For reasons that I’m not going to get into here, I recently got a pretty much free Google Pixel 6a smartphone (had to pay the tax and get a USB-C -> USB-C charger).

Note: This is the first time I’ve spent any significant hands-on time with an Android device; it’s the first Pixel I’ve ever touched.

I’m pretty much a (very happy) iPhone dude.

Here are some first impressions, especially vis-a-vis Apple smartphones. In no particular order:

• Lovely (full) screen; solid build feel.
• USB-C. Come on Apple, join the rest of the world…
• Hate that I had to enter/set-up a Google account to continue. I don’t think Apple requires this (encourages so you can back up to iCloud, but not required). I, of course, have an account, but didn’t want this phone to be an extension of my Google universe…
• Fingerprint reader is under the screen (yay! – no chin like my iPhone SE) but it works at best about one out of every ten times. Apple’s home button is phenomenal.
• Battery life seems kinda weak, and I was just using it on WiFi.
• Gestures are a little weird, but I come from an iOS world. I’m pretty sure it’s just a case of getting used to the different environment.
• Interface for calls (it’s a phone, remember?): iOS kicks the Pixel’s ass. Hands down.
• There was a Google rep in the store when I got the phone, and she touted the camera. I have yet to try, so I can’t say.
• While I’m certain I can change the color scheme, the default is, in most areas, dreadful. This is where Apple rocks – design, including the UI.

Again, pretty and solid phone but it is the Pixel SIX – not just a work in progress.

Overall, slightly unimpressed.

I remember helping a friend set up his email om a Samsung Galaxy a couple of years ago, and that was a sweet phone. Hardware and software – impressive with just a few minutes handling it. Rivaled the iPhone.

Subtitled “How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution,” this lengthy (480 pages) overview of the foray into computers and the connected world is an impressive survey. And the first of it’s kind, as far as I’m aware.

It begins at, well, the beginning of it all: The early 19the Century with Charles Babbage and his “difference machine” and Ada Lovelace’s ruminations on concepts of programming (which would not be borne out until the mid-20th Century: Loops, logic, subroutines/libraries).. It continues on a chronological path, sometimes forking to show how multiple groups were working – often without the other’s knowledge – to crack the same problem. For example, the integrated circuit was developed by two teams almost simultaneously. Yet only one got a Nobel Prize for the discovery, simply because the other team leader had died (there are no posthumous Nobel Prizes)..

Isaacson does a good job of when to dwell on a subject and when to just note a milestone and briefly outline its significance. There is a lot of history – and a lot of characters – to talk about, and the book doesn’t go astray too often (one nit to pick: Isaacson spends a couple of pages talking about Ada Lovelace’s father, the poet Lord Byron. Why? Yes, he was a famous writer and womanizer, which would be germane in a book about the lives of poets, but here?).

In tracing the history of the digital revolution, Isaacson comes to two main conclusions:

1) Progress was not spurred by solitary geniuses, but by collaborative groups:

Math and physics are often powered by keen insight of gifted individuals – think Newton or Einstein. But the digital revolution almost always needed teams, to overcome wide-ranging problems, such as electrical and material expertise for the transistor or integrated circuit. No one person could really tackle this alone.

And that leads to another truism Isaacson uncovers:These groups, often duos, often worked most effectively when one individual was technical, the other a visionary/salesman. Think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple, or Paul Allen and Bill Gates at Microsoft: The former in the group knew how to sell products, the latter knew how to build stuff.

2) The digital revolution is roughly divided into two eras: Hardware, and then software:

Back in the day, the nerds knew about memory addresses and how to read the colored bands on transistors to figure out its properties and so on. Today, few know – and really don’t care – exactly how a computer or router works. Hardware is for huge companies with billion-dollar factories, not for people geeking out in their parent’s basement.

The transition to software began around the rise of Microsoft – the difficult and time-consuming tasks of building computers and connecting them (both locally with ethernet and remotely via the internet) was over. Now was the race to devise tools to use the hardware/networking.

