Notes

Wilhelm von Humboldt on “the individual man, and the highest ends of his existence” (via Henrik Karlsson):

The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the grand and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but there is besides another essential,—intimately connected with freedom, it is true,—a variety of situations.

The efficiency of all such unions as instruments of cultivation, wholly depends on the degree in which the component members can succeed in combining their personal independence with the intimacy of the common bond; for whilst, without this intimacy, one individual cannot sufficiently possess himself, as it were, of the nature of the others, independence is no less essential, in order that the perceived be assimilated into the being of the perceiver.

[I]n the highest sense, that each still perceives the beauty and rich abundance of the outer world, in the exact measure in which he is conscious of their existence in his own soul.

Now, whatever man receives externally, is only as the grain of seed. It is his own active energy alone that can convert the germ of the fairest growth, into a full and precious blessing for himself. It leads to beneficial issues only when it is full of vital power and essentially individual. The highest ideal, therefore, of the co-existence of human beings, seems to me to consist in a union in which each strives to develope himself from his own inmost nature, and for his own sake.

It is, on the other hand, undeniable that, whereas physical variety has so vastly declined, it has been succeeded by an infinitely richer and more satisfying intellectual and moral variety, and that our superior refinement can recognize more delicate differences and gradations, and our disciplined and susceptible character, if not so firmly consolidated as that of the ancients, can transfer them into the practical conduct of life […]

[R]eason cannot desire for man any other condition than that in which each individual not only enjoys the most absolute freedom of developing himself by his own energies, in his perfect individuality, but in which external nature even is left unfashioned by any human agency, but only receives the impress given to it by each individual of himself and his own free will, according to the measure of his wants and instincts, and restricted only by the limits of his powers and his rights.

Reason must never yield aught save what is absolutely required to preserve it.

“You Aren’t In The DSM”:

In his 2013 essay “Book of Lamentations,” cultural critic Sam Kriss reviews the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as if it were a work of dystopian literature, a kind of nightmarish encyclopedia in the lineage of Borges. Kriss argues that the manual is a literary object with a deeply unreliable narrator, who writes with a coldly compulsive voice that cannot perceive its own madness. “As you read, you slowly grow aware that the book’s real object of fascination isn’t the various sicknesses described in its pages, but the sickness inherent in their arrangement.”

Kriss sees the DSM as a device of absurdity and detachment because he reads it as making assumptions that are not explicitly present in the book itself: that madness is internal, individual, and biologically determined. The DSM’s silence on these issues does little to dispel this interpretation.

Since its first edition in 1952, the DSM has gradually evolved from a slim document meant to standardize psychiatric recordkeeping into a sprawling classification system that shoulders a set of responsibilities it was never designed to bear. It is expected to guide clinical care, enable research, satisfy insurance companies, anchor epidemiological studies, shape patient self-understanding, and serve as a platform for public policy. Each of these demands pulls the manual in different directions.

In advance of the DSM-5, there were hopes for a “paradigm shift” which would incorporate findings from neuroscience and create a more dimensional, biologically based system.The neo-Kraepelinians had believed that with iterative research, biological validators would point towards the hidden disease entities, in much the same way that syphilis had been identified in the early 20th century as a cause of a then-common condition “general paralysis of the insane.” But by the 1990s, it was becoming obvious to scientists that validators of DSM categories did notconverge in any neat fashion.

DSM-5 became the symbol of a deep tension within the field. Psychiatry wanted to be seen as part of clinical neuroscience, but didn’t yet have the evidence to fully support that shift. The controversy around DSM-5 also hurt its public image. While it remains the go-to manual in practice — since no alternative has been able to displace it —  it no longer carries the same unquestioned authority.

Even if genes or brain scans do not line up with DSM categories, researchers have found plenty of evidence that biological processes such as genetic factors, inflammation and brain circuitry are involved in mental illness. These patterns aren’t random or meaningless; they’re just far more complicated and messier than we had hoped. “Biology never read that book,” Thomas Insel famously said about the DSM.

And yet, in the new clinical, atomized, and oddly impersonal idiom, “having OCD” or “having ADHD” invites one to imagine essences within oneself that do not exist. This linguistic shift, McWilliams observes, often accompanies a deeper psychological distancing. People present themselves as hosts to diagnostic entities, rather than agents struggling through difficulties. In the most extreme cases, that essence becomes all-pervading, a core of who they are.

The DSM was never crafted with the purpose of helping individuals make sense of their own psychological struggles, nor is it particularly well-suited for that task. The DSM is a tool for clinicians and researchers. It presumes a baseline of clinical training and medical knowledge, and an appreciation of methodological limitations. It is not a guidebook for laypeople navigating their inner worlds.

The DSM, with its deliberately “user-friendly” format and preference for everyday language, appears vulnerable to misinterpretation by the public.

The psychologist Eric Turkheimer has commented that psychiatric diagnosis is a “relief from the Sisyphean burden of understanding the relationship between our bodies and our intentions.” It’s exhausting to ask, again and again, why we suffer so intensely, despite our efforts to feel otherwise, or why we return to self-destructive habits even when we know better. Our struggle with these questions leaves us emotionally depleted. If calling these struggles “disorders” offers a kind of balm, a way to temporarily suspend the ambiguity, then maybe that’s a mercy.

Where in Turkheimer’s perspective diagnosis offers a reprieve, it offers only confinement to Oyler. She doesn’t want to be cornered by language, to have her fluctuating experiences pinned under a diagnostic term. This resistance, however, shows just how powerful those terms can be. We seem to need them for our suffering to feel real, and yet we bristle when they confine us.

