Perennial problems, modern media

Postcard #39

Fortepan / Makovecz Benjamin

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

This week’s POSTCARD is about thinking and writing under changing circumstances.

• Text is king

  Surprise, text is still king! Adam Mastroianni has more than romantic reasons for it.

• On not giving up

  A moving piece by the 74-year-old writer Gary Arms.

• The best philosophy lectures on YouTube

  Free, yet excellent educational content compiled by Jared Henderson.

• Substack and legacy media

  Cal Newport offered a nuanced perspective on Substack. I had a more specific question, and he replied [1:12:00]. Nevertheless, I still think that Newport, like so many IndieWeb advocates, underestimates the difficulty of building an audience.

• A tool to turn a YouTube link into a transcript

  Jasmine Sun Claude coded a tool that converts YouTube URLs into transcripts. She even added a font selector with options for Arial, Comic Sans, and Wingdings. 🙈

Noteworthy

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.“

—Edward O. Wilson, 2009

A mystery link leading into the unknown

„What if...

• ...they observe us the same way we observe them?“

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.