And software development could still be done by individuals, or small groups.

VisiCalc – the vision of one man – became the first “killer app.”

Others followed, but software, much like hardware before it, became too large for individuals or small groups. I can’t even imagine how many lines of code were in even early editions of Adobe Photoshop!

As computers – and their underlying software – became more flexible yet more complex, computers and networks once again allowed groups – this time often far-flung groups – to collaborate, this time with small fixes to big projects (Linux and other open-source software) and content collaboration. For the latter, Isaacson ignores Facebook, Twitter and Reddit and instead focuses on Wikipedia. He ties Wikipedia’s “anyone can edit” structure back to home brew clubs of the past, where hardware and software was freely shared.

Interesting – and accurate – take.

Isaacson is a good writer, and he makes good choices about what to include, what to gloss over and what to ignore. It’s a good overview of almost 200 years of digital development without having to really understand the tech it describes.

Watched the most recent Ken Burns’ documentary over the past couple of weekends on DVD (three discs, six hours). Searing, unsettling and – as usual – chock full of amazing photographs and movies, with a surprising number in color (still and video).

One of Burns’ finest efforts.

One thing that I had not noticed about Burns’ work before is the US-centric nature of his documentaries. I just hadn’t really realized this before. Sure, much of his work is on American-centric issues: Baseball, Prohibition, The Civil War. But look at the title of this documentary: not The Holocaust, but The U.S. and the Holocaust.

The same is true for his other not specifically US documentaries: The War (WWII) and The Vietnam War. Each film includes background and the actions of other countries, but the emphasis is on what these events meant to Americans.

Interesting.

This film – about the US and the Holocaust – gave mich of the backstory about Hitler’s rise to power and the imposition of the “Final Solution” (genocide; by raw numbers, higher for Jews), but a great deal of the emphasis was on the US’ actions and the stories of Jews who ended up in the US. And those who were turned away.

What struck me was how US politicians and military personnel, up to and including President Franklin Deleno Roosevelt, decried the persecution of non-Aryans in German-controlled Europe, but they always shied away from taking direct action to help throw a wrench in the genocidal apparatus, for fear of something going wrong and then US personal could potentially be killed just trying to “help the Jews” when there were other targets to hit. That was considered – over and over – and was deemed as just not acceptable.

Isn’t this, to some degree, anti-Semetic?

A couple of issues the documentary didn’t address, but that’s understandable given the breath of the issue:

• No mention of the brain drain, especially among Jewish scientists, the Holocaust created in Germany (think Einstein, rwin Schrodinger, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller). Many were current or future Nobel laureates, and many aided the Manhattan Project, which was a key to ending the war.
• Never really addressed if the Final Solution was a Hitler/Germany project or extended to other Axis countries (I think it was a German thing).
• No mention of how Stalin – an ally of sorts to Germany at the beginning of the war – had his own, much higher body count genocide later in the 20th Century. While the Nazi genocide seems more targetted at people deemed inferior to Aryans, and Stalin’s purges/gulags seemed more politically motivated, one still wonders if there was any connective tissue between the two – any :”lessons learned.” I just don’t know, and it wasn’t mentioned.

Unlike Baseball, which had interviews with everyone and their uncle, this film had only a half-dozen or so interviews interspersed within the footage (many small snippets throughout the six hours, but a finite number of interviewees, overall). Made for a tighter film, to me. On the other hand, not everyone in America has a connection to the Holocaust, but everyone loves baseball, so it worked there.

Not a film I will return to in the near future – it’s a bruising story to follow – but it’s well done and, given the rise in anti-semitism/white supremecy in the US as of late, it’s unfortunately very timely.

From CDC.gov

We’ll see how it affects me — the first shot gave me flu-like symptoms, the second and booster made me a little wiped out.

Let’s see what the fourth does!

Easy to get done – checked online, saw an opening. Booked online for later in the afternoon.

