Some gems from 2019;

• Christopher W. Shaw: The People Vs. the Banks (laphamsquarterly.org)
• Ben Hunt: The Long Now, Pt. 2 - Make, Protect, Teach (epsilontheory.com)
• Francis Fukuyama: Against Identity Politics (foreignaffairs.com)
• Scott Alexander: Meditations on Moloch (slatestarcodex.com)
• Antonio Prohias: SPY vs SPY (comic book, pdf)

• A quote from Ira Glass (public radio);

  “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Leo Widrich: I coached 101 CEOs, founders, VCs and other executives in 2019: These are the biggest takeaways (leowid.com)

Whether it’s fear, anger or hurt, what I started to practice with my clients is to let these things come and as they come, notice how they don’t want to stick around if we really agree to them:

• The sadness wants to become tears and flow and become tender thereafter
• The anger wants to punch, ball hands into fists and then fizzle out through the arms and legs
• The loneliness wants attention, to be held, embraced and just sat with.
• The fear wants to be felt, receive attention and permission to flow through the body, only to leave a trail of energy and aliveness behind.

They just want to be felt, heard, acknowledged and then move on.

“I dreamed there was an island that rose up from the sea and everybody on the island was somebody from TV and there was a beautiful view but nobody could see cause everybody on the island was saying: Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”

• Language is a Virus, Laurie Anderson (1986)

Paul Bloom: The Lure of Luxury

“Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?” The answer is no: if you grind up a product called Canned Turkey & Chicken Formula for Puppies/Active Dogs in a food processor and garnish it with parsley, people cannot reliably distinguish it from pork liver pâté.

Niall Ferguson: A message to all professional thinkers – we either hang together or we hang separately (bostonglobe.com)

Aral Balkan: The Nature of the Self in the Digital Age (ar.al)

An anonymous quote from the internet;

It has already been stated that the universe is not what you think it is in the absence of an observer. This argument can be brought closer to home when applied to length, breadth, width and time – in other words your entire three or four dimensional reality.

Ask yourself what is space, distance and time and do these things exist independently of your human mind? Some of the comments have hinted at interdimensional aspects being a possibility. This is not only a possibility but these “dimensions” are the rungs the ladder you need to climb in order comprehend the true nature of things.

The next logical question most likely is why you are not aware of this and what is blocking your perception? The answer (although counter-intuitive) is thought. Your everyday incessant thoughts are preventing you from an awareness of your very own existence in these “higher” dimensions where other lifeforms function.

It is imperative that you learn to become “the observer” of your thoughts. These thoughts are not you, they are transient, your emotions are not you, they too are transient, but the observer of both of these is YOU. Your daily contemplation of this fact will cause a phase-shift in your consciousness and it will allow you to understand the illusory ego which has held humanity back for so long.

Your purpose now is make the opportunity to quell all these thoughts and greatly increase your awareness of that which precedes thought. This is a very important practice and some of you will be further up the rungs of the ladder than others but every one of you is capable of this and physical disabilities are no obstacle in the process.

There is a wealth of knowledge to be attained as you will come to realize and you will be following in the footsteps of people like Einstein, Tesla and others who developed this ability.

“If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said ”We’re publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it’s illegal, we’ll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don’t touch it.“ It’s like the phone company. If I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn’t get in trouble. But the moment they started taking stuff down that wasn’t illegal because somebody screamed, they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier. And now all of a sudden they’ve taken on a liability. They’re sliding down this slippery slope into ruin, where the left wants them to take down the right, the right wants them to take down the left, and now they have no more friends, they have no allies. Traditionally the libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they won’t. So my guess is, as soon as Congress (this day is coming if not already here…)… the day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman. They’re literally picking, and they have the power to pick, so they will be controlled by the government.”

• Naval Ravikant, Angel Investor, co-maintainer of AngelList

Morgan Housel: Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World (collaborativefund.com)

Find something that’s important to you in 2019 – social, political, economic, whatever – and with a little effort you can trace the roots of its importance back to World War II. There are so few exceptions to this rule it’s astounding. … The three big ones that stick out are demographics, inequality, and access to information. There are hundreds of forces shaping the world not mentioned here. But I’d argue that many, even most, are derivatives of those three.