The debate around Asperger’s syndrome should have sparked a collective realization: that the sense of self shared by those who identify as “Aspies” never needed to hinge on whether the DSM retained that term. How can a medical manual, subject to change, driven by evolving criteria, have the authority to define or dissolve a social identity? Social identities live and die on their own terms.

Psychiatric classification as a clinical and scientific project is not designed as a tool for existential self-definition. It is not for you. No diagnostic manual can tell people who they really are.

My hope in these conversations with patients is to plant a seed of resistance, to offer an account of suffering that acknowledges complexity, contingency, and context beyond categories. I try to say, in effect: this pattern of symptoms reflects something meaningful about your psychological life, but it doesn’t define you. It shouldn’t be the scaffold upon which you build your entire self. You’re free to acknowledge it, even to use it as a lens, but don’t let it confine you. Do not let it determine your story.

And yet, I am aware that at a certain level this message is deeply unsatisfying, both to those who see diagnosis as a scaffolding and to those who see it as a trap. In gesturing toward the messy interweaving of temperament and trauma, and softening the solidity of diagnoses, I refuse to indulge our strange masochistic desire for categorical self-confinement.

Wong, Sampson. Hong Kong Walkology [香港散步學]. White Paper, 2022.

我們常常會以「功能」來理解身邊城市中的一切：車站是用來乘車的、商場是用來購物的、郵局是用來寄信的。每一個地點，彷彿都有著既定功能，我們只是透過這些地點來做到這些功能。

只要一個人對跟城市空間相關的一切充滿熱情，他就是個 Urbanist。每座城市都有極其熱愛談論那座城市中各種各樣地方的人，而且談起來多是如數家珍般充滿激情，借用地理學家段義孚的說法，他們有種「對地方的愛」(Topophilia)，也有強烈的「場所感」（Sense of Place）。

第一種關懷，是練習出一種「Mode」，走在城市裡頭，有辦法「開眼」和打開所有威官，忽然金睛火眼，「見到」最多。這種「Mode」，我時常叫作「掂行掂過」的相反。

有說山、樓、海之壓縮與緊靠，是香港城市地景的最獨特之處，走在百福道，正正可烕受到這種「好香港」的魔幻城市臧。

無可置疑的是，[己連拿利天橋] 盡現香港城市設計和基建所產生的空間，其複雜性之極致，而更有趣是，這種道路規劃的複雜性，竟又好像顧及了行人的經驗，讓置身其中的人，可以享受不可思議的移動體驗。這套落成於一九七九年的天橋系統，充滿現代主義建築高峰期的烏托邦色彩（天橋還特意立了開幕碑）。好多人都把焦點放了在「環形隧道」這個「打卡位」但我帶朋友走到這兒時，最強調的是如何「窮盡」它生產出來的每一重 Layer，看看它可以讓行人走到什麼方位、何等高低，轉換多少視點。

雖說 [「風之塔」] 有少許怪，但並不是批評，在香港，難得有官方的公園可以容納這種「半公共藝術」、「半懷舊」、「半功能性設施」的亭樓（Pavilion），實是有點趣味。在世上許多城市，公共空間裡都有這種難以準確界定、純粹給人多點空間體驗的「微建築」°

香港只有兩條跨海大橋是容許行人走上去散步的（第三條是預計二零二二年峻工的將軍澳跨灣連接路），近年也多人知道了。這兩條大橋，一條是在荃灣與青衣之間的青荃橋，另一條正是鴨脷洲大橋。

這條香港仔避風塘堤壩之不可多得，在於香港大多近海的路都有圍欄，在這兒散步，那種讓人「浮在海中央」的自由之眾，在別處不易找到，可謂香港絕境（曾經在西區貨物裝卸區也可有近海的「無欄杆體驗」，但現在它已不對外開放）。黃昏時分到訪這兒，因為向西一面全無阻隔，日落景色無敵；到了晚上，此處自然也是首屈一指的浪漫之地。

這批市政大廈的設計，線條方正，有許多通道連接四周，看起來有點笨重，所有細節都是功能主導，但有種簡單得來、配合到其「功能上的野心」的簡潔美學。許多八、九十年代的市政大廈，都帶點那個時代日本動畫中機械人基地的味道。

可以是圍繞著彩虹邨走一圈，觀察它如何被幾條交通極繁忙的高速公路包圍著，同時亦有無數的地面路徑可以步進邨裡。從整體的空間佈局來看，每一「面」彩虹邨高樓都像圍牆，組成現代主義住宅的堡壘，像框出了這些板塊之間的生活空間。

[隱藏在彩虹道橋下的奇異微型公園] 一直在我珍藏的隱蔽公共空間清單上，它是香港典型利用剩餘空間造出來的雞肋環境，雖然不實用，亦未必有人鍾愛，但那種「怪雞」，對喜愛在城市尋幽探祕的人來說，就好比美食家眼中的羌婪「識欣賞就會好沉迷」。

而我一直很喜歡主教山，因為它是社區居民自發由下而上營造公共空間的典範，山上有各種街坊親自帶去的設備（包括乒乓球枱！），完全體現了「一人做啲」的精神，令整座小山有非常豐富的細節和自建空間的痕跡。

總覺得沿著九龍城道，在東九龍走廊下散步，有在台北一些地帶行走的況味。高速公路天橋遮蓋了這段路大部分面積，以致橋下氣氛有點陰沉，跟旁邊活躍的街道生活與街市買賣形成反差。我喜歡烈日當空時在有陰影與被太陽曬到的橋下空間之間交替行走，戚受兩邊的差異。

[將軍澳南] 這一帶也成為很好的提醒：雖然業權上和概念上，公與私的空間很分明，但私人的住屋空間建成後，必然產生出「共用」的社會空間，例如在香港，就有屋苑附帶的商場環境、天橋、連接通道等等。雖然這些地帶規矩分明，但不是百分百開放。同時，它們也決定了在附近居住的人，可以擁有怎樣的日常環境。

Nick Heer on Liquid Glass:

iOS’s system theme was not branded from when it was first shown in 2007.

