If you’re like me and like to have NewsBlur sitting open all day, then you’ll love the new NewsBlur macOS app. It’s a first-class app that supports all of NewsBlur’s features, from intelligence training to sharing/blurblogs.

Introducing the NewsBlur macOS app, available for free on the Mac App Store.

The macOS app also supports all of the themes, so it can turn itself into dark mode automatically.

It’s configurable and supports ay=utomatic hiding and showing of the feed list so you can focus on the stories you want to read. Use your mouse to swipe left and right on both stories and to swap which pane is visible.

In the Grid view, you can swipe right with your mouse to temporarily show the feed list, giving you a compact view of your news stories without having to give up screen real estate.

Training is supported natively, so you can hide those stories you don’t want to see while highlighting those thast you do.

It’s important to be able to train, because you can set notifications to be sent from either your Unread list or your Focus list, ensuring you only see the notifications from sites you want to see. And clicking on those native macOS notifications takes you directly to the story in the new macOS app.

If you have any ideas you’d like to see on macOS, feel free to post an idea on the NewsBlur Forum.

Coming up soon are the discover feeds feature, where you can see related feeds based purely on semantic similarity (and not based on mined usage data), as well as real-time updates to the macOS app similar to the dashboard on the web.

It is October 21. Kamala Harris has raised record amounts of money. It hasn’t mattered much–it was a tossup election from the moment we finally got Biden to step aside for her and give Democrats a chance and it remains a tossup election today. Leaving beside the depressing nature of that fact, it’s just true. She has all the cash she can use and she is spending it. Yet people are still giving. This is stupid. There is no way to spend that money between now and the election. Even outside the question of the efficacy of all that money–and like the race to defeat Susan Collins, we have clearly reached the point of maximizing returns–it is simply too late to move that money through this election cycle for anything that means anything at all. I doubt at this point it even makes sense to give to downballot candidates, though perhaps on the margins I could be convinced. The consultants and their targeted advertising to get you to give more money–and let’s be clear, that’s what your money is going toward here–are going to tell you that you have to give just this much more or TRUMP WILL WIN, but don’t do that, at this point it just isn’t true.

The real issue of course is that because we liberals lack any kind of institutions to build toward political engagement. we have individualized everything. Yes my friends, we are all neoliberals now. What was once collective is now entirely individualized. We are anxious, so we open our wallets to the grifting consultant class. The focus now should be on GOTV efforts in your local communities. That’s how you build community and political solidarity. You and your friends figuring out which older or disabled residents of your communities need to get to the polls, now that’s useful political action. Telling your 18 year old disinterested family members how to vote and who to vote for, that’s valuable. Talking to people, that’s useful. And it has to be on what matters to them, not on your anxieties about Trump, about which they very well may not care. Remember that organizing starts where people are at, not where you are at.

I have said it before and will continue to say it–spending your hard-earned money on national elections is just flushing it down the toilet, especially with already well-funded campaigns and late in the cycle. But since we have torn down every institution that brought liberals together, from the union hall to the social club to the liberal Protestant church, we have nothing but our anxiety.

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Story.

The gap between Carter’s birth and his vote today is the same as the gap between his birthday and the presidency of James Monroe in the other direction. Monroe fought in the Revolutionary War and subsequently studied law under Thomas Jefferson. Curiously, three of the first five presidents died on July 4th (Jefferson and Adams famously both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Monroe died five years later to the day).

Carter carried every state of the Old Confederacy in 1976. The past is a different country . . .

I strongly recommend Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland for a rich cultural history of the Carter presidency and the rise of the New Right.

The post Jimmy Carter votes for Kamala Harris appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

A word about our new Nobel Prize for Literature. The only of her books I have read is The Vegetarian, though the others look great too. This is kind of author that people were hoping the Nobel reforms of a few years ago would lead to winning the prize. This weird little novel is about a woman who stops eating meat and then withers away after nightmares about blood and guts of that industry, but is actually rejecting the patriarchy that dominates her life. Evidently all her novels have these types of political themes. From E. Tammy Kim in The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, which I get by email so I don’t have a link:

In works such as “The Vegetarian,” “Human Acts,” “The White Book,” and “Greek Lessons,” she applies a light, often experimental touch to heavy themes: women’s experiences under patriarchal rule; the buried histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century South Korea.

Han came to the attention of most readers outside South Korea with “The Vegetarian” (translated into English by Deborah Smith), which tells the story of Yeong-hye, a woman in Seoul who responds to a series of gory nightmares (“great blood-red gashes of meat”) by giving up her carnivorous ways and rejecting her husband and extended family. I’m partial to a larger-scale novel, “Human Acts” (also translated by Smith), about a people’s uprising and U.S.-backed massacre, in 1980, in the southern city of Gwangju, where Han spent her early childhood. In an author’s note, she reflects on a grim source of inspiration: a boy, killed in the massacre, whom her father, the writer Han Seung-won, had taught in middle school. “How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?”

Han’s latest novel is “I Do Not Bid Farewell” (forthcoming in English)—a beautiful, mysterious story built around another historic tragedy, a pogrom on Jeju Island after the Korean War, told from the perspective of three women characters. A few months after it came out, in 2021, I met her for a vegetarian meal in Seoul. (We have known each other for a while.) South Korea was trending authoritarian, increasingly steered by male grievance, which got me thinking about 2016, when Han and Smith won the International Booker Prize for “The Vegetarian.” That same year, a feminist movement took hold in South Korea, #MeToo avant la lettre, and made the literary world its first bit of housecleaning. Ko Un, a poet who’d long been considered South Korea’s most likely winner of a Nobel Prize, was revealed to have been an abuser; no one reads him anymore. Korea’s #MeToo uprising has since shrivelled, but Han and many other women writers—Kyung-sook Shin, Kim Hyesoon, Hwang Jung-eun—are still in their rightful place, defining contemporary Korean literature.

As I general rule, I try to make about 1/3 or a little more than that of the novels I read from outside the US and European experience. That’s a lot to read and we all only have so much time, but sometimes it leads you to read great authors before they get this kind of international recognition, so this makes me happy. Plus The Vegetarian is just a great book.

The post Han Kang appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

It has been a week. It’s not going to fix anything, but maybe watching George Clooney chilling at the end of a movie will help you in some small way.

He has perfected the art of just chillin’ out silently for an extended period of time during the last shot of a movie while the credits roll…

(via laura olin)

Tags: George Clooney · movies · video

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