How San Francisco Became a Failed City
Living in a failing city does weird things to you.
Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.
Our misguided obsession with Twitter
Cal Newport:
A message originally meant for your direct followers could now, under the right conditions, disseminate exponentially through the network. These viral dynamics were further turbocharged when Twitter subsequently moved away from sorting time lines in strict reverse chronological order, and began deploying algorithms that prioritized engagement, which can lead to popular tweets spreading faster.
Zero-Sum Environments
Banham writes: “Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”