.

See this ad and others in the series in full context. I found ten of them; there may be more. All links except the final one are from the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America. The last one is from Newspapers.com.

• Country Life in the Center of San Francisco
• View from one of the homesites
• Forest Hill as an Investment
• Nature is calling your children to Forest Hill
• Where do your wife and children live?
• Do you know what Unearned Increment means?
• The Home is the Cradle of Humanity
• When is a man’s property worth more than his good name?
• A Look into the future
• Houses planned by M. Fisher