“It’s funny that tech companies are always complaining about diversity. There’s not enough women in tech, not enough black people in tech. You know, the fact is, there is plenty of diversity out there. The problem is that they’re not immigrants who you can control and underpay.”

• Patrick Shu, ex-Google/ex-Facebook Tech Lead

Christopher W. Shaw: The People Vs. the Banks (laphamsquarterly.org)

In November 1932, the American Bankers Association Journal imagined apprehensively, “At this moment, tucked away in pigeonholes and desk drawers, or existing solely as hunches, are hundreds of plans for restoring prosperity tomorrow morning by the simple method of hampering the operation of banks.” Such plans commonly sought to inaugurate a publicly controlled, service-oriented banking system. “Banks should be controlled and operated by states and national government,” proposed a Chicago Defender reader in Detroit who held bankers responsible for “having brought poverty and misery to thrifty American citizens.” A Texan submitted that Congress “should cancel the present banking charters and create national banks, not allowing any individual to own a dollar of bank stock.” And a Norwegian American farmer in Ada County, Idaho, suggested that “interest or usury for private profit should be forever prohibited under penalty of life imprisonment.”

“All this time trying to subjugate the humans and all I had to do was charge them for it.”

• Invader Zim

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

• George S. Patton

Andreas Antonopoulos: Money as a System of Control

An anonymous quote from the internet;

Generally speaking, the way to buy a soul is to offer convenience. It doesn’t even have to be major.

The Economist: How the World Will Change as Computers Spread into Everyday Objects (theeconomist.com)

The cheaper models in Tesla’s line-up have parts of their batteries disabled by the car’s software in order to limit their range. At the tap of a keyboard in Palo Alto, the firm was able to remove those restrictions and give drivers temporary access to the full power of their batteries. … John Deere, an American maker of high-tech tractors, has been embroiled in a row over software restrictions that prevent its customers from repairing their tractors themselves. And since software is not sold but licensed, the firm has even argued that, in some circumstances, a tractor-buyer may not be buying a product at all, instead receiving only a licence to operate it. … For much of the internet the business model is to offer “free” services that are paid for with valuable and intimate user data, collected with consent that is half-informed at best. That is true of the Internet of Things as well.

“May the bridges I burn light the way.”

• a box of matches

Ben Hunt: The Long Now, Pt. 2 - Make, Protect, Teach (epsilontheory.com)

Romanian politics in the 1930s was a classic widening gyre, spread out over a decade, and policy followed the classic Long Now formula – more and more economic stimulus, more and more political fear-mongering. This was true of the fascists, for sure. IT WAS ALSO TRUE OF THE LIBERALS.

By February 1938, when King Carol II dissolved the parliament, nothing mattered anymore in Romanian politics. There was no “truth”. There was only narrative. There was only spectacle. There was only the naked exercise of power and the celebration of that naked exercise of power. You didn’t just seize control. You seized control, and then you threw yourself a big parade for doing it. This was true of the fascists, for sure. IT WAS ALSO TRUE OF THE LIBERALS.

That’s the kicker of Rhinoceros. It wasn’t just the bad guys who turned. It was everyone.

• Rhinoceros (play) (wikipedia.com)

Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis: How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper (dailymaverick.co.za)

• Miya Tokumitsu: Tell Me Its Going to be OK (thebaffler.com)

Feeling blue? Why not scroll through some non-challenging four-line poems and a pleasing table setting?

• Arthur Schopenhauer: Paradise Lost (laphamsquarterly.org)

A happy life is impossible, the highest thing that man can aspire to is a heroic life; such as a man lives, who is always fighting against unequal odds for the good of others; and wins in the end without any thanks. After the battle is over, he stands like the Prince in the re corvo of Gozzi, with dignity and nobility in his eyes, but turned to stone. His memory remains, and will be reverenced as a hero’s; his will, that has been mortified all his life by toiling and struggling, by evil payment and ingratitude, is absorbed into Nirvana.

unOrdinary - Prologue (webtoons.com)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (medium.com)

Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights. … Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meeting, academic conferences, and polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere. And asymmetry is present in about everything.