[I]t is not the first time Apple has used the term [“Liquid.”] Since 2018, it has described high-resolution LCD displays with small bezels and non-zero corner radii — like the one on my MacBook Pro — as “Liquid Retina displays”.

Apple is emphasizing another defining characteristic of the Liquid Glass design language, which is that each part of the visual interface is, nominally, concentric with the bezel and corner radius of a device’s display.

[The Liquid Glass] is as much a reflection of the intent of Apple’s human interface designers as it is a contemporary engineering project, far more so than an interface today based on raster graphics. That it is able to achieve such complex material properties in real-time without noticeably impacting performance or, in my extremely passive observations, battery life, is striking.

Apple also tries to solve legibility by automatically flipping the colour of the glass depending on the material behind it. […] If Apple really wanted to improve the contrast of the toolbar, it would have done the opposite. […] It is Apple’s clever solution to a problem Apple created.

It seems Apple agrees [corner radius] is more appropriate in some apps than in others — app windows in System Information and Terminal have a much smaller corner radius.

Even on a device with four rounded display corners, this dedication to concentricity is not always executed correctly. My iPhone 15 Pro, for example, has corners with a slightly smaller radius than an iPhone 16 Pro. The bottom corners of the share sheet on my device are cramped, nearly touching the edge of the display at their apex.

In a column view in Finder, for example, there is a hard vertical edge below the rounded corner of the ostensibly floating sidebar. I am sure there are legibility reasons to do this but, again, it is a solution to a problem Apple created.

It could simply be an exercise in branding. Apple’s operating systems have shared a proprietary system typeface for a decade without it meaning anything much more than a unified brand. And it is Apple’s brand that supersedes when applications look the same as each other no matter where they are used. In my experience so far, developers that strictly adhere to Apple’s recommendations and fully embrace Liquid Glass end up with applications having little individual character.

So far, Apple justifies this redesign, basically, by saying it is self-evidently good for all of its platforms to look the same. This is an inadequate explanation, and it is not borne out in my actual day-to-day use.

[O]n today’s hardware that is, to me, less of a showcase for Apple’s visual design cleverness and more of a means to get things done.

“When Is Better to Think Without Words?”

When we put words to a thought, we have to compress something that is like a web in our mind, filled with connections and associations going in all directions, turning that web into a sequential string of words; we have to compress what is high-dimensional into something low-dimensional.

[C]ompression is effortful. It takes intense concentration to find the right words (rather than the sloppy ones that first come to mind), and then to put them in the proper order.

If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual space, we can move much faster. But this is a big if. Most people, myself included, have too weak mental models to do this kind of processing for complex problems, and so, our thoughts are riddled with contradictions and holes that we often don’t notice unless we try to write them down. We can move faster in wordless thought, but we’re moving at random. If, however, you have deep expertise in an area, like the mathematicians, it is possible to let go of the language compression and do a much faster search.

The insights arrived at wordlessly need to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical notation and logic, to test their validity. It is a sort of feedback mechanism: unless the intuition holds up on the page, it is a false intuition.

The written results also work as relay results. By writing something down and making sure it is solid, we can offload that thought from working memory and instead use it as a building block for the next step of the thought.

When writing, there are all sorts of details that need to be specified for our paragraphs to make sense, and if we don’t know what should go into a sentence, it is all too easy to fill in the uncertain parts with guesses. At least my brain has the most miraculous autocomplete function and supplies me with credible endings to any sentence I start—often credible nonsense. But when the nonsense is there on the page, next to thoughts I’ve settled through hard work, it looks respectable! It often takes considerable work to realize I’ve fooled myself.

About the Public Suffix List:

Software using the Public Suffix List will be able to determine cookie inheritance boundaries between domains, preventing cookies set on one domain from being accessible to other domains under the same public suffix. This protects users from cross-domain cookies setting while still allowing individual domains to set their own cookies.

As well as this, the Public Suffix List can also be used to support features such as site grouping in browsers.

“Art Must Act”:

Instead of delineating an artwork’s place in the unfolding of historical tendencies, or revealing its interest as a lens onto social problems, the critic must judge the artist’s action for how it reveals a life.

[E]xtremist ideologies of the Right and Left responded to the real problems of modern society by offering illusory collective identities and narratives that substituted for genuine action and an authentic self. Liberals who opposed these ideologies, they warned, were no less susceptible to such illusions.

In promoting a smug conformism disguised as free thinking, the little magazines, he warned, were drifting into dithering liberalism that substituted a cozy in-group identity for real possibilities of intellectual and political action.

Proponents of the ‘new painting’ responded to this situation by abandoning both politics and aesthetics – the goal of either changing society or of creating beautiful, interesting or otherwise significant objects. They sought instead, with ‘a desperate recognition of moral and intellectual exhaustion’, to ‘act’ through the creation of artworks ‘in the form of personal revolts’.

