onfocus

Welcome to podcast Saturday! (Also a thing.) NXIVM is (was?) a multi-level marketing self-help system (cult?) that recently imploded. Its senior officers are now waiting for their trials. This podcast tells the story of one senior member who left (escaped?) before the end. I hesitate to recommend this podcast because it requires some serious psychic energy to stay involved. There are descriptions of physical and mental abuse and it gets to be too much at times. Plus it's one of those crime podcasts where you're not sure the protagonist is a protagonist. It is seven episodes of a riveting, difficult story.

Here's another great article by linguist George Lakoff about our current media environment. It's frustrating to see the same dynamics play out over and over again. It's like seeing legacy code in action while lives depend on refactoring. Two other folks I tune into for analysis of the media are Ezra Klein and Jay Rosen and they recently had a conversation about what's happening now. Also also, don't miss Klein's article about Enemy of the People. And after you digest all of that important garbage, a reminder from Warren Ellis: You can tune your Internet connection until it is useful and fun.

This is such a great mystery and investigation that I don't want to spoil it with too many details. We try to keep our phones out of water but we should also try to keep them away from "large concentrations of small-molecule gas".

Welcome to Newsletter Wednesday! (I just made that up so it's a thing now.) Sidebar shares five daily links about web design and it's a good one to subscribe to via email. I've recently been diving down a microcopy best practices rabbit hole and I'm blaming Sidebar for that.

This is a fun site to browse for visual inspiration. It has high-resolution scans of historic maps and map-adjacent documents that you can zoom around to see details. I've been going back to the data visualization category and the illustrated maps are pretty great too. Here's the origin story of this project.

Some amazing architecture and portrait photography of NYC in the 60's and 70's. [via Tecznts] There are a few more photographs by Hofer at Galerie m Bochum.

"In no other two-party system does the party that receives the most votes routinely find itself out of power." So that's not going according to plan. I really like the idea of ranked-choice voting but when the people who make those kinds of decisions benefit from the current system, any sort of voting change seems unlikely.

This is a nice, new iOS Mastodon app. I'm going back and forth between Mast and Amaroq and I can't decide which is the one Mastodon app to rule them all yet. If you're wondering what Mastodon is, you can't go wrong with Laura Kalbag's summary: What is Mastodon and why should I use it?

Jeff Atwood contemplates 10 years of the indespensible programming community Stack Overflow and where it might be heading. I'll also use this space to plug the excellent Stack Overflow newsletters. I don't visit the SO sites everyday but I like to see a weekly summary of what's popular in various communities—the RPG newsletter is especially fun if you're into that sort of thing.

The screen struggle is real. I'm trying to find this line with my kids and with myself and this article is more fuel for the less-is-more fire.