Maxwell Maltz, M.D., F.I.C.S: The New Psycho-Cybernetics (book, pdf)

I’m not sure where this quote is from, but it sparked my interest in the author.

Second, everything written, said, recorded or taught about selfimprovement since Maltz wrote has derived from his work. Try and find any book on success or self-improvement written since 1960, right through to yesterday, that does not include a discussion of selfimage and the techniques for improving and managing it-notably including visualization, mental rehearsal, and relaxation-and you’ll realize how crucial the work of Maltz still is.

Francis Fukuyama: Against Identity Politics (foreignaffairs.com)

Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure. Unless such liberal democracies can work their way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, they will doom themselves—and the world—to continuing conflict. … Governments and civil society groups must focus on integrating smaller groups into larger wholes. Democracies need to promote what political scientists call “creedal national identities,” which are built not around shared personal characteristics, lived experiences, historical ties, or religious convictions but rather around core values and beliefs. The idea is to encourage citizens to identify with their countries’ foundational ideals and use public policies to deliberately assimilate newcomers.

David Streitfeld: Paging Big Brother: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite (nytimes.com)

“The marketplace of ideas is now at risk for serious if not irreparable damage because of the unprecedented dominance of a very small number of technology platforms,” the report concluded.

Fun fact: I have been called Master since the age of 1.

“The enemy knows how to bring things in our way to discourage us and make us give up. But I am here to tell you don’t give up because the sun will shine brightly for you. Just see everyday as an opportunity to achieve greatness. In the end you will win.”

• Aunt Blossom

Jose A. Del Real and Julie Turkewitz: Should the Electoral College Be Eliminated? 15 States Are Trying to Make It Obsolete (nytimes.com)

NSA: How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash (groups.csail.mit.edu)

• Bitcoin - Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008
• HashCash - Adam Back, 1997
• Cryptocurrency - NSA, 1996

• A quote from Ira Glass (public radio);

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

“A Man that steps aside from the World, and hath leisure to observe it without Interest or Design, thinks all Mankind as mad as they think him.”

• Lord Halifax (1633-95).

Nathanial Gronewold: World’s Largest Nuclear Fusion Experiment Clears Milestone (scientificamerican.com)

xkcd: 137: Dreams (xkcd.com)

When did we forget our dreams?

Logic Magazine: Disruption: A Manifesto (logicmag.io)

The best minds of our generation are either curing cancer, or building a slightly faster way to buy weed.

Henry Freedland: Hell Breaks Loose (laphamsquartly.org)

“The way to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell.”

• F. Nietzsche

• JoAnna Klein: Could This Be the End of Frankincense? (nytimes.com)
• Antonio Prohias: SPY vs SPY (comic book, pdf)

“Antonio Prohias is a famous Cuban artist who defied the censorship of the Castro regime with anti-Communist cartoons – until he was forced to flee Havana with his life. Now, he graces MAD with his cartoon sequence of friendly rivalry called– SPY vs SPY.”

• MAD Magazine

• [[https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/05/kings_university_breached_gdpr_by_sharing_list_of_activist_students_with_cops/][Kat Hall: King’s College London breached GDPR by sharing list of activist students with

cops]] (theregister.com)

“We’ve taken their details from our card security which does not have DoB. I would have to go to student services which would raise flags and cause chatter so would rather not as this is a sensitive around student freedosm!!! [sic]”

• King’s College London

• David Wootton: The Impossible Dream (laphamsquarterly.org)

“The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.”

• Aldous Huxley

r/INTP

Aren’t all INTPs just ENTP online?

