Excellent Reads

I first read this excellent article many years ago. With the Central Park Five recently making speeches at the DNC, it seems timely. I find that it exposes the superficiality of contemporary public and political discourse, especially when contrasted with the systematic, detail-oriented nature of the legal process.

Really cleverly and comedically written. "Summer is too hot, too boring, and too long."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19095878

I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live. Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing.

Archive link for those who want it: https://archive.is/20240725152155/https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/07/usa-cricket-team-pakistan-win-t20-world-cup/679221/

NYT but link is gift article from me

...from EasyOS, a Linux distro, which moved to the .img format.

At 27, I’ve settled into a comfortable coexistence with my suicidality. We’ve made peace, or at least a temporary accord negotiated by therapy and medication. It’s still hard sometimes, but not as hard as you might think. What makes it harder is being unable to talk about it freely: the weightiness of the confession, the impossibility of explaining that it both is and isn’t as serious as it sounds. I don’t always want to be alive. Yes, I mean it. No, you shouldn’t be afraid for me. No, I’m not in danger of killing myself right now. Yes, I really mean it.

How do you explain that?

The author solves a half century old murder of a small town legend.

Monorepos, performance problems, and a lot of asking

This summer, a friend called in a state of unhappy perplexity. At age 47, after years of struggling to find security in academia, he had received tenure. Instead of feeling satisfied, however, he felt trapped. He fantasized about escape. His reaction had taken him by surprise. It made no sense. Was there something wrong with him? I gave him the best answer I know. I told him about the U-curve.

Not everyone goes through the U-curve. But many people do, and I did. In my 40s, I experienced a lot of success, objectively speaking. I was in a stable and happy relationship; I was healthy; I was financially secure, with a good career and marvelous colleagues; I published a book, wrote for top outlets, won a big journalism prize. If you had described my own career to me as someone else’s, or for that matter if you had offered it to me when I was just out of college, I would have said, “Wow, I want that!” Yet morning after morning (mornings were the worst), I would wake up feeling disappointed, my head buzzing with obsessive thoughts about my failures. I had accomplished too little professionally, had let life pass me by, needed some nameless kind of change or escape.

Seen the movie, had no idea it was based on a true story!

A friend told me about Alfred a few years ago, having heard of him on the Internet. Initially, she believed him to be a work of fiction: the man who had waited at Charles de Gaulle Airport for fifteen years, on the longest layover in history. But then, the man was real. It was said he could be found near the Paris Bye Bye bar. He'd be bald on top, with frizzes of wild hair on the sides and four teeth missing, smoking a gold pipe, writing in his journal or listening to the radio. It was said, too, that it really didn't matter what time of day or night or which day of the week one visited, for Alfred was always there—and had been since 1988.

It's not so much a bell, really, as an electronic horn, short and shrill. When it goes off, firefighters freeze and listen for the sound that comes next. Usually, only words follow. "Engine 1," the dispatcher might say—or "Engine 8" or "Ladder 5," but only one truck—before reciting an address and a task. One tone signals a medical run or some minor emergency, like going out to stabilize a car-crash victim or a coronary case until an ambulance arrives, breaking a toddler out of a locked-up Taurus, or squirting water on a flaming car. Milk runs.

Sometimes, maybe every fifth time, a second tone will follow the first. Two tones is more serious, perhaps a fire alarm ringing somewhere, probably triggered by nothing more than a stray wisp of cigarette smoke or a burp of electrical current jiggling a circuit. Dispatch sends two engines and one ladder truck for those, picking whichever units are available and close.

Even rarer is three tones. Three tones means a reported structure fire, a house or a condo or a strip mall already blowing smoke into the sky. Three tones means blazing orange heat, black smoke, and poison gas; sirens and lights and steam and great torrents of water; men ripping into walls with axes and long metal spears, smashing windows and cutting shingles from roofs, teetering on ladders a hundred feet long. It doesn't always turn out that way, but three tones, at least, offers the chance of action. Firefighters love a triple.