Join Readup to read with bill.

Upvote. I always love a good, big idea.

I did the yoga teacher training at Yoga to the People and taught and assisted on both coasts. I’m extremely sad to see it go. It was a staple for me in NYC and SF/Berkeley.

This is a loss.

BethAnn is like a digital version of Rachel Dolezal. This story is nuts.

To be honest, I couldn’t stop LOLing every time someone was like “I remember thinking, ‘Is this BethAnn?’” Lolol. It’s BethAnn!

“I was pretty shocked,” said Erica Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University. “I had never had particularly great experiences with @Sciencing_Bi, but I thought that she was a whole real human who had just died. I was surprised by how hard it hit me. I ate a pint of ice cream about it.”

I wonder how many times someone accomplished a fake death and just disappeared and nobody ever knew the truth that the person wasn’t real.

💯✌️💥 Oh wow yes! Breezy and delightful. Deep, but delightful.

Applicable to life beyond programming too. Loved it.

Humans don’t scale.

Time and attention are finite.

Reposting. This is the paragraph that I can’t stop thinking about:

Reading through the Roman bot’s responses, it’s hard not to feel like the texts captured him at a particularly low moment. Ask about Stampsy and it responds: “This is not [the] Stampsy I want it to be. So far it’s just a piece of shit and not the product I want.” Based on his friends’ descriptions of his final years, this strikes me as a candid self-assessment. But I couldn’t help but wish I had been talking to a younger version of the man — the one who friends say dreamed of someday becoming the cultural minister of Belarus, and inaugurating a democratically elected president with what he promised would be the greatest party ever thrown.

It’s crazy to think that we are what we say, but that’s what this has me thinking — that we are the words we use. And it makes me want to use more positive language, everywhere. I’m horrified to think of what a bot of me would say if it was trained on the language I’ve been using for the last few months. Lots of practical life lessons in this article, and in all real life sci-fi stories like this.

Totally my jam, I can’t recommend this enough.

Fascinating. 🆙👍✅

Interesting, but I think I oppose any organization that solely exists to create negative ads. I'm not even sure if this helps or hurts Trump.

I did some slow breathing in a huge empty church this morning and it was awesome.

Every single word of this short story is absolutely perfect.

Inspiring. Breath is the key to life.

Wow. This profile on Charles Taylor was published in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election. In the age of COVID, I think it’s even more relevant than ever.

In Taylor’s view, cool disengagement is a fiction; an ardent search for goodness is the human reality. “We all seek a sense of what it would be like to be fully connected to something. We all have a sense of what really living, and not just existing, would be.”

Because of our giant leap backwards into something that feels, day in and out, like dystopia, that “sense” is now a historical one, and it’s clearer than ever. I, for one, can’t stop thinking about the past, about what could have been.... An impromptu, guilt-free party. The neighbors popping by to say hello. Travel. Spontaneity. Smiling in public. Laughter. Sex with a stranger. Live music. A happy, wasted day. Adventure.

Was all of that real? Was life really that good? And are things that bad now? Yes. Yes. Yes.

And it’s all self-inflicted. We’re doing this to ourselves and we don’t have to. The darkest thought of all is that we humans don’t want reality any more. It’s too scary, too unpredictable. We feel safer when we’re told to wear a mask, stay inside, stay away from others.

I know what I want, I keep telling myself. But do I really? Despite my best efforts, I too keep checking out, giving up. And God knows I know how to gaslight myself. So now I’m asking myself:

How do I know that I want to be free? How free do I want to be? How much do I care about this experiment called democracy? And is it worth my whole entire life?

Read. Read diverse opinions and alternative perspectives. Read to expand your worldview and challenge your assumptions.

This stuff is SO obvious it feels borderline condescending. (Didn’t we all learn this in primary school?) But I guess the reminder is important since the web works against our best efforts with this stuff.

Optimistic and enthusiastic writing from (go figure!) an undergrad.

This stuff makes my head spin. I just left a long comment on another anti-Facebook article.

Basically: I couldn’t care less about how Facebook moderates itself. And I think it’s embarrassing that the employees there get so hot and bothered about individual posts, although I guess it makes them feel better about themselves and the work they do. I’m more disappointed in the journalists who are missing the real story.

We need more complexity and nuance in these discussions. Facebook is harmful in a very specific way that almost nobody is talking about.

“There must be a better way.”

Hilarious, weird, edgy, smart. This is one of my all time favorite short stories. I was twenty-one when it appeared in The New Yorker, almost thirteen years ago.

For a while, I couldn’t track it down. But this morning, randomly, the title (Magda Mandela) came back to me in a flash. Funny how memory works! I get so stoked when this happens.

Enjoy! 😉

A president who dispenses with the pen inevitably takes up the club.

Thrilling and thoughtful. A look at our changing, intensifying weather from the same author who wrote that great one about the Pinkertons

👾👽👾

Aiight. Let’s roll. Three cheers to sci fi for pointing the way!