Got to the Cook County, IL facility (one of many), checked in, got shot, walked out.

I was halfway home by the time my “appointment” was scheduled.

Update 10/13/2022 – Same as he last two times: Dragging, elevated temperature. Spend the next day doing little and then the next day ~90 percent back to normal. Lesson: Take a vacation day for the day after shot.

This was a really disappointing series finale season – had its moments, but overall “meh.”

Some good closer action – the Pontiac Bandit (Craig Robinson is the best here) – but the rest was lame.

I get that they tried – over the first few episodes – to get past the (at the time) George Floyd, other police injustices. Too preachy, to me.

And not funny.

I get it – police were the bad guys then, but … this is a comedy.

Failed for that beginning of the season reason (police are bad) and how it wrapped up with all the characters really didn’t work for me.

Surprisingly good series (at the beginning) – I did not take Andy Samburg seriously – that had a good run and then kinda went “whatevva.”

Short story shorter: Last week I purchased four spanking-new tires for my 10-year-old car.

Now, if I was a car guy, this might be somewhat exciting, especially if the tires had some awesome name: Tiger Claw, PavementGrippers, KingsOfTheRoad.

But I’m not a car guy. And the tires I put on replaced the boring old tires that came with my oh-so-sexy Ford Focus. Continental tires, I think.

For me, tires have no bang for the buck.: $140 per tire, installation fee, recycle fee, state tax, local tax, HBO Max 6 months, Spotify, two box minimum of Girl Scout cookies…

And what do I have to show for it? Tires that no one looks at anyway.

Get a new, big-ass TV? Fire it up and it sure looks pretty.

New stereo or speakers? Crank it up! (Does anyone buy new stereo equipment anymore?)

Oh well – it was necessary and it’s done. Shouldn’t ever have to worry about tires on this car again.

Keri Blakinger’s meticulous and thought-provoking memoir starts off with the story of an unexpected and sensational crime: An Ivy League student (also a heroin addict) is caught with $50k of heroin (oh – she’s also a drug dealer).

The Ivy institution is Cornell University and the student is Blakinger.

The first 250 pages of the book are, for the most part, a record of her incarceration: Jail, transfers to other jails closer to courthouses, and – finally – a series of prisons where she serves her time, No exhaustive examination of lawyers, judges, trials or the then-current outside world. Just prisons and prisoners.

There are some flashbacks – the figure skating is a surprise – and vague stabs at how she got to this point, but the first 250 pages really concentrate on her time in jail (before conviction) and then prison (post conviction – again, no mention of her lawyer, did she plea out?), a period of about three years. She illustrates in painful detail the prisons themselves and – especially – the prisoners she is locked up wth. How they are treated; how they are mistreated. How prisons do not promote personal betterment; it is just dehumanizing. And that’s the point.

We have a busted incarceration system.

The overwhelming minutiae, as well as the bleak day-to-day details (think One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but a longer time with shallower details), started to weigh down on me, and I put the book aside for a week or so.

But I left off just before the tone shifted.,The last fifty or so pages were lighter, covering the period just before her release up through the present day, a span of five or so years. For an overwhelmingly bleak book, it ends, overall, on mostly upbeat notes.

An English major (slash heroin addict) while she was in college, Blakinger relies on words to slowly get into journalism and ends up championing prisoners’ rights: She’s now with The Marshall Project (“Nonprofit journalism about criminal justice”), going into prisons as fellow felon to find out what can be done to make the time more bearable, She’s had some successes book drives, dentures, a rare success in a sexual assult case. The prisoners – current and former – talk to her because she’s one of them – always a powerful tool.

And – obviously – she’s published a book! Good for her.

I first read about this book by women writers on Twitter (it came out in June 2022), and after the first dozen or so references, I looked it up and bought it.

I was expecting something more along the lines of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir Girl, Interrupted (committed to an asylum at 18) or Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which is a novel but based on Plath’s very real life events. Both dark and filled with demons, but very wise and grounded.

