📷 The Red Cedar used to host a raw sewage discharge point, power plant, and heavy industry along its banks for large portions of its history as Michigan evolved from a frontier territory to Arsenal-of-Democracy. Decades of environmental advocacy and robust regulation have gotten it to a point you can see the riverbed on most days. When I walk its banks I try to remind myself to never take clean water for granted.
Ebola is often called the disease of compassion by experts like Dr. Craig Spencer. It spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, which means it spreads when a family member tends to the sick, when a nurse stays at the bedside, or when a community gathers to bury their dead. In other words, it’s spread through acts of care.
But the phrase has been sitting differently lately because this outbreak is spreading not only through compassion but also through the global withdrawal of it.
Spring Progress 📷 2026.05.19
We might be able to say summer has arrived.
Today marks the death anniversary of Stanislov Petrov a man who disobeyed orders and established protocol to ensure the world didn’t end in nuclear fire. As someone who has spent most of my career working for large bureaucratic institutions I use this anniversary to reflect on his courage and remind myself that building and maintaining esteem within the bureaucracy should never come at the expense of extinguishing my or others humanity.
Not once have I ever been disappointed by a visit to Angela’s Cafe in downtown East Lansing. It’s just so good. 😋😋😋
If the only way to make money in comedy is to feed the algorithm, while the companies that control the algorithm scoop out most of the money, and the people who run those companies keep modifying the algorithm to cater to their own whims, then we will be a society where comedy tends toward sucking.
Same principle applies across all sorts of culture-making endeavors, and increasingly any public good that can be commodified for shareholder profit.
📸 I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tree so brightly flowering and leafing at the same time
Apple just settled a false marketing case involving Apple Intelligence and I don’t think there is a direct correlation, but I find it noteworthy that the two ads apple has recently released featuring a K-12 classroom and college students don’t have a single whiff of Generative AI in them.
Look’s like Ghost in the Shell is getting another reboot, but frankly I still haven’t gotten over this sequence from 2nd GiG.
Spring Progress 📸 2026.05.10
The maple shed its blossoms and has moved on to leaves. #SP26.4
Could Christian colleges be used as an ablative shield against GOP de-institutionalization efforts? When I read articles like this one I wonder about that.
These photos are remarkable:
TEXAS! (by Erin Newman-Mitchell)
Nicholas Carr, reviewing a book by one of the world-wide-web’s earliest architects, encourages the reader to touch some grass:
Not all technologies improve people’s lives. Just as Berners-Lee’s now omnipresent web shapes industries and markets, it shapes its users’ thoughts, perceptions, and relationships. As we’re slowly coming to understand, human beings did not evolve to be virtual creatures in a computer-generated world. The internet operates at a scale and speed that conflict with the brain’s deliberate pace of thought, the intellect’s slow accumulation of knowledge, and the psyche’s limited capacity for stimulation and social exchange. To be able to do anything and be anywhere at any moment seems liberating for a while, but it ends in a blurred and chaotic existence, the physical world’s familiar, steadying divisions of space and time dissolving in endless torrents of data. It’s an existence that may be vivifying to certain software programmers…but for the rest of us, the virtual world’s hyperkinetic superabundance ends up feeling like emptiness, a very, very busy void. We may be drawn to that void by our native attraction to information, novelty, and spectacle, but we’ll never make a home there.
Tea Anemone by Tatsuya Tanaka at Miniature Calendar:
Westenberg calls it “withdrawal” but you could also label it sabbath:
Any culture that systematically punishes withdrawal is going to lose its most concentrated thinkers to either burnout or invisibility. The modern knowledge economy, with its ambient pressure to post, ship, and stay in the conversation, is a machine for producing exactly that loss. The people we’ll wish we had in 15 years are, right now, being shamed into producing slop they don’t believe in, because the alternative is to drop out, and dropping out reads as failure.
The eldest shares her mom and grandmothers' interest.
📸 Spring is sprung
There is a particular bus driver on Route 24 of Capital Area Transportation Authority that (density and time permitting) will Intentionally wait until embarkees sit down before driving onward. And it’s little stuff like that which makes me feel good about living in a Midwest town.
Philip Cohen, reflecting on the intersection of the perverse incentives of ‘publish or perish’ + low consequence editorial accountability + generative AI:
I assume you are appalled at the idea of journals publishing such fabricated results. However, there are a lot of people who would draw a different lesson from this example: Why spend an hour getting this real data, doing some recodes, running the model, and sharing the data and code — when ChatGPT already “knows” the answer? They see the small errors in the table above, and compare the time it took to produce them, and conclude that the ChatGPT approach is much more efficient and almost as good. This is productivity!
To the extent I pay attention to Home and Garden trends I always got the impression the platonic ideal for lawn maintenance was a golf course fairway.
Meanwhile I’m out here weedmaxxing
World Press Photo’s 2026 photo of the year, Separated By ICE:
Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚
On the growing challenges early modern education reformers claimed (and overpromised) the humanities could address:
The humanities came to stand in for the contradictions and tensions that, as we have traced in this chapter, characterized nineteenth-century liberal education or allgemeine Bildung: tensions between method, research, and ways of knowing on the one hand and ethos, teaching, and questions of how to live on the other. The scholars who helped establish “the humanities” as a distinct institutional domain within the modern university and identified themselves with it gradually claimed (and sometimes gained) a monopoly over these questions and concerns, especially as other scholars (natural and physical scientists in particular) began to regard such questions as outside their own domains (witness Pinker). Yet the academics who did so much to make the humanities possible within universities also inherited all of the contradictions and confusions that beset Diesterweg in the 1830s. (p. 79-80).
My first blush thought on this is that focusing on humanities stakeholders overpromising intellectual unity allows for side-stepping the issue of disenchantment (the loss of “magic” as Max Weber might phrase it). In this chapter they do briefly address figures like Alasdair MacIntyre and Brad Gregory, but brush them aside pretty quickly.
Is the unifying promise they address really a sign of hubris when the pre-Enlightenment world (particularly in Europe) had a unifying meta-narrative that underpinned intellectual life?
What are we doing? What’s going on?
ghoulish