In referring to them as action, he stressed that these experiments should be judged for their effectiveness in changing the situation and character of those performing them.

He was sceptical whether the ‘personality-myth’ of the ‘lone artist’ was a true resource for resistance or a lure by which artists would let themselves be co-opted.

The only way to reconnect with the experience of the latter, Newman posited, was to use techniques of abstraction as a kind of ascetic purification bypassing art history, moving the spectator ‘beyond the aesthetic into an act of belief’, in a sublime without theology, ideology, ritual or creed.

If both the pose of the isolated, marginal creator defying social conventions and that of the freethinking intellectual rejecting mass society had become deceptive guises for a failing liberal order, then perhaps the solution, after all, was to work out paths for action from within, and not outside of, the structures that seemed to thwart it.

One of the few forms of action is for intellectuals, putting aside any claims to expert knowledge, to express in a compelling, personal ‘style’ their own reactions to what they see – with honest disgust and outrage, rather than cool, dispassionate investigation or critique. Instead of reaching for the mask of ‘the expert’ posing as a master of impersonal facts (a role for which the public now had only well-earned contempt), the intellectual who wants to reach the public should become a ‘participant in the family table talk’, speaking straightforwardly (albeit in an ‘unusually brilliant’ way) about things we all see and feel. In an era that no longer believes in truth, Rosenberg warned half a century ago, the intellectual must become a kind of populist, just as the artist might become a comedian.

What’s most significant about Rosenberg’s criticism is that, as he shifted attention from one artist to another, he consistently sought to evaluate what a given artist’s work revealed about how an individual in our society can use the cultural and institutional resources available to pry themselves out of their old personae and craft a new, more expansive and enfranchising identity. Throughout decades of writing about art, he always held that artists were to be judged for their success or failure at acting – that is, in finding ways to resist routine, cliché and conformity on the one hand, and self-deluded escapism and fantasy on the other. These twin evils, he never stopped arguing, arise from the very nature of our capitalist society.

But his friend Hannah Arendt took up many of his ideas in her opus The Human Condition (1958), which argues that political life, like aesthetics, is characterised by an innate, albeit now widely ignored, human need for self-display through performances that are not labour, or routine, or ritual, but what she, following Rosenberg, called ‘action’.

Qiu, Yuwei. Your Near Is My Far. Shandong Publishing House of Literature and Art, 2025 (translations mine):

Mainstream psychologies have reduced the issue of trauma from a social problem to an individual or bodily one. This shift has exacerbated adversarial dynamics between generations (mother–daughter), genders (male–female), and urban–rural divides, leading to such stereotypes as “East Asian mothers are control freaks,” “East Asian women aren’t relaxed enough,” or “rural women are ‘brothers’ subordinates.’” The intent here is not to deny the existence of certain social phenomena, but to point out that we often mistake consequences for causes, treating them as mere matters of personal choice while neglecting the historical and social conditions behind these behaviors.

Many Western psychologists in recent years have also begun to critique this concept of self, arguing that it alienates people and breeds isolation. It leaves individuals feeling lonely, anxious, and narcissistic. In my clinical work with older generations of women, I have come to see that their seemingly “ineffective” behaviors are not merely expressions of narcissistic traits but responses shaped by their own needs and the historical context they lived through.

Gradually, I realized that as a therapist, I must not only study mainstream psychological frameworks but also maintain a critical awareness of their underlying ideology, pursuing localized explorations of my own. To interpret trauma, one cannot stop at the dichotomy between individual and collective; one must place it within larger social contexts and complex power relations.

The process from “Why can’t she understand me?” to “This is something she simply cannot give me” is a journey of recognition.

I came to see that empathy rests on two pillars: psychological energy and the understanding capacity. The former depends on inner maturity, the latter on our ability to revisit the past with the client and re-experience their feelings of that time. Both are indispensable. For a long while, I thought understanding mattered most, but later I saw that without sufficient psychological energy, it is nearly impossible to transcend one’s own perspective and truly understand another, especially someone who has hurt you. A colleague once remarked: “When my psychological energy is low, my imagination traps me in deep unease.” Empathy cannot be forced. An emotional flow beyond the self, it arises naturally after one has worked through a great deal of grief and developed the internal strength to hold it.

When a mother’s sense of self-worth relies entirely on the social identities bestowed upon her, the completion of each such identity — wife, mother, grandmother — leaves her emptier. She may then seek to fill the void by creating new identities, such as “being a boss,” to meet inner needs.

Letting go of expectations is a kind of farewell, a farewell to the imagined mother or daughter. Earlier I wrote mainly of daughters dismantling their idealized image of the mother, but mothers too must relinquish their ideal image of the daughter. This is a shared responsibility. One side’s willingness to face it can be supported by the other, but never wholly replaced. The process requires working through grief: denial, guilt, ambivalence, anger, unease, anxiety, depression. Only when these emotions are acknowledged and released can one accept the other’s real, imperfect self and different choices. Otherwise, unrealistic expectations persist.

Do not wait for your parents to recognize you before becoming an independent person. Take responsibility for yourself first before attempting to communicate.

We habitually begin questions with “why.” But research shows that “why” questions often make others feel accused or challenged, especially when they already harbor negative emotions.

