Recently

Listening

• Thao & The Get Down Stay Down: A Man Alive - I’ve been really digging the track The Evening off this album. Thao’s a fellow William & Mary grad, probably the most successful musically since Travis Morrison from Dismemberment Plan.
• King Krule - 6 Feet Beneath the Moon.
• Frank Ocean - Blonde. Everyone’s listening to this highly-anticipated follow-up. It’s good, but I don’t feel as attached to it as channel ORANGE, and prefer the track that’s really just Andre 3000, Solo (Reprise)
• Dolfish - Foreclosure American Dreams

Watching

• Suicide Squad - kind of a puzzling companion piece to the Batman world. It’s just what you’d get from a Markov chain of other superhero movies. The most interesting part is the revival of Harley Quinn as a standalone character and Margot Robbie’s performance.
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. A well above-average documentary. It’s not even terribly detailed or personal, and doesn’t need to be: the rise and fall of Enron has so many punchy facts that simply retelling the story broadly is fascinating.

Elsewhere

• Custom dynamic markers with the Mapbox iOS SDK and PaintCode on the Mapbox blog
• Mapbox GL JS in a Reactive application on the Mapbox blog
• I wrote regex.party, a guide to regular expressions.
• iD with modules. I helped lead the iD project in 2013, and felt it was time to knock out a long-running feature request - modularization.

Reading

• The New Man of 4chan feels like the American version of Hikikomori, and is a razor-sharp piece of writing.
• The biggest beneficiaries of housing subsidies? The wealthy. The mortgage interest deduction has always felt wrong to me and this article at least gives me something to pin that feeling on.
• Improve your App by Connecting the Dots. Always interesting reading about UX from the Basecamp team.
• Startups in 13 sentences. Paul Graham has been writing for so long - this article’s from 2009 - and there are so many people writing on similar topics, that sometimes I feel like much of tech writing is derived from his.

Eichmann in Jerusalem. It’s about time I read this one, and it’s a good time to read it. It is, as the foreword explains and everyone will remind you, a flawed and tricky account. But nonetheless it submerges you in details and gives a really interesting perspective. An especially interesting passage:

Like almost everybody else in Israel, he believed that only a Jewish court could render justice to Jews, and that it was the business of Jews to sit in judgment on their enemies. Hence the almost universal hostility in Israel to the mere mention of an international court which would have indicted Eichmann, not for crimes “against the Jewish people,” but for crimes against mankind committed on the body of the Jewish people.

This immediately brought forth feelings of today. Toni Morrison quotes this passage in Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case. And it rings of the all-white jury and one of the central tenets of BLM - that individual events should be considered in historical context - in Jerusalem’s case, the historical persecution of the Jewish people, and in others, the historical racism in America.