Angus Reid Institute: A Portrait of Social Isolation and Loneliness in Canada today (angusreid.org)

Robin Linus: webkay (robinlinus.com)

• An anonymous quote from the internet;

Google is not a search engine. It is a memory upgrade, and anybody who tries to write software with a standard human memory is obsolete.

• A quote from Marc Brooker (Amazon Web Services);

“I’ve been doing this stuff for 15 years in one way or another, and still feel like I’m scratching the surface. Don’t feel bad about others knowing things you don’t. It’s an opportunity, not a threat.”

• Matt Stoller: The Wave of Terror in American Commerce (mattstoller.substack.com)

And remember, the people I’ve mentioned are relatively powerful - CEOs of companies, venture capitalists, farmers who own their own land, unionized workers, etc. Just go down the line and think about what it’s like for those without property or power.

• The Economist: China’s grand, gloomy sci-fi is going global (theeconomist.com)

An anonymous quote from the internet, regarding haveibeenpwned.com;

For context, I’ve sold a business, been a full time entrepreneur for about 16 years, got it wrong many times and am currently the founder/CEO of a biz with a team of around 40 people, strong cashflow and we continue to grow and innovate - and we’re founder controlled.

I met with Troy briefly for coffee about 8 to 12 months ago and we chatted a bit about this. I sensed his aversion to growing the biz back then. Seemed like he’d made up his mind. This post from him reinforces that. Even so I feel compelled to post a few thoughts.

Troy is an implementer. I was too. I was a dev guy who started as an ops guy. I really really wanted to build a business and for over a decade I tried to do it myself by writing my own code, doing my own ops, doing my own marketing and so on. It was very very hard, and after many failures and almost financially ruining me, I got to a place where I have an amazing biz and amazing team and I’ve turned myself into an exec who is no longer doing the day to day implementation, but is leading and coordinating.

This transition is very hard to make for folks like most of the people here - including myself. You have the sense that it’s all on you. I need to repeat that in caps because that’s how it feels. IT’S ALL ON YOU. I think this deep sense of accountability is what makes great devs and great ops people very good at what they do. But it also is perhaps what leads to burnout.

For an entrepreneur, it really is all on you. That work isn’t going to do itself. And so that sense is even more visceral when you’re a one man show. Now imagine you’re running at the scale of HIBP. Pretty hardcore.

When I made the transition to being a leader and once I had a team behind me, the feeling was a bit like I’d imagine one might feel getting over a traumatic experience. It took a while. I felt like I could breathe again. I never wanted to go back to that place, if I have to be perfectly honest. It’s a rough gig.

I think the trouble here is that Troy thinks that scaling HIBP is going to be more of the same. More of everything being on him, more work, more implementation, more accountability, more more more!!!

It doesn’t work that way and I’m going to use my own path to growing a team (and regaining my sanity) to describe how it actually does (and can) work.

If one were to not sell HIBP and not raise money but instead grow it yourself into a business, it might work thusly:

1. Immediately work on developing strong cashflow for HIBP. Unfortunately this step is going to take some implementing from Troy. However, with good planning, you can probably hire some help and perhaps even do so in exchange for equity/options if you hire a good lawyer and can structure a cost effective deal. This stage is critical and I’d encourage Troy to get as much advice from other seasoned entrepreneurs as possible. Not folks who have raised VC, but who have actually created cashflow out of thin air. It’s a dark art, but many of us know how to do exactly that.
2. Once you launch, it will take a while for the full revenue potential of the business to reveal itself. Cashflow takes a while to kick in and you will take a while to optimize it. e.g. many simply won’t know that HIBP now has a paid option. That will take months, perhaps longer. So keep working and wait it out. I’ve seen this in every single successful cash generating biz I’ve created. At first it’s a trickle, then a stream, then a river, then a wonderful fun and exciting deluge.
3. Once you can demonstrate that the biz is clearly going to grow into something with strong cashflow, you can start making your first hires. I would suggest hiring dev first. At this point you are going to have to do something very difficult. Step back from the coal face and trust your first employee. This was huge for me but thanks to Harvard Biz Review etc writing about this founder dilemma over and over, I was primed and I wasn’t going to be the baker that can’t get out of the kitchen. So I 100% delegated the job to an amazing person who remains with our team to this day. Once I could hire for ops, did the same. Rinse, repeat. Grow the team.
4. As your expenditures increase, you will need to be very good at managing cashflow. That is because at some point growth will pause. When that happens, if you don’t realize that you will run out of money in X months, it will sneak up on you and you will lose the business. It happens every week around the world. Execs take their eye off the cashflow for a few months and byeeeee. Not everyone has the appetite for finance. Some are mildly or even severely allergic. I’m on that spectrum and thankfully my co-founder has a passion for it and happens to be very good at it. This has literally saved our asses and we too went through that growth pause. So if you are allergic, find someone who isn’t. This is critical.

