Manan's notes

202407140801 Weekly update, Week 29

What I thought about this week

I spent some time at the Art Institute of Chicago and wrote about Artwork I like.

What I read this week

  • Finished Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. I quite enjoyed this book; it was simultaneously harrowing and entertaining. I would highly recommend it if you want to learn more about how fucked up the American carceral system is, but would also enjoy reading a sleek, sexy cross of The Hunger Games and Gladiator. If you're bored after reading the first part, it gets better.
  • Started reading Martyr, by Kaveh Akbar. I've only read about 20 pages so far, but I love this book already. It's clear the author is a poet: almost every word of the book feels precise, warm, and elegant. All Cyrus (the main character of the book) has done so far is think about his ideal life, try to live it, and mostly fail miserably, which is right up my alley. I can tell this will be a good one — I'm excited to share more about this soon.
  • why you should write more - by Ava - bookbear express. I'd suggest this post to everyone who's considering sharing their thoughts on the internet but isn't fully convinced. This seems to be key: writing helps people find you, and helps you find other people.
  • Entering text in the terminal is complicated. Interesting, lightly written, and informative, like all of Julia's work. If you've ever tried to press the left-arrow key in a terminal and got a weird string like ^[[D printed out, this one's for you.

Other Cool links

  • I wrote about My "I'm feeling ducky" workflow. Check this out if you like the idea of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" and hate spending an extra five seconds and an unnecessary click on Google searches where 95+% of the time you're just clicking on the first link. As an example, this lets me do things like press option+space, type "martyr goodreads", press enter, and immediately get taken to Martyr's Goodreads page.
  • https://www.sfzoo.watch/. I did not know that the SF Zoo has so many issues. Full-disclosure: I haven't been yet, but after reading this page, I'm not sure I want to.
  • Video showing the shooter crawling into position while folks point him out to law enforcement at Trump rally : interestingasfuck. You might have already seen this, but it is wild to me that an almost-presidential-assassin had an audience of dozens of people for several minutes and law enforcement did nothing.
  • McCleskey_v._Kemp. In this case, the Supreme Court determined that a statistically-supported argument for racial disparity in application of the death penalty was not enough to overturn the conviction without showing a "racially discriminatory purpose." It's been named one of the worst Supreme Court decisions since World War II; a prominent journalist at the time argued that the decision "effectively condoned the expression of racism in a profound aspect of our law."
  • https://www.dinnersapp.com/. "Tinder for recipes". I haven't tried it yet, but it seems like a cool app.
  • How to Lie using Visual Proofs. The latest 3Blue1Brown masterpiece I consumed. Contains some fun "proofs" that π = 4 and all triangles are isosceles.