I’ve observed that most of parents don’t consciously intend to hurt their children; rather, they themselves are helpless and can only resort to ineffective ways of coping with their emotions, such as provocation, suppression, avoidance, or outbursts. When emotional trauma remains unhealed, people use dogma and austerity to suppress inner anger, viewing emotions as an “obstacle” to solving problems, pitting emotions against problem-solving.

When describing emotions, use affirmative rather than negative language. We often say, “Don’t worry,” “Don’t cry,” “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Though meant to comfort, such words invalidate the other’s lived feelings and may have the opposite effect.

Empathy requires the willingness to feel one’s own vulnerability. A person who cannot accept their own emotions cannot truly accept another’s.

When parents complain that nothing tastes right or works well, it is often an expression of insecurity.

If I had to define the “self” in one sentence, it would be: “The self is an independent being composed of diverse needs.”

When mothers act domineering, there is usually a need beneath it: to be acknowledged, to be obeyed, to see certain outcomes in their children. Especially for mothers who sacrificed their careers for their children, the child becomes the vessel of all their time and energy. Their expectations intensify. This is not only a domestic tragedy but a social one.

There are two types of controlling behavior: overt “claws-out” dominance, easily visible, and a “roundabout” stubbornness that twists and turns but always circles back to her viewpoint, quietly unyielding.

If you are currently in a fragile state, financially or emotionally, keep a healthy distance from your parents. Create a space of autonomy, avoid sharing vulnerable feelings that may be easily triggered. When your energy strengthens, state your feelings and boundaries matter-of-factly. The other party may react defensively by suppressing, denying, or playing the victim to evade responsibility. Such reactions are common, since challenging long-held values provokes aggression. There is no need to justify or explain yourself; simply restate your boundary, calmly and repeatedly.

A father may suddenly be triggered by something, lash out in anger, and not understand what caused it or how to express dissatisfaction constructively.

Children often express strong emotions because they lack the tools to express themselves otherwise, using intensity as a way to be noticed.

For example, your grandfather may not actually be refuting you; he may simply be offering a different perspective. Yet you feel instantly contradicted, because years of his nagging have filled you with anger. His differing view reactivates that old scene, triggering rebellion. A more effective approach is to revisit the past and truly feel the anger that accumulated in childhood and to release it. This is not to change the past, but to clear the blockage so reconciliation becomes possible.

The key to breaking reactive patterns is not to “fight back,” but to notice your emotional state in the moment, use relaxation techniques, and release the physiological stress — racing heart, dizziness, tension in limbs — to free yourself from reactivity.

Parents are autonomous individuals with their own issues to work through. We cannot expect them to change before we can adjust our emotions. The more effective approach is to recognize what is happening and refuse to absorb their emotional debris. When you sense “he’s slipping into it again,” gently interrupt. I now stop my father mid-sentence and mirror back his anxious speech to him.

Over the years, I have accepted that I can’t expect to change my father or to have him understand or approve my choices. But I retain the right to tell him what I think.

Between anger and appeasement, I have found a third way: to give him direct feedback about my feelings. Whatever his reaction, I calmly and firmly communicate my discomfort or joy and my choices without justifying them. When he erupts in impotent rage, I tell him directly: “That’s your emotion. If you want comfort and support, I can offer that. But if you attack, I won’t accept it.”

For a long time, my image of my father was split, both fragile and violent. I later realized these were two sides of the same coin: narcissism and trauma intertwined, trapping him in his pain. I could label him an “East Asian parent,” yet I know his suffering is also part of mine. To reject him is to reject part of myself.

When I was young, I swore not to become my mother. Yet I’ve internalized her disappointment in me: I can’t “forgive” myself unless I excel. Otherwise, I feel unworthy and punish myself. I dread what she’d feel if she saw how much she hurt me, because she’s trapped in the same pattern. What I can do is to learn about her past, to know that being caught in this cycle isn’t my fault, and to free myself from guilt and anger.

In response to this emotional void, mainstream culture prescribes “be yourself” and “live your truth,” resulting in a false sense of agency through consumption, as if using a certain brand, following a celebrity, or listening to a podcast makes you unique, attracting like souls so you can receive love and attention. But this pursuit centers on having, not on feeling or understanding; it dulls awareness of others and of reality. The more we chase “selfhood,” the lonelier we become, living enclosed within our own worlds, fragile and anxious when we reach outward.

“Apple’s Liquid Glass Design Prioritizes Content Over Tools”:

Yes, many people are largely passive consumers of content, whether we’re talking about Web pages, podcasts, or streaming videos. For those people, there is little beyond content, and Liquid Glass’s deprecation of controls may allow them to continue their consumption with less distraction. But that’s not a lifestyle to aspire to, reminiscent as it is of the humans in WALL-E—perpetually reclined in floating chairs, mindlessly consuming entertainment.

For the most part, Apple has done a good job of making them highly usable and efficient, but at the same time, the company’s designers seem to want to pare away ever more of the physical instantiation. Bezels get smaller, keyboards get thinner, and ports disappear, all in the service of giving way to the content on the screen. But tools aren’t necessarily better for being smaller—function must dictate form, not the other way around.

Wikipedia editors on Signs of AI Writing:

When talking about biology (e.g., when asked to discuss a given animal or plant species), LLMs tend to put too much emphasis on the species' conservation status and the efforts to protect it, even if the status is unknown and no serious efforts exist, and may strain to derive symbolism from things like taxonomy.

While many of these words are strong AI tells on their own, an even stronger tell is when the subjects of these verbs are facts, events, or other inanimate things. A person, for example, can highlight or emphasize something, but a fact or event cannot. The "highlighting" or "underscoring" is not something that is actually happening; it is a claim by a disembodied narrator about what something means.

