In the paper “Personal Style and Artistic Style”, Nick Riggle tries to get to the bottom of the contradiction in how we think about style: Is having style something admirable or something trivial that people shouldn’t waste their time on? People by and large seem to see it both ways. It helps to get more concrete about what, exactly, style is. Riggle takes style to be those things we choose about how we act and present ourselves in service of the kind of person we aspire to.

Notes on The Doodle Revolution by Sunni Brown (Amazon). You have to get out of your head and into your body to think. The seemingly small act of using our hands to create something not only gets us reliably unstuck but also changes the way we look at and understand the world. It harnesses and directs some of the energy that would either be dispersed or made aimless through fidgeting or daydreaming, and the movement of the pen across paper or the marker across the whiteboard discernibly anchors the learner into the present moment.

Dave here. The newsletter has been quiet, but behind the scenes at The Marginalia Club we were flooded with so much good stuff that it was hard to decide what to share with y’all. In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell points the finger to social media for infilitrating our leisure time with market thinking. […] when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.

Michael sat down at his desk, pulled out his new phone, and turned to me with a grin. I work in software; gadget love among my peers isn’t unusual. But this phone was a chunky, off-brand Android–hardly the latest and greatest. Over the weekend, Michael’s three-year old had thrown his iPhone in the toilet. He was in no mood to pay out of pocket for a straight-up replacement and resolved instead to make do with the cheapest phone he could find.

Software was my fallback plan after I decided to leave physics. I knew that I was going to have a lot to learn about writing code; I had no idea that there was so much to learn about teamwork and culture. These are some of the resources that have helped me find deeper satisfaction in my working relationships. Debugging Teams, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman. Companies use software to make their business processes more efficient.

Software is about people and the jobs they need to do. It may look like it’s about things like algorithms, databases, and network protocols (which certainly are all relevant), but software developers' primary responsibility is making a system of people and their jobs more successful. Writing code may be the means, but code must be fit for use and actually be used to have any value. Everyone sees the universal kinds of applications like spreadsheets, word processors, and web browsers.

I’m headed to Boston to attend the Tufte seminar tomorrow. It’s been nearly fifteen years since I bought — and devoured — The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Even if there’s nothing new in the seminar beyond what I’ve already learned from the four books, I’m excited to see one of my heroes live. Over the past few weeks, I devoured the three extant Wayfarers novels by Becky Chambers: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Records of a Spaceborne Few.

Having taken away the traditional means of measuring ad effectiveness with Intelligent Tracking Protection, the Safari team is now offering an alternative in “Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution For the Web” (emphasis mine). Online ads and measurement of their effectiveness do not require Site A, where you clicked an ad, to learn that you purchased something on Site B. The only data needed for measurement is that someone who clicked an ad on Site A made a purchase on Site B.

I’m most comfortable hammering out posts of five hundred or so words. That’s enough space to share an interesting link or suggest a connection between things, but not to develop ideas that feel like my own. Yet when I try to write at greater length, I get stuck in a vicious cycle of self-criticism and rewriting tangential paragraphs. Writing has been a big part of my identity since I learned to read and so the frustration of pushing out of my comfort zone ends up also threatening my sense of self.

I recently finished Agnes Callard’s Aspiration, in which she examines the kind of practical reasoning we do in service of acquiring new values. The aspirant’s idea of the goodness of her end is characterized by a distinctive kind of vagueness, one she experiences as defective and in need of remedy. She is not satisfied with her own conception of the end and does not feel that arriving at the correct conception is simply a matter of waiting.