Once you do the above, if you build a team you can trust and you are very good at stepping back, finding and motivating talented people and carefully guiding the direction of the biz, things can get weird. You’ll see a lot of executives talking about burnout, about how they work 20 hour days and the pressures of being a leader etc. But in your case you’ll find that you have more free time and more mental bandwidth to shape the direction of the biz. You’ll wake up one morning not sure what to do because you won’t have a job anymore. You will have fired yourself from dev, ops, customer service, finance, HR, marketing, blogging and everything else. You’ll go “oh shit, what am I supposed to do?”

The answer to this question is really fun: Whatever you and the business want to do. And guess what? You have a CEO who is the company founder and has a ton of energy and bandwidth to continue innovating.

That’s pretty much the end of this post. I want to add a few more notes:

Delegating is hard for several reasons: If you’re a dev and you have to delegate dev, you need to realize there are developers out there that are better than you and you will need to learn to trust them. You also need to understand that you’re firing yourself from a job you are passionate about - a job you have loved and gotten very good at for many years. This is tough.

To scale a biz, you need to continue to delegate, even the things you love doing. Troy loves blogging and he writes epic tomes. But this too will need to be delegated if he wants to run at maximum effectiveness. I know. I did this. It was very hard. But I now have about 5+ writers in our organization and it’s freed me up to launch a video podcast which I am already beginning to delegate to a certain extent.

VC is certainly an option, but know that each round you raise will also raise the bar on what success means. Right now you own the biz and success means a team that frees you up and cashflow that pays everyone better than market rate salaries. After the first round, a $20MM exit will be the definition of success. After a B and then C round north of $100MM will become success. And so it goes.

I’d also like to note that HIBP has built an incredible brand and growth. This is very hard to do. As Naval put it in a conversation I had with him not too long ago, it’s lightning in a bottle, and I truly think that HIBP is a great example of lightning in a bottle. This won’t happen again in Troy’s lifetime. And what he has right now makes it very easy to: recruit, hire, retain, get help from other entrepreneurs, find customers, convince them to sign up, convince them to pay, get them to continue to pay, etc. The list of benefits is long. This kind of biz and brand is very hard to create. Troy’s personal reputation is sterling and he’s one hell of a nice guy. He is young, smart, healthy, well spoken. Seriously, you don’t see this very often and it won’t happen again, so choose your path wisely if you’re reading this Troy.

And finally - and this is really why I’m writing this as a reply to onli’s post - because I agree with their sentiment. Have no illusions that once you sell, you ’exit’ in a very real sense. You are no longer the owner of the business. You are an employee. I’ll also add that M&A folks are VERY good at selling the dream. I was recently at a certain multi-billion dollar company’s offices who were trying to buy us. Their offices are based on Lake Washington up here in the Pacific Northwest. The M&A guy actually suggested that once we join their team we can ride to work in our boat. But in his defense, that’s his job. Sell the dream. However, in this case I know the reality because I’ve been here before. Monday morning after you sell your company you will commute to work in a car, sit in a cubicle or office if you’re lucky and you will do what you’re told to do by the new owners of your business.

You will stare through those bars longing to roam the great plains once again as a free and wild creature in control of your own destiny. Or as Bodhizafa said in the final scene of the original Point Break: You know I can’t handle a cage man!