While human editors and writers often use em dashes (—), LLM output tends to use them more often than nonprofessional human-written text of the same genre, and uses them in places where humans are more likely to use commas, parentheses, colons, or (misused) hyphens (-). LLMs especially tend to use em dashes in a formulaic, pat way, often mimicking "punched up" sales-like writing by over-emphasizing clauses or parallelisms. LLMs overuse em dashes because they were trained (sometimes illegally) on novels, and novelists have always used em dashes more often than laypeople do.

Chris Arnade in “Walking Hong Kong (Kowloon, really)”:

The only way to cross that eight-lane fenced-in road, the one with monstrous semis pulling shipping containers, or buses whose center of gravity seems too high for the speed it takes the curves, is to go into the Hoi Tat Estate’s mall, up to the second floor, next to the Fairwoods diner (more on those later), then across the long bridge to the adjacent mall, where you can weave your way three floors down through a series of zigzagging escalators to the food court, where the four-block-long underground passageway to where you want to go is, assuming you take the passageway branching off at three o’clock on the compass face, not eleven, six, or nine.

Being a pedestrian in a city shouldn’t be the equivalent of a mouse in a maze, or a Super Mario Bros-style series of levels to complete, but in Hong Kong it is, which coupled with the density, heat, noise, and general sense of barely contained clamorous mayhem, makes it a punishing city to be in, one that’s aggressive, intense, and exhausting, one you feel you’re constantly battling2.

So while I stand by my opening statement that Hong Kong is not walkable, that doesn’t mean it’s not a singular and fascinating city, a humid gem in an ocean of global uniformity, and one that is ultimately rewarding as a pedestrian.

在华强北看到 Gaga 心想开在这是要给谁吃。

最后吃了 Gaga。

“Intimacy” (fiction):

I could not help feeling bored by the accounts whenever I encountered them—how granular they were, how tedious. How often they repeated the same material facts: the little clammy hands, the sleeplessness, the lack of time, the mess and splintered focus, the wonder of new speech and its ingenious formations. The problem, I thought, was that these descriptions never reached beyond themselves, beyond the concrete reality of the situation. But what was the purpose of their repetition? Was it just that we yearned to be heard? Was there a genuine need within this yearning, as basic as nourishment?

[T]he writer started talking about a book he had read in his youth which he had recently come across by chance. At one time, he had included this book among the titles that made up his formative reading, but now he could remember nothing about it. Rereading it, he found it confusing. In fact, he had no idea what it was about.

“What I can’t figure out,” the author said, “is whether I was smarter back then or just pretending to understand what I read. That wouldn’t be unusual, you know. One is in such a hurry to get an education, to have read it all.”

Ayşegül Savaş, the author, discussing the story:

We meet the narrator at a moment when her identity is in flux. She is holding on to an idea of what a writer should be, even though this model no longer seems authentic to her. At the same time, she is not very comfortable in her identity as a mother, or, rather, how this identity has merged with her life as a writer—that is to say, with her imagination. It’s easier for her to keep these two parts of herself separate, but it also means that her identity as a writer is not true to who she really is.

What is striking to the narrator about Marian is that she is so comfortable with who she is—she does not compartmentalize her different selves. The narrator does begrudge the fact that Marian has made her husband’s writing life very smooth, but, ultimately, I think that she is resentful about the various dead ends in her own life, the experiences that she tries to keep contained, without allowing them to merge or interact.

The narrator plays at being intimate with the author and his wife, following some rules she has set for herself, and then one day discovers, almost to her surprise, that she cares deeply for Marian. It’s as if she is trying to correct her faulty compass [for intimacy] by overstating the closeness.

ChatGPT:

The final paragraph is a quiet self-indictment. After trying—and failing—to prove closeness to Marian through a secondhand anecdote, the narrator wonders if she “didn’t relate the story very well,” or “missed some details,” or “hadn’t listened carefully enough.” She recognizes her unreliable memory and borrowed intimacy: the story didn’t belong to her, and her need to “belong” bent it out of shape. As an ending note, it leaves her with regret and acceptance of limits—of her art, her memory, and her right to narrate others—closing the story on self-awareness rather than consolation.

nothing constitutes an offense in a party where the music may stop at anytime

Kindle 中国拾遗

而在这块萎缩的领地里，各家出版社的电子出版业务，已经从几年前被寄予厚望的“全村的希望”，迅速沦落为食之无味、弃之可惜的“路边一条”。朋友半开玩笑地告诉我，现在社里的共识是，对于那些有点畅销潜质的爆款书，电子版“能不上就不上，能晚上就晚上”。

在 Kindle 业务的最后几年，一个显著的变化是电子书的价格越来越贵。一本实体书定价 60 块，它的 Kindle 版就敢卖到 50 块，甚至更高。当时不少读者对此怨声载道，认为亚马逊吃相难看。但正是这种被读者诟病的“高价策略”，催生了一个短暂却极具想象空间的“黄金时代”。

Kindle 之后，国内再也没有一个电子书平台，有能力或者有意愿，去复制这样的高价单本销售模式。以微信读书为代表的“优等生”们，选择了另一条道路：低价包月。

与此同时，另一个“巨兽”的崛起，则彻底断了出版社对电子书的念想。那就是抖音直播卖书。

在 Kindle 退出中国的时间点，任何公司都已经错过了统辖电子出版市场的历史机遇——你再也没有机会像早年的亚马逊（中国）一样，用镶着金边的大外企名片，带着一款没人见过的设备，敲开每一家出版社领导的门。

One dies twice, I see it clearly:
To cease to love and to be lovable,
It’s an unbearable death:
To cease to live is nothing.

