Ben Crowder

The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society, by Eleanor Janega, published 2023, history, 286 pages. An interesting book. Among other things, it makes a point which hadn’t occurred to me before, that what a society considers attractive typically correlates to what wealth gets you — light skin back in medieval times because you didn’t have to to work outside, nowadays a tan instead because you have leisure time for sunbathing or vacationing, etc. (I don’t think the…

Bryan Macomber’s teardown illustrations/animations of how things like mechanical pencils and retractable pens work. Very cool, love the style. Reminds of the explainers Bartosz Ciechanowski used to do. HellMood’s 16-byte Sierpinski triangle demo. Sixteen bytes! Derek Sivers on being a netizen. I’ve been online since 1991 and that same early ethos was instilled in me, too. I believe it makes for a better internet. Harry Roberts on the new No-Vary-Search browser cache control header. Ally…

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare, published 1600, play, 64 pages. A bit bonkers. Once again, Ovid shows up everywhere. (I had no idea to what degree until after I read the Metamorphoses and started recognizing the allusions in other books.) I’d forgotten, too, that Shakespeare borrowed from Pyramus and Thisbe not once but twice. The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, published 1610, play, 66 pages. This was the Shakespeare play I’d been looking forward to the most, because I’d…

I am so behind on these! Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam, by Brian VanDeMark, published 2018, history, 763 pages. Really liked it. It’s a history of Vietnam up until LBJ leaves office, including a bit at the beginning on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis (useful context for the early decisions both Kennedy and McNamara were making), looking in particular at the various cognitive blind spots that led smart people to make poor decisions throughout the…

Misha Glouberman on how worried we should be about climate change, based on what the studies actually say. This was hopeful. While we still ought to do everything we reasonably can to avoid making things worse, it’s good to know that current indicators don’t lead inexorably to a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Typographica Library’s specimen books of metal and wood type. Lovely. I occasionally dream of using some of these specimens as inspiration for new rough, wobbly fonts in the same vein as the…

Unimportant administrative note: I’ve imported the posts from my original blog back in 2001–2005, when the site was called the slate and, later, Blank Slate. (The posts were in a handful of PHP files I left behind and forgot about when I moved to Blogger in 2005. I stumbled across them recently while reorganizing my backups. While I was young and I don’t expect anyone to go back and read the posts, there’s some mild historical value so I figured it made sense to bring them into the fold.…

Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup (edited by David Wilson), published 1853, memoir, 292 pages. So. Good. With the thick sense of dread in the first part — knowing what’s coming — and the drive to escape later on, it felt a bit like a horror novel. Slavery: still inhumane, still unbearably evil. What a compelling and heartbreaking book. Highly recommended, along with The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. Foster, by Claire Keegan, published 2010, fiction, 34 pages. I normally try not to…

Dubliners, by James Joyce, published 1914, fiction, 249 pages. Alas, I didn’t like it. Sad and melancholy, which itself doesn’t bother me, but throughout I just couldn’t believe that Joyce had any love for his characters, or for humanity, and I have as little love for misanthropy as it has for me. Twenty-four years ago I read Portrait of the Artist and I believe I came away from it with a similar feeling. My interest in someday reading Ulysses has slipped beneath the waves. The Old Regime and…

Geoff Groberg’s MK1, a gorgeous, high-end, handcrafted MIDI keyboard. Those keys! I’m biased because Geoff is my friend and I’ve been to his workshop, but dang, it’s a thing of beauty. Several smart innovations, too. Peter Saint-Andre on pair reading. I’ve been doing a form of this for the last year and a half and have really enjoyed it. epub-merge, a tool I recently used to merge two EPUBs from Project Gutenberg. Worked great. Matt Glassman on proportional representation in the House of…

Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer, by Kathy Kleiman, published 2022, history, 276 pages. Though the prose is regrettably monotonous and wooden, and facts are sometimes inexplicably repeated after a few pages, it’s an important part of early computing history that I hadn’t learned about before and was overall worthwhile. (I’ll note here, by the way, that I’ve worked with many great female software engineers, and I firmly believe…

This may not last for long, but as of today I’ve fleshed out the now page with a list of the books I’m currently reading, as the present counterpart to the past of the reading log. Part of me still hesitates to make this public (probably because it’s often in flux and I add and abandon books with, um, abandon), but that part is taking a nap right now so here we are.Reply by email

Pleased to announce that I Will Give You Rest II is on the cover of the recently published BYU Studies volume 65 number 1: Also, Lincoln H. Blumell’s article Is Jesus’s Yoke “Easy”? is accompanied by both My Yoke Is Easy and (at the end) I Will Give You Rest IV.Reply by email

All’s Well That Ends Well, by William Shakespeare, published 1623, play, 89 pages. It’s based on a story from The Decameron and is one of Shakespeare’s comedies, so I probably don’t need to elaborate further because what follows is surely not a surprise, but I will nevertheless because I am that kind of person: meh. And now, with that stunningly explicatory elaboration taken care of, let’s move on. Desperate Remedies, by Thomas Hardy, published 1871, fiction, 538 pages. Quite liked it. Good…

Matthias on the importance of curating the web in the age of AI. I agree. (Thus these link posts.) Isaac Kolding on how reading is good for you and how it expands your effective freedom. I also enjoyed the post on inefficient books and very much agree. BDM on how sometimes books are hard to read. “Being easy to read is not the only virtue a book must possess to be enjoyable. If something is not easy to read, that is not a sign that the reader is stupid. Sometimes it is the knowledge that you…