Blakinger does talk about the stuff in her head – pre- and post-arrest. And it ain’t pretty, especially her experience with solitary confinement. But she’s more interested in the structure and execution of the criminal “justice” system than herself.

And she’s particularly interested in – and empathetic with – those who did time with her. I bet the pre-edit version of this memoir was 500+ pages, and most of the cuts were her stories about/discourses with her fellow inmates. I could be wrong, but I’m probably not far off.

Blakinger is white and her folks have money (she was at Cornell U.), but she never really addresses her privilege until the section after she was released, but she is relentless about herself on this. She realizes she got breaks – big and small – because of her station in the world. She mentions her car getting pulled over (while muling drugs) and got off with a warning – the cop saw a Cornell course guide in the car. What mischief could a white coed be up to?

And the privilege is just as important out of prison, especially when on parole. One tiny slip – maybe not your fault (a friend’s friend joins you for dinner. Your friend’s friend is, unknown to you, a felon) – and you could easily be back in prison. The dinner was at some nice French restaurant? Ah, how could you have known? Same situation but you’re black/brown and eating in a McDonald’s parking lot? You just violated your parole.

Finally, the title: Corrections in Ink. This phrase is used at least three times in the book, basically saying at the time she only has a pen so any corrections she makes to a journal, crossword puzzle or reporting notes are done “in ink.”

I think it has a deeper meaning: Blakinger is not going to memory-hole her crimes or her time. She’s going to own it: she’s a now-sober felon.

And her time served – her Corrections – is being put out there for all to see, printed – in Ink – in this book.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy” – August 1854

Now some guys they just give up living,
And start dying little by little piece by piece.
Some guys come home from work and wash up
And go racing in the streets

– Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run “Racing in the Streets” – August 1975

The last three years of college – when I had an apartment, I was quite the magazine whore.

I would read everything: Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, Science, The New York Review of Books (not the The New York Time Book Review – different animal), Newseekl and so on.

One particular favorite was The Atlantic. – always well written, always with a roster of stories that didn’t fall in any one bucket. Mainly non-fiction, but excellent fiction, as well.

Last week, I purchased a digital subscription to theatlantic.com.

Why?

Two main reasons:

• Excellent writing and writers – Anne Applebaum, Molly Jong-Fast, David Graham, Tom Nichols (just off the top of my head), as well as occasional pieces by non-staff, such as Tim Alberta.
• Giving back. Sure, I can get a couple of free articles a month or go into incognito mode and get a couple at any time. But both Romy and I read The Atlantic pretty regularly, do why not give something back?

I’ve no regrets.

When I was in college, I read a very strange and impressive short story^* in the New Yorker. A half page long – the bottom half of the page was a very New Yorker-esqe cartoon.

A half page long, all one sentence with some magical writing: “The Letter From Home, ” by Jamaica Kincaid, of whom I had never heard. Puzzling but lyrical. What to make of it?

I clipped the page (later had to copy the tattered page) and stuck it in this or that folder packed with, to me, interesting writing.

In 1985, Kincaid came out with the novel Annie John and whenever it was that I ran across it (before 1990, I’m sure), I picked it up. I recalled the magazine article, and the author’s name was easy to remember.

It remained, on my bookshelf, unread. Until yesterday.

Clocking in at 148 pages with generous margins, it’s closer to a novella than a novel, but no matter. The book traces – first person – the thoughts, joys, illnesses and mental gyrations of a young girl growing up, from 10 years old to 18, with her mother and father in Antigua.

Like the New Yorker story, it’s beautifully written, hard to put down (I read it in three hours, almost uninterrupted), and difficult to decipher.

At heart, it’s about growing up, learning to love, and learning to leave love – and other parts of your life – behind.

I remain puzzled by the ending, to come to grips with some of the decisions she makes, most only to herself (Annie John) without input nor sharing with others.

Incandescent.

^*April 20, 1981 issue, pg. 33