Chris Arnade:

I began, somewhere in my forth year of grad school, when I was finally exposed to the current cutting edge of physics, to believe that the whole construct of modern physics, while great at advancing technology, maybe wasn’t so great at answering those fundamental questions.

Physics, during the early 1900s, had gone from using math to construct toy models of the known physical world, to forcing reality to agree to the math. From letting reality drive the math, to letting math drive reality.

I wanted to understand the universe at a level that when I try to explain it to someone at a McDonald’s, I’m not laughed at. Or not reported to the cops as an escaped inmate. Not because I think normies have a lock on what’s true, but that I think the truth shouldn’t be so odd that it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Or, to put it another way, the truth is a very human thing, and it shouldn’t be instinctively off putting to other humans.

I also began to think a little differently about religion that last year of grad school, not as a route to the truth, but as a low bar that science hadn’t managed to clear, provoking my physicist friends over beers by telling them that the Big Bang was only Genesis dressed up in fancy Math. Something I more firmly believe now.

There was a sense in the air that we were approaching a nirvana on earth, the payoff for centuries of scientific and rational thought. We had found the correct mixture of free markets, good governance, and smart technology, all available because of a dedication to a lucid intellectualism unchained to emotion. The 90s was a combination coming out victory dance for the technocratic class, and we were cocky, including me.

I want to emphasize what might seem obvious — which is how deeply money matters to many financial people. Yet it’s deeper than bankers craving money, it’s their entire identity. It’s how they see themselves in the world, and how they understand their worth as a person. It becomes their morality — a very explicit metric by which they measure how good they are. A free-market libertarian telos, adjudicated down to the single dollar.

Sorries Seem to Have the Harder Words:

People use longer words when apologizing and interpret apologies with longer words as more apologetic.

Iconicity in language is the non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning.

The type of iconicity that is investigated in this paper, however, is context-dependent and will be referred to as dynamic iconicity. It is not between a word's form and its meaning but between a word's form and the meaning or attitude that the speaker would like to express in that context, not necessarily via the semantics of the word.

Dynamic iconicity, in contrast, examines whether the form of words that are semantically unrelated to effort (e.g. genuinely) can signal effort, and are even produced in order to signal effort, in certain contexts.

While prior studies focused on the cost that accompanied the message, it is possible that making the message itself costlier, that is, requiring more effort to produce, can also increase its perceived sincerity.

Prior work in pragmatics lends support to the claim that the effort one puts into communicating a message influences message interpretation. A general assumption is that both speakers and listeners aim to minimize their effort. Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) further proposes that speakers produce messages that they believe are relevant, that is, that the cognitive effects that they would bring about in the listener are worth the cognitive effort of processing them. Similarly, Gricean Maxims (Grice, 1975) assume that communication is cooperative, and that, among others, speakers adhere to the maxim of manner, namely, to be clear. Deviations from the clearest formulation should thus give rise to a conversational implicature.

Ann Goldstein on Translating Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet”:

I feel that’s the way I get closer to the writer is just by staying close to the text; by not trying too hard; not inserting myself. If you’re a copy editor or an editor, I think that’s part of your job in a way, right? We used to talk about this at the New Yorker, sometimes: the goal is to make a writer sound as much like him or herself as possible. Not like you. I feel like that’s a good standard, at least for me, for translation.

You shouldn’t feel like you’re reading something in English, but you also shouldn’t feel like you’re struggling over the grammar or over the structure. You should be able to read. So there’s something in-between, something like that.

Then starting with the third book, actually I didn’t even read it. I just translated it. I read it when I was working on it, but I have never read the four novels altogether.

When the TV show came out, they did speak in dialect, but it was subtitled in Italian as well as in English, so that’s the level.

One other thing I think is big is that Italian has the ability to add suffixes to words that give them a nuance that English doesn’t have. One of the obvious ones that everybody would know would be like Fortissimo: if you say Forte is “strong,” and Fortissimo is very strong.

A lot of Italians write run-on sentences; I think I heard somebody say once it was a paratactic language, which I think is true—that the clauses just lie there beside each other, and you have to sometimes put the relationship in.

apparently it’s just beyond the capacity of my brain to manage more than two phones

“Queer Unintelligibility in China”:

Homosexuality in China was never technically criminalised or pathologised in the same way. Rather than targeting homosexuals for persecution, the Chinese State—from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) through the Republican era (1911–49) and into the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–present)—has largely rendered them invisible through systemic denial of their existence.

Pointing out that in the Qing archives there is not ‘a single case of consensual sodomy being punished in the absence of other, more serious crimes’, Sommer (2000: 116) argues that what bothered Qing lawmakers was not the sexual orientation of the partners but homosexual rape.

one of the most striking cases occurred in 1991, when a man named Lin Jiabao in Anhui filed an official complaint against his daughter and her same-sex partner, accusing them of crimes of ‘tongxinglian’ and demanding their arrest. Unsure how to respond, the local authorities forwarded the case to the Public Security Department, which eventually issued a statement that became the first instance of a juridical interpretation of tongxinglian in Chinese law. According to the statement, tongxinglian had no legal definition in Chinese law and therefore the reported incident had no merit. In his analysis of the proceedings, Chinese legal scholar Zhou Dan (2009) argues that the significance of the Lin case lies less in what it reveals about the treatment of homosexuals than in what it demonstrates about law as a continual process of rhetorical suturing and articulation.