Anya Kamenetz on how nothing is ever going back to normal, listing out some of what we’ll have to do to rebuild after we emerge from the superpower suicide the current administration is putting the country through. Found this hopeful and energizing. Matt Glassman on influencing politics (by talking with policymakers). Liked this. Rob Henderson on how he reads. Also see James Marriott’s similar post. I love these kinds of posts. L. M. Sacasas on reading as counter-practice. “By counter-practice,…

At Home in Mitford, by Jan Karon, published 1994, fiction, 517 pages. The first in the (fairly long) series. I read this for book club, and I’m glad I did. A cozy, small-town, heartwarming read, with a touch of mystery and romance. I especially enjoyed the religious angle (the main character is a rector). The Two Gentlemen of Verona, by William Shakespeare, published 1594, play, 68 pages. Possibly the first of Shakespeare’s plays. His comedies don’t appeal to me anywhere near as much as his…

For the next while (and for real this time), I will refrain from posting AI-related links. I’m heavily allergic to AI — sorry to blindside you with that hugely surprising fact — and the links I’ve been posting about it naturally skew negative, but I don’t want this blog to be weighed down with frequent negativity. Enter this respite. Craig Mod on the MacBook Neo and the iPad. Yes, this. I rarely use my iPad these days but could see myself doing so if iPadOS were a better fit for the device.…

Mira’s Last Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold, published 2017, fantasy, 109 pages. One of the Penric & Desdemona novellas. Earthy bits aside, I enjoyed it as usual, and oh, what a sad day it will be when I finally run out of new Bujold to read. Luckily I still have a good amount left, and even after that, she is on my very short list of authors I plan to reread. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan, published 2006, history, 416…

Sam Kriss on reading being magic. The part about Luria’s study utterly fascinated me. The Kansas study blows my mind and seems like it has to be flawed, surely, because it does not at all match up with my experience with other people around me. Adam Singer with more evidence that short-form video rots your brain. Avoid, avoid, avoid. Kyle Orland on AI use leading to cognitive surrender. “Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were w...

I’m so behind on posting links that I’m going to declare link bankruptcy and post the whole long list without much commentary, rather than chunking it into smaller posts. (And then we’ll go back to business as usual.) Teddy Macker on David W. Orr and a healing vision for America. This was so, so good. Highly recommended. This quote from Orr at the beginning sets the tone: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, he...

The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV volume 1, by Charles Greville (edited by Henry Reeve), published 1874, diary, 619 pages. Hot dang, I loved this. Even though I know very little about nineteenth-century politics in Britain (so far, anyway), these memoirs are what I never knew I wanted. Here are some sample passages, starting with Greville’s grumblings about George IV (who reminds me of a certain orange menace): There never was such a man, o...

A couple months back I moved off Feedly (for reading RSS feeds) and switched to my own handcrafted reader, Digest. It started when I came across Karin Hendrikse’s article on building a static RSS reader (oh how I love static files), and then Terry Godier’s post on RSS and phantom obligations nudged me away from the idea that a feed reader has to be something like Feedly or Google Reader. At some point Feedly started adding more AI features (ugh) and I decided it was time to part ways and do m...

Madame de Treymes, by Edith Wharton, published 1907, fiction, 74 pages. Great writing as always. With these Wharton novellas, I feel slowing down — not my natural instinct given the long list of books I want to read before someday shuffling off this mortal coil — is particularly rewarding and worthwhile. The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410, by Iris Origo, published 1957, biography, 526 pages. Enjoyed this deep dive into the life of a medieval Tuscan merchant. Very deta...

This morning I was reading Matthew 5 and had a little epiphany. Verses 43–48 (and this is from the NIV, never mind the post title being from the KJV): You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what rew...

Excited to see yesterday’s Church Newsroom post about the upcoming changes to the Sunday class meeting schedule. While the new schedule doesn’t give a lot of time for lessons, I think the consistency — same schedule each week — is important, as is the follow-on effect of each organization gathering together every week instead of every other. Less of a preparation burden for teachers on any given day, too, now that lessons/discussions are only half as long. (I say this as one who always worrie...

I’ve been reading through my journals from twenty years ago, remembering old friends and who I used to be and what I worried about when I was young and single. And goodness, I had forgotten just how much I used to blog back then. Perhaps to excess (and by “perhaps” I mean “without a doubt”), but it was fun and I made lots of friends and I find myself missing it. [He says on his blog, where he has posted twenty-three times this year so far.] [He wants to point out, though, that the booknotes a...

Inspired by Jo Walton’s post about reading sixteen books at once, here are my own reading habits, for those who have trouble falling asleep at night. I generally read between four and ten books at a time, though at times it’s gone as low as two and as high as, uh, thirty. (Those were wild days.) For me it’s a balance between finishing books — where fewer at a time helps — and reading across more of my areas of interest in parallel. Each day I try to read at least 100 pages. My loose goal is a...

The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, published 1596, play, 82 pages. I first read this twenty-five years ago but apparently retained almost none of it. Aside from the antisemitism, I generally liked it. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard, published 2011, history, 368 pages. Loved it! The history — the assassination, the undiagnosed mental illness, the medical malpractice — is tragic and awful, of course, but the b...