Paul Craig Roberts: Western Supremacy Is On Its Way Out (paulcraigroberts.org)

Alex Boutilier: Facebook refuses to remove false content during Canadian election (thestar.com)

Chris Martenson: They’ve Stolen Our Future! (peakprosperity.com)

[Federal Reserve], tell us please, if you are as successful over the next 100 years as you have been over the past 100, what sort of world do your models indicate for us?

• play.date (play.date)
• Starlink (starlink.com)

Michael Lee Stallard: America’s loneliness epidemic: A hidden systemic risk to organizations (smartbrief.com)

“Our failures as a profession are the failures of individualism, the result of competitive medicine. It must be done by collective effort.”

• Will Mayo

xkcd: 1732: Earth’s Temperature Timeline (xkcd.com)

Scott Alexander: Meditations on Moloch (slatestarcodex.com)

Andrew Leonard: Amazon Has Gone from Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

Jason Daley: Scientists Played Music to Cheese as It Aged. Hip-Hop Produced the Funkiest Flavor (smithsonianmag.com)

• Edsger W. Dijkstra (computer science) once said;

Let me try to explain to you, what to my taste is characteristic for all intelligent thinking. It is, that one is willing to study in depth an aspect of one’s subject matter in isolation for the sake of its own consistency, all the time knowing that one is occupying oneself only with one of the aspects. We know that a program must be correct and we can study it from that viewpoint only; we also know that it should be efficient and we can study its efficiency on another day, so to speak. In another mood we may ask ourselves whether, and if so: why, the program is desirable. But nothing is gained—on the contrary!—by tackling these various aspects simultaneously. It is what I sometimes have called ‘the separation of concerns’, which, even if not perfectly possible, is yet the only available technique for effective ordering of one’s thoughts, that I know of. This is what I mean by ‘focusing one’s attention upon some aspect’: it does not mean ignoring the other aspects, it is just doing justice to the fact that from this aspect’s point of view, the other is irrelevant. It is being one- and multiple-track minded simultaneously.

• Surveillance Self-Defense (ssd.eff.org)
• Jim Edwards: ’This is not a threat’: Facebook denies it would have pulled investment from Europe and Canada if demands were not met (businessinsider.com)
• “Silence is god; eloquence is silver.” - Chinese proverb
• Zat Rana: The Most Important Skill Nobody Taught You (medium.com)

• (Excerpt) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV George Gordon Byron, c. 1818

CLXXVII Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair Spirit for my minister, That I might all forget the human race, And, hating no one, love but only her! Ye elements! – in whose enobling stir I feel myself exalted – Can ye not Accord me such a being? Do I err In deeming such inhabit many a spot? Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.

CLXXVIII There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

CLXXIX Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin – his control Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own, When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.

CLXXX His steps are not upon thy paths, – thy fields Are not a spoil for him – thou dost arise And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise, Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, And send’st him shivering in thy playful spray And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth: – there let him lay.

CLXXXI The armaments which thunderstrike the walls Of rock-built cities. bidding nations quake, And monarchs tremble in their capitals, The oak leviathons, whose huge ribs make Their clay creator the vain title take Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war – These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada’s pride or spoils of Trafalgar.

CLXXXII Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee – Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? Thy waters wash’d them power while they were free, And many a tyrant since; their shores obey The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay Has dried up realms to deserts: – not so thou; – Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves’ play, Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow: Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

• Invictus William Earnest Henley, c. 1875

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

David Lazarus: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry (latimes.com)

Troy Hunt: The 773 Million Record “Collection #1” Data Breach (troyhunt.com)

• Dan Charles: Scientists Have ’Hacked Photosynthesis’ In Search Of More Productive Crops (npr.org)
• Alan S. Brown: Teaching Me Softly (nautil.us)

“The effectiveness of the first grade teacher’s instructions was obscured by the fact that the object of the instruction (to learn) had little to do with the content of the instruction (to sit). But this is often the case. ”