生成式 AI 最不擅长的可能是生成:

前者 [ 评估 ] 追求的是对数据分布的深刻理解，希望达到全局上的客观综摄。后者 [ 输出 ] 追求的则是在这个分布里试图获得一个不平凡的结果，换句话说，是对这个分布的一个抵抗而非服从。

也就是说，评估需要的是理解分布，而创造追求的是打破分布，或者说，是在另一个自己内心的理想分布中做采样。

“The History of the New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department”:

I’ve never encountered a complete description of what the magazine wants its checkers to check. A managing editor took a stab in 1936: “Points which in the judgment of the head checker need verification.” New checkers, upon receiving their first assignment, are instructed to print out the galleys of the piece and underline all the facts. Lines go under almost every word.

The joke in the department was that my foreign language was sports.

A disputatious source is actually more helpful than the opposite. The checking system, like the justice system, requires something to push against.

Checkers don’t read out quotes or seek approval. Sources can’t make changes. They can flag errors, provide context and evidence. The checker then discusses the points of contention with the writer and the editor. It’s an intentionally adversarial process, like a court proceeding. You want to see every side’s best case. The editor makes the final call. In a sense, the checker is re-reporting a piece, probing for weak spots, reaching a hand across the gulf of misunderstanding.

Peter Canby’s philosophy was that it’s better for a subject to scream before a piece is published than after—a controlled explosion. Screamers still provide useful information. They’re better than ignorers or trolls.

Most writers appreciate having been checked but resent being checked. Checking makes evident how badly you’ve misinterpreted the world. It upsets your confidence in your own eyes and ears. Checking is invasive.

“This kind of fact checking wasn’t nitpicking and wasn’t just a bureaucratic thing. It was an artistic advance of the twentieth century. It just clicked with modernism.” He went on, “Modernism is goodbye to self-expression, hello to what’s right in front of you,” and that means you better get the thing right. The hedge is an acceptance that the world is impossible to know accurately. It imparts to the writing a humbleness, an understatedness, and, perhaps, a smug fussiness: in other words, what people think of as The New Yorker’s voice.

Large Language Muddle:

So, inconstancy, fallibility, forgetfulness, suffering, failure — these, apparently, are the unautomatable gifts of our species. Well, sure. To err is human. But does the AI skeptic have nothing else to fall back on than an enumeration of mankind’s shortcomings? Are our worst qualities the best we can do? It’s hard not to read the emphasis on failure as an ambivalent invitation for the machines to succeed.

The way out of AI hell is not to regroup around our treasured flaws and beautiful frailties, but to launch a frontal assault. AI, not the human mind, is the weak, narrow, crude machine.

For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear.

Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI’s further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don’t publish AI bullshit. Don’t even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit.

“Inside Uniqlo’s Quest for Global Dominance”:

“Uniqlo is kind of like Everlane without the moral superiority and H&M without the ickiness.”

An inadvertent moment of unibare—a Japanese word for the moment when someone realizes you’re wearing Uniqlo and not a more expensive brand.

Uniqlo is the universal donor of fashion, intended to go with any life style or aesthetic.

What was clear is that Uniqlo conceives of itself as a distribution system for utopian values, replete with mantras and koans, as much as a clothing company.

[The LifeWear messaging for Uniqlo] was deliberately enigmatic, saying that he wanted customers to “stop a moment and engage with language.”

Yanai has likened Uniqlo to K-pop, an industry that is oriented toward “what will be popular worldwide, rather than focussing on uniquely Korean characteristics.”

Under normal circumstances, the Uniqlo shopper should walk into a store and feel a sense of overwhelming abundance. Such is the logic behind Uniqlo’s power walls of thousands of sweaters on shelves that reach so high you fear that they might bust right through the ceiling, like Willy Wonka’s elevator. The display is arranged according to a precise formula, with sizes increasing from floor to ceiling, and colors darkening from left to right, as well as from the entrance to the back of the store.

Each pile is assessed for tidiness multiple times a day, using a five-rank grading system. A “B” grade might mean that a green blouse has found its way into a blue stack, while “D” is reserved for serious cases like a completely empty stack, or items that have fallen on the ground. Like IKEA, which intentionally musses and jumbles its displays, Uniqlo believes that volume is the catalyst of consumer desire. Conway explained, “We want everything to appear fully stocked all the time.”

Apparently, one of Yanai’s inspirations for this hands-off style of service was a visit that he made to a university co-op during a trip to the U.S.; Uniqlo now trains employees to sell clothes like they are selling books, letting customers browse freely.

This strategy gives customers “a chance to say, ‘I don’t need a basket, but I need help with a sweater.’ It’s an indirect way to initiate communication—low pressure, because you’re offered something specific versus asking, ‘Can I help you?’ ”

Uniqlo finishes every zipper track with a small piece of fabric known as a “garage.” It keeps gunk out of the device and protects against abrasion. Other fixes are invisible.

But much of what Fast Retailing says about its deep commitment to creating timeless clothes is undercut by the fact that it also owns GU, a lower-priced sister brand. Pronounced “jee-you,” GU offers “trend-driven styles” and “rapid turnaround times from design to retail”—with, presumably, rapid turnaround times from retail to landfill as well. And the scale of Uniqlo’s operations, not to mention its quest for endless expansion, makes real sustainability an impossibility.