Walk Softly and Carry a Big Schtick

Quote of the week

If everything we ate were kibbled into uniform dog-food, and the amount consumed at each feeding time tediously watched and tested, we would have little fondness for eating. But this is what the schools do to our food for thought, and this is what happens to people’s minds in primary school, secondary school, and most colleges. — Ted Nelson, Dream Machines

What I’ve been reading:

• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 22 (Yuto Tsukuda) 
• A Red-Rose Chain (Seanan McGuire) 
• Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Ted Nelson) — Apparently some things are the same across time and field: Nelson refers to “an article everybody cites but nobody reads.” In his case it was Vannevar Bush's “As We May Think.” In art history it's generally either “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” or “Notes on Camp.” In American history, it’s Frederick Jackson Turner's “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” while in English history it's Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History (a book rather than an article, but the idea is the same). Every field seems to have these “phantom ur-texts,” and I've found, now that I’m no longer in grad school and I actually have time to read them, that there has generally been significant drift between what these works actually said and what they've since been used to say. Of course, trying to convince people of this would be like shouting at the tide. (Doesn't mean it's not worth it to try when a small chance presents itself.) // Page 46 of Dream Machines: Doug Engelbart had an early ancestor of Google Drive, complete with file sharing and live collaboration, working in 1974! // Having finished this, I’m finally able to reach a conclusion about it, as far as whether it should be reprinted as is or updated or just let fade into the past. I’m . . . still not sure. There are some parts of it that could be valuable for people to read right now, as is, there are other parts which are obviously outdated and should be profitably removed from a modern version, and there are other parts which would be valuable if they were updated. There are some parts that I think would need to be rewritten to a more of a 2026 style, while there are others where I think the 1974 style is a large part of the style. And in the end, whether the decision was made to do a reprinting or a new edition, I think either one would have the same problem: The people who most need to read it, wouldn’t. (I find this is the main problem with a great many books.)
• Cells at Work! Baby, vol. 4 (Yasuhiro Fukuda) — The Cells at Work! crew have done it again: There’s no reason a story about anthropomorphized cells should have such an emotional impactful ending, but once again it did. I was expecting it — they didn’t just foreshadow it, they flat-out told us in chapter 1 that this was going to happen — but the ending still hit me pretty hard.

• ArtForum, February 2026 
• Ritual Income, Witch of the Demesne vol. 1 (B.L. Brown) 
• Vogue, September 2026 — Page 248, Alessandra Codinha, “The Grind”: As a life-long tooth-grinder, I’m always interested in learning more about how to fix this problem. I know that it’s stress-related, but “don’t have stress” obviously isn’t the answer. Things have gotten bad enough now that not only are people applying enough pressure to their teeth to kill the roots (been there, done that), they’re also breaking the fillings and crowns that are applied to repair them (been there too). The problem’s gotten bad enough that one endodontist that Codinha talked to was considering Boxin injections to the masseter muscles. Then, the chiropractor that she talked to said that this was bad idea. (I hate agreeing with chiropractors, but everyone’s right sometimes.) An accupuncturist she talked to advised “When you catch yourself [clenching your teeth], put your tongue behind your upper teeth,” (I had unconsciously discovered this on my own, and it does help.) before adding “The only time your teeth should be touching is when you’re chewing.” Codinha eventually goes for an intensive program that’s centered around twice-weekly chiropractic adjustments, cold-laser treatments to her jaw, and electrostimulation to her back muscles, which she said helped tremendously. Besides the time required and the (unmentioned but sure to be prohibitive) cost, the chiropractic would be a deal-killer for me: I’ve heard too many horror stories of people who were paralyzed as a result of chiropractic interventions to feel comfortable with that. (And I imagine that my fear would then cause me to tense up, which would probably make me more likely to get injured.)

• Once Broken Faith (Seanan McGuire)
• Minnesota Monthly, September 2026 
• Art in America, Fall 2026