First of 2025
Conserving energy in the cold, plus militia's and undercover informants, birds, Spotify, Cybertrucks, and much more.
Happy New Year, folks.
I hope the end of 2024 was kind to you, and you’ve been able to stave off your “Let’s circle back after the new year” emails and conversations until today, at least.
As you are likely aware, there was a massive winter storm that swept across Middle America yesterday, and Columbia was smack in the path. It’s a very cold, snowy, icy day here, and the forecast is only calling for colder temps tonight.
It’s the perfect weather for doing nothing much at all, for curling up inside in your favorite cozy spot and enjoying the simple pleasures of a good book or a good movie or TV show (or, heck, even bad ones).
It’s nature’s way of determining what you should do with your day, and because our creature comforts are such that we don’t often have to listen to Mother Nature, I’m choosing to remind myself of it. Hunker down, stay warm, conserve as much energy as possible.
Giving my restless mind permission to be quiet for the day. Hoping this finds you at the end of your day in such a state where you can do the same.
Sending you warm wishes for 2025, and as always, thanks for reading.
Ten Worth Your Time
- On this, the fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, there can be no better time to read one of the best stories I’ve read in a long while: “The Militia and the Mole.” Joshua Kaplan, writing for ProPublica, absolutely knocks it out of the park with a gripping (and meticulously reported) story that’s just what the title suggests. From the story’s dek: “Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.” All I can say is: If you only read one link in this newsletter, make it this one.
- About this time last year, I was in South Africa with Courtney, and I met one of her cousins who said something to the effect of: “I was suddenly into birding. I don’t know how or why; it just happened, and I was really into birds.” I wish I could remember the exact quote because it was much more charming, said with a self-effacing laugh and kind of a what-are-you-gonna-do shoulder shrug. I was reminded of it when I saw a post on Bluesky that said: “something so whole about reaching a certain age and watching person after person you follow on Instagram succumb to the charms of birdwatching.” All this to say: Birds are awesome. We all know it. Which is why I was excited to read this piece on bird memories in The New Yorker. You probably aren’t surprised to know that some birds can remember a certain spot where they store their food over and over again, but did you know that some are called “scatter hoarders” and store food in multiple places over a wide area and remember where with scary accuracy? It’s truly mind-boggling to read about it. The piece discusses the evolutionary benefits of remembering, but also, perhaps more importantly for humans, of forgetting.
- This was a bummer of a story. Harper’s published a book excerpt on the inner workings of Spotify, and the piece is all about how the company prioritizes companies that will produce nameless, faceless muzak to populate the tons of playlists that people put on the background. It’s a savvy business move, no doubt, but it shows the futility of thinking huge streaming companies are actually good things for artists. It contains a lot of details, gleaned from interviews with current and former Spotify employees, as well as, sadly, musicians who have to play the game, namely by being basically session players to create filler tracks to make up the desired vibe of a particular playlist. It sounds about as soul-sucking as making a piece of art can be, and what’s worse is it’s totally understandable why some of them choose to do it.
- Here are two related stories that, as much as anything, captured a specific moment in time, specifically January 3, 2025. Suddenly, my Bluesky feed was filled with post after post about one topic: Meta’s AI-generated bot profiles on Instagram. The Verge reminded us that these things were actually a 2023 phenomenon but were mostly bots that “used celebrities’ likenesses.” They weren’t popular in that format and were killed off in summer of last year. But that didn’t mean there weren’t AI-generated bot profiles out there, and boy, oh boy, did they piss people off. Rightly so, I’d say. Particularly offensive was “Liv,” which claimed to be a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller.” I saw all of this blowing up on the third, and mostly just rolled my eyes at another tone-deaf ploy by Big Tech giving people more of what they clearly would never want. But it took a dystopic turn when I saw one of “Liv’s” posts—an AI-generated image of a box of coats with a caption in which the bot claimed to be kicking off the new year in service to her community and how “leading this season’s coat drive was an honor…” Just a moment’s consideration of all the layers of weird and sad and messed up contained in a bot posting that felt like it aged me a hundred years in a matter of minutes. Then a few hours later, Rolling Stone posted a story that said we’d essentially killed the bots: Meta was deleting the accounts.