Wow. Inspiring. The writing and the adventure. Beautiful. 10.

Uncanny resemblance to my pre-COVID adventures.

“It’s not real.”

“We need to change things.”

Smart words, clearly written, from @benwerd. Let's not panic, but let's be ready for anything... and keep reading!

The crazy part about Russian "interference" is that all they need to do is make lots of people (dem, repubs, and the other 60% of the country that won't even vote) really confused about the results of the election. If it happens, it'll be so weird and horrifying. Given how constantly confused we are about everything right now, none of this seems far-fetched to me.

Facebook, Twitter, and a small handful of BUMMER companies (I'm borrowing Jaron Lanier's acronym - Bummer: "Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent.”) are putting democracy in the USA at risk. Russia doesn't even have to break any laws or rules to use these platforms to spread confusion. It's quite easy. I would imagine that it's also a fun project to be working on, but that requires a huge leap of my imagination, a la:

I am born and raised in Russia // I grew up with cold winters and food shortages // I'm an excellent coder and I worked my way up to an intelligence position with the government where I'm paid to kick it with an extremely smart group of hackers, drink vodka, and figure out ways to use social media to fuck up the US election.

Beyond thrilling. I'd probably want to be put on the Twitter-infiltrating team, because that's where the media hangs out and where the biggest, most influential narratives are shaped.

The craziest part of this, to me, is the way that Facebook and Twitter make people nuts (specifically: angry, confused) even without Russian interference. (I'm stifling an "lol" because man this is all so crazy!) Like, the entire Russian strategy might literally just be: enhance the effect that Twitter is having on society. And global order really does hang in the balance, but it's hard to see on a day to day basis. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. At least that's been my experience. Anyway: The best way to counter Russian interference is to get everyone on Readup!

I watched some of the Chris Wallace interview. I think Trump's brain is actually quite easily hackable and being hacked, by one real echo-chamber (his human surroundings) and a bunch of virtual ones, some of which are owned by Russia. His addiction to Twitter, so prominently on display, is going to be a fascination to future generations. It will only make sense given the context: The media industry itself is also addicted to Twitter.

As trust in literally everything (institutions, science, data, journalism, social media) continues to plummet, society will increasingly recognize and reward the value that readers create for the world. Readers are the best bet there is right now.

Upvote.

Go, Andrew, go!

Yes! You are what you pay attention to.

As I write this comment, I have a choice to make: I can spend 45 minutes writing it, or I can spend just 5 minutes. Or 5 seconds. In turn, you, reader, can ignore it, or spend 1 minute reading it, or you can read and re-read it and meditate on it for much longer. There’s really no upper limit. We make these choices day in and day out, but without nearly enough intentionality.

Sometimes I look at one line from a poem for hours. It’s because the words are worth it. And because I can feel the depth of meaning. I can feel that the poet, in turn, put so much time and thought (meaning: attention) into it. And I want to explore every single decision, down to the punctuation marks, in detail, because I know that each decision was considered with great attention.

Attention = thought x time = life

When you tell someone “pay attention to what you pay attention to” you are actually saying “have a good life.”

Readup is interesting because for the first time ever we have a chance to see what other people are paying attention to. There’s no other platform on the web that does that. The result is a profoundly special community.

Man, this was extremely inspiring. I read it this morning and spent a lot of the day thinking about how awesome the Lilith Fair must have been. Sarah McLachlan is a legend.

Looks like this whole thing is getting the Werner Herzog treatment: Family Romance, LLC

This is still one of my favorite articles of all time on Readup.

Yes.

Except this:

Still, to admit to liking poetry is faintly embarrassing.

No. Not that.

But everything else — yes

What a surprise delight!! High satire from the olden days, written by the original king of word-comedy in the USA, Mark Twain. I giggled from beginning to end of this one.

Basically, Mark Twain takes a huge dump on James Fenimore Cooper. It’s so damn funny because it’s thoughtful and meticulously written. (You don’t need to know anything about Twain or Cooper to enjoy this.)

Three cheers. These days, we frown on “harsh burns” - for good reason - but it’s nice to imagine Cooper responding with ink/parchment, something like: ”Twain my dude, what an EPIC roast. Miss you bud. Kisses -Coop”

Excellent!

Yikes. It feels so weird to be rooting for democracy, but that’s where we are right now.

Lol, whoaaaa. Remember when days of the week were a thing?!

This feels so so ancient yet it’s so so not.

This is confusing and jarring on many levels.

Why isn't the fight against COVID a humanity-wide, global effort? That shocks me. It's hard for me to even think about the political warfare happening underneath that larger, bigger human failure.

If I was the president of any nation on Earth right now I would absolutely have hackers working day and night to get as much medical and scientific information as possible by any means necessary in order to save lives and prevent ongoing calamity. (Isn't every country in the world currently doing this?)

Also: Twitter got hacked to shit today. Oops :P That's a bigger story.

🤯