JBL party speaker in Jackson, Michigan. Spotted for @reckless.bsky.social in wild vintage shop. Lights in full effect, good sound filling the whole store.

From 1999 to 2011 I co-operated one of the internet's earliest literary magazines. I still don't know what to make of it. www.poormojo.org/cgi-bin/genn...

Building a newspaper from scratch in the last ten years has been a challenge. Most local newspapers inherit a century of ad contracts. We’ve had to prove ourselves, as well as benefit from Facebook’s collapse. A full page hospital ad, and two banks vying for our readers business, is a real success.

Every week, love picking up this physical newspaper to deliver to our readers.

Memorial Day Parade coming.

The first president of the University of Michigan was Henry Tappan, and he wrote this in his book on the theory of University Education. He believed the only proper university was fully stocked with books and professors and equipment, and with a spirit of free inquiry.

I am reminded that this famous quote, often misattributed to Lenin, was actually said by a string of American conservatives, most recently an investment banker named Borelli. They consistently refined the quote, and consistently put it in Lenin's mouth.

This chart is wild. About 96 teen girls in every 1000 had babies in the 1950s, and virtually all of them were married. Today it’s 17 out of 1000, and almost all are unmarried. But even in the 90s it was about 62!! Just wild. We’ve culturally narrowed the acceptable child rearing years. A lot.

Searching the archive. I love all my paperback title page plates, but putting my Doc Savage plates on the same page as my Nero Wolfe plates is sort of a tribute to my marriage. (Theindexpress.com is where I’m poetically reinterpreting the collection. I’m not mad about the world every second.)

I thought you be interested to see this. I got a collection of printing plates from a typesetter that handled mass market paperback books from the 60s through the 90s. (This image is reversed for readability).

Introducing THE NAME GAME! Issue 22 of The Index, a quarterly letterpress poetry experience. Like every issue, the title comes from an original mass market paperback plate from Jackson Typesetting. And it features original poetry and art, hand printed via letterpress. theindexpress.com/issue22/

Social media discourse is the exhausting exercise of endlessly and intentionally misreading one another. By automating the editorial process and atomizing the interlocutors these platforms structurally insist that we misread and misrepresent one another.

Will AI degrade your intellectual skills? Just look at what spellcheck has done to professional headline writers. Now imagine what happens when AI takes notes for your doctor. The danger isn’t that AI won’t work. The danger is that it will.

Fat Dracula Cat Thread!

The algo delivers the content you want to see.

This is algorithm logic. The algorithm makes editorial decisions by sorting all possible claims on a topic and presenting them to audiences to see which sells more shoes. And so we surface claims that no human editor could have imagined would find an audience. Which legitimizes the claim.

An important chart from this article. cepr.org/voxeu/column...

More people need to use and understand the word “asserted” because so many things in our popular discourse are actually just claims made with no evidence. “Discover” is definitionally impossible here.

He died.

So many people confuse arguing and fighting. Argument is a logical process for discovering truth. You can do it alone. Fighting is just a dominance struggle. It requires opponents. The internet sorts people on every dimension. Sorting people by who do and do not care about dominance is useful.

I was curious.

Have you been to America before?!

Thanks, Commuting Dog.

Mill owners confident new powered looms a good investment. Skilled weavers raise concerns about looms in workplace.

Steady on, McDonald’s. I hope no.

New poem dropped from my son.

It’s the open heart that always inspires me.

On my office wall, here on campus.

Probably not a thrilling topic, but I wonder if anyone has written about colorism amongst white people? Surely someone has?

I’m just reporting to @reckless.bsky.social an in the wild sighting of a JBL party speaker, playing salsa music for a line cook at the Fleetwood Diner in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It appears to be a Partybox 520. Kiss the baby!