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| Carrot salad (partially made) and tuna steaks on the kitchen counter before dinner prep begins. |
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| Ingredients for tuna steak recipe from the New York Times. |
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| Tuna, mostly covered by the pepper-olive-and lemon zest. |
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| Carrot salad, partly eaten. |
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| Pork chops and snow peas with mushrooms. |
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| I’m finding it hard to follow this book, which varies from one location, from one set of characters, from one mindset, and then switches to another place, time, person, scene. When I began reading Tokarcuk’s Flights, it was a relief to read well-formed sentences and well-thought-out phrases, no stupid analogies (see next book)! But then I bogged down and only read half. |
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| Free book from amazon.com. It stinks. Bad writing, bad characterization, bad in every way. I tried hard but only read around 30%, |
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| An insanely long book (over 700 pages), but maybe I’ll read it all. |
“Enshittification is when you combine the banality of evil with an internet-connected device and a federal law that criminalizes doing anything with that device that the manufacturer dislikes.” (p 141)
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| Why “everything” got worse — easy answer: in this book, “everything” pretty much adds up to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, the iPhone, and maybe Google. |
Does Cory Doctorow have a life outside of the online world? He probably does. However, you wouldn’t know it from this book, despite a brief acknowledgement of the mess the US is in because of our hideous administration in Washington. The book is a weird read because it’s so devoid of what I would call real life. Does the man ever eat? Read fiction? Go for a walk? I understand that every book has to have a focus, but this book reaches a lot of conclusions based on a kind of hyper-focus that makes it seem distorted.
Here’s a summary of what he means by everything: “We are living through a Great Enshittening. Somehow, humans have unleashed the Enshittocene, in which all of our artifacts and hyperobjects are turning into piles of shit.” (p. 55)
Ok, there’s occasional mention of history:
“Never let anyone tell you that the Luddites were afraid of technology or angry about ‘progress.’ That’s a lie propagated by history’s winners, whose great fortunes required oceans of blood from child laborers, murdered protesters, and enslaved Africans in the ‘New World’ who provided the cotton for their machines.” (p. 196)
The book is a dense read: in fact, I had to read the first half of it twice. There’s a lot of real information about the very recent history of technology. But the author considerably overstates the claim that he covers everything. In fact, as I said, it’s hyperfocused.
UPDATE: Cory Doctorow’s summary of the current state of the main points of the book, in case you want the abbreviated version:
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| New table and chairs in my little House at Pooh Corner. NOTE: Of course I know that’s Paddington, not Pooh. But Pooh built a house (at Pooh Corner) and Paddington didn’t have a house of his own. So it’s the HOUSE that I named, not the bear. Bears are generous and share with one another.  The house Pooh built for Eeyore. |
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| Renewed effort to go to the fitness center. |
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| New recipe: Len’s Shrimp Curry Dinner. |
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| There’s always something to try at Trader Joe’s. |
President Trump has said since his first term that he wants to acquire Greenland, and he asked aides for an updated plan on Monday. European leaders reject the president’s assertions.
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| We have had some snow but not excessive! |
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| Dreaming of Paris which is snow-covered this week. |
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| It’s always good to think about penguins! |
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| We tried a new coffee shop in Saline, Michigan, down the road from Ann Arbor. It’s Ok, not great. |
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| The coffee cups are upbeat. |
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| Street art in Saline across from the cafe. |
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| Jam omelet at home |
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| Free book from amazon.com I hated it. Not remotely up to this author’s other books. It’s smarmy and preachy. |
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| Probably my next book. |
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| Putting the new mayor and his political party in historic context is interesting. It’s more interesting to me because one of the currently-living people mentioned is someone I knew. |
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| Michigan winter: snow and no color or light. |
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| Evelyn, Tom, and Miriam are in Italy. It looks so good! |
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| An amusing short story by R.F. Kuang |
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| Rock Paper Scissors — disappointing. |
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| Just purchased: Tokyo Express. Will be reading today. |
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| Leg of lamb for New Year’s Eve: leftovers will be eaten New Year’s Day. |
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| Rice pilaf with cashews |
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| May, 2025: Alice Graduates from University of Virginia, one of the highlights of the year! |
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| January: cooking from Fuchsia Dunlap’s book. |
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| May: our kitchen extends into the back yard, which continued until October. |
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| September: Carol brings us a fruit tart. |
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| December: Chanukah — latkes and salmon. |
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| Christmas dinner at Nat’s house (not my kitchen). |
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| We had a great birding trip to Texas in April. Here is a Texas lunch. |
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| One of the many birds we saw in Texas: a Black-Necked Stilt. |
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| On the National Geographic Orion in July, after a tour of Athens, we visited a number of places in the eastern Mediterranean. Here’s the ship’s kitchen. |
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| After decades of hoping to see the Acropolis, I finally made it to Athens in July. This is a view from our hotel. |
“By any honest accounting, 2025 has been a year of wrecking-ball damage to the constitutional scheme. Our democratic structures are more vulnerable by orders of magnitude than they were at the beginning of the year, before Trump took office. Indeed, one theme historians will likely emphasize is the speed and breadth of Trump 2.0—the way the administration hit the ground running with pre-cooked plans, especially those from Project 2025, to erode the separation of powers.
“That unprecedented damage has come from a ruthless and often lawless executive branch, a Congress that has largely declined to act as a co-equal branch, and a Supreme Court that—too often—has been solicitous of presidential power, especially on its emergency docket. The result, at best, is a pockmarked landscape that will require a herculean reclamation project, legally and politically, if constitutional government is to be fully restored.” — Harry Litman, December 29, 2025
“The Mona Lisa will be moved to a new exhibition space at the Louvre in Paris as part of a plan to renovate the world's most frequented museum. Emmanuel Macron stood in front of the masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci as he made the announcement to an audience of dignitaries, with the change to be introduced by 2031 and visitors charged separately to see the painting.” (BBC)
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| In Paris last June (from Alice). |
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| Jean Margat, Mona Lisa collector extraordinaire and creator of this famous issue of Bizarre Magazine, died in February. |
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| From Andy Borowitz |
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