- Speaking of things nobody asked for, I enjoyed this Texas Monthly “profile” of Tesla’s doorstop-on-wheels, the Cybertruck. Before it made headlines as one-half of the terrible news day that was Jan. 1 last week, it was already a point of equal parts fascination and scorn. I’m not on TikTok, but I must confess a guilty pleasure in watching the genre of videos that are essentially “Day-ruined rants by people who’ve just seen a Cybertruck in the wild.” It’s funny because it mirrors my own eye-rolly inclination when I see the same one zooming around Columbia. But this article captures the push-and-pull nature of the monstrosity—there is undeniably something novel in seeing one, a certain stop-and-point quality to it. The production woes are legion, yet it drives like a dream, they say. It’s a crazy mixture, and this piece is as much a cultural study as it is a profile of a dystopian-looking electric truck.
- As the new year kicks off, so too do new goals and resolutions of millions of people: Read more books, being a perennial favorite. This piece from Teen Vogue is a takedown of a sort of logging-for-clout culture that seems to have emerged from the gamification of reading and watching challenges or goals. I’m hardly one to judge—I just posted my entire 2024 Culture Diary, and it’s routinely a part of this newsletter. But I don’t do it for the numbers. I don’t set goals at the beginning of the year to “read X books” or “watch X movies,” though I do generally think “I should read more” each year. Not as anything to brag about, but as a reminder that I spend my time in slothful ways. This is a good reminder that these stats are largely meaningless if not attached to some internal goal or objective; numbers for numbers’ sake is largely empty.
- On the topic of reading (and also being a man), I was intrigued to read this article from Vox about whether or not there’s actually a men’s reading habit crisis going on right now. The crisis is summed up thusly: “Reading fiction has assumed the same role as therapy in public discourse: something good for one’s mental and emotional health that we should all do in order to be better citizens, and something that men — particularly straight men — are simply choosing not to do, to the detriment of society.” The author then sets about trying to see if there’s any evidence to back up the assertion, and specifically a claim that men make up about only 20% of the fiction market. The piece is mostly a publishing of what normally would happen behind the scenes of a magazine—its fact-checking process. The answers aren’t as easy to find as you might think.
- Speaking of things being hard to find than you might think, I present you the humble quote. We’ve probably all relied on the speed of the internet (let’s face it: Google) to give us the answer the “who said/wrote this?” question. While watching Election, Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick quotes Henry David Thoreau in her student government campaign speech given to her fellow students. I quite liked the quote, and I wanted to simply hang on to it for potential later use, so I googled it quickly to make sure that Thoreau said it. And then things were complicated. Because the first result seemed a hit, but it was actually quite different from what I expected: It credited writer Paul Theroux. One can see how this could easily cause a mix up, but what astounded me was just how many results there were for each. It would be tough to sort out, and it would be very easy to misattribute a quote to someone who never uttered it. Which, in fact, happens all the time, which was why I enjoyed this piece in Big Think that interviewed the Quote Investigator, Garson O’Toole about his work and how certain individuals get credited with way more quotes than they deserve. PS—Just for fun (and the randomness of it all), when I visited the Quote Investigator website, one of the most recent entries was attempting to track down a particular quote by President Jimmy Carter, and O’Toole’s research led him to cite a November 1991 issue of the Columbia Daily Tribune when Carter was here in town giving a speech at Stephens College. Small world.
- If in the new year you hope to travel more, you could do worse than consult The New York Times for its 52 Places to Go list, which this year, is celebrating its 20th edition, published each January since 2005. This (free gift article) is not the actual list for 2025, but a retrospective on the project as a whole, looking at “how The Times’s annual travel list — and travel itself — has changed in the last two decades.” It’s full of interesting tidbits and many recommendations.
- I enjoyed this LitHub examination of Robert Eggers’s new film, Nosferatu, specifically with its analysis of how the film fits into the existing (and robust) Nosferatu/Dracula canon.
More From Me
Over on my blog, I’ve been writing about various topics of interest to me.
iPhone Photography: MKT Trail and Twin Lakes
Culture Diary
Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past week.
The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.