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• Light Rail System Testing Beginning
• Airports Refuse to Show Kristi Noem Video (Including MSP)
• Demolition on the Nicollet Ave. Bridge Started Today One step closer to reopening Nicollet Ave.
• Trump Cancels Nation’s Largest Solar Project Ideology over everything else.

• What To Make of A Precarious State
• Designing Tech-Ready Spaces for Tomorrow’s Learning
• Chacha Land: The Dream and the Nightmare of Skiing in Georgia
• Last Week Tonight: Bari Weiss
• The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

• Stephen Miller Is Going for Broke "Violence is not the cause of Trump and Miller’s desire to use state power to crush their opposition. It is the pretext for which they transparently long."
• ‘A Precarious State’ skims the surface of our urban condition People keep sending me the video
• Is The Bread in Europe Better For You? I’ve been asking this question ever since our trip
• What Neuroscience Teaches Us About Reducing Phone Use A couple of simple tips

“The Minneapolis music scene has been adored by fans around the world. And many of the local Black artists — Prince, Jimmy Jam, Morris Day and the Time, Lizzo and others — who subsequently earned national acclaim were already staples on KMOJ before the world met them.”

Important article about KMOJ’s future in the startribune – I still believe radio matters and MSP has a strong culture of independent radio. I’ve been heartened to hear that The Current has been making progress towards their goal of 5,000 new subscribers, and I’m hopeful that KMOJ is successful in raising the funds they need to be a fixture of the Minneapolis music scene well into the future.

Fitting choice for the Oxford English word of the year. From The Guardian:

If you want to witness the last vestiges of human intellect swirling down the drain, hold your nose and type the words “skibidi toilet” into YouTube. The 11-second video features an animated human head protruding from a toilet bowl while singing the nonsensical lyrics “skibidi dop dop dop yes yes”. The clip has been viewed more than 215m times, and spawned hundreds of millions of references on TikTok and other social media.

Source: Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore | Siân Boyle | The Guardian

The collective action required to solve this problem is massive.

I wonder about this prediction, Writes, and Write-Nots. AI has had an enormous impact on student and professional lives already, and it is only likely to get more pervasive as it becomes more integrated into all the tools you are already using. Pretty soon, people will need to consciously choose tools that don’t include AI generation by default. Once it gets to that point we just accept that it is part of our lives and move on. Rarely do we consciously add the friction, the hard work back in.

“I’m usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won’t be many people who can write.”

I could certainly benefit from writing more, I actually do enjoy the process of writing, trying to explain my thoughts, but rarely find the focused time to do it.

Letters from an American, January 19, 2024

Great post here. I recommend subscribing to this newsletter if you haven’t already.