Love work, loathe mastery over others, and avoid intimacy with the government. Pirkei Avot 1:10

My first email account was a VAX account and I used it to email exactly two people. 1) A very cute boy from MIT and 2) my professor for Newton to Einstein: The Trail of Light.

Because no one else had email yet.

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct... All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." Orwell, 1984

In the Middle Ages violating sanctuary by, say, killing Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, would get you excommunicated, or executed, or (at the very least) fined.

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

Using a podcast with urban planner Alain Bertaud as a starting point, I explore similarities between housing regulations that restrict building (and repurposing) and limits on the Smithian "extent of the market"—and therefore the division of labour and our ability to solve problems of/in cities.

It is very odd watching Episcopalians suddenly taking political heat. My decision to reread Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, rewatch the Tudors, and run a reading group on Shakespeare's plays was supposed to distract me from contemporary politics, not mirror it! But there you go...

We need a word for the moment when a metaphor turns out to be just plain facts.