sippey.com

it is finished

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:20:00 -0700

On Friday all the Phoebe fans (hi) were searching for “tamám shud” after reading the lyrics to Kill Me.

becoming more fully yourself

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:45:00 -0700

Reading isn’t about reaching empathic dead ends, or recruiting platitudes about how we must understand each other; it isn’t about the performance of social class absent a criticism of that class structure. To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means that you are there when you are reading; you, the reader, with your feet on the ground, a ground on which racism, misogyny, and extreme poverty are not so easily dispatched. You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt. To use reading to step into someone else’s shoes is to leave yourself behind.

Emphasis mine.

hello from the worldwide ungoverned network

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:35:00 -0700

Love seeing Spencer Tweedy making the case that you’re still allowed to use computers like it’s 2007. “I like being part of a worldwide ungoverned network of absolute fuckin nerds sounding off on things they think about.” Celebrity drummers, they’re just like us.

So long bike shedding hello jarvising

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:09:00 -0700

Robin Sloan coins “jarvising,” which describes upwards of 99.8% of YouTube AI content. “The most common application of a personal Jarvis seems to be…tinkering with one’s personal Jarvis. ‘Gotta get my tools just right’ isn’t a new phenomenon, of course, but/and it’s useful to notice its recurrence here.”

Reminder that we are all on the decoy plane

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:16:00 -0700

GenX childhood fear: nuclear holocaust. GenX adulthood fear: a coordinated attack on the US power grid. “With 20 minutes and enough rifles, a crew could potentially turn the lights out nationwide. … A blackout caused by lost transformers, he warned, could last 18 months or longer.”

Sam Kahn asks: Is the City Finished?

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:57:00 -0700

Sam Kahn asks: Is the City Finished? “I have this suspicion that the pandemic was a collective trauma that we still haven’t processed, and a great deal of the trauma was this — that at a stroke the city became outmoded and it became clear that the real movement of wealth and culture was through the web.”

Happiest place on earth

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:41:00 -0700

I’ve been lucky enough to attend three Golden State Valkyries games this season; two from the nosebleeds (still not “cheap seats”), and last night’s playoff berth-clinching game against the Dallas Wings, from some seats lower down in Chase Center.

I’ve seen my fair share of professional sports in my life, and we are blessed with great teams and fandoms here in the Bay Area. But the big three seem to have curdled. Since they moved from Oakland, Warriors games are now full of moneyed tech bros; 49er games carry the latent encephalopathy of the NFL (and are better on TV anyway); and Giants games now feel like a nice picnic hosted by your homophobic uncle.

On the other hand, there is nothing like a Valks game.

The Bay Area (soon to be renamed the GabbbBAY Area, after star forward Gabby Williams) may have been demographically and psychographically primed for a WNBA team, but even in their second year the team already feels like an organization in their prime. Every game sells out, the stadium (aka “Balhalla”) full of people decked in violet and black, many of them sparkling. The crowd is all ages, all genders, all orientations, all colors, all family types. Everyone is smiling and friendly and happy to be there…and everyone is happy that you’re there. If it’s your first time, you can stop by an information desk and get a free “MY FIRST VALKYRIES GAME!” pin, which becomes a moment of celebration for the arena’s hype woman if you make it on the jumbotron. I have never felt more joy in professional sports.

Here’s The Athletic’s Brian Hamilton in a long piece on the Valkyries from a couple of weeks ago:

When the Valkyries compete along the shore of the San Francisco Bay’s Central Basin, there is a sort of exaggerated delight that sets the mood apart. A fan brought out for pregame drum-banging is hailed as “a Founding Guard member since 2025,” which is amusing, since there’s no way to be a Founding Guard member any earlier. Upon her return to Chase Center, Los Angeles Sparks guard Kate Martin receives a pregame tribute video and a standing ovation; Martin played one season for the Valkyries before being cut in training camp this year. One guy leaves his third-row seat to dance with members of The Flock hype team during a timeout. When Kaitlyn Chen banks in a 3-pointer, it’s as if no one in the building has ever seen such a thing in their lives.

It’s funny. Maybe a little try-hard. But then some WNBA teams and fans haven’t tried enough, period.

For years, whenever I’d post a pic to Instagram or Twitter (RIP) from a San Francisco Giants game, I’d caption it “Happiest place on earth.” I still love an afternoon or evening picnic at ~~Pac Bell~~ ~~AT&T~~ Oracle Park, but Balhalla now earns that title. If you can, go. This is what professional sports should be: inclusive, fun, a little silly, a little over the top, featuring a team that plays with joy, backed by an organization that gives a shit about and reflects the community it lives in.

Headphone music

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:18:00 -0700

Mitch Therieau on Phoebe Bridgers’ new album in The New Yorker:

Her first two albums have distinct sonic identities, but the songs sometimes bleed into one another. She has a finely tuned ear for melody, but she is not a writer of earworms; her melodies tend to follow the lateral, associative chain of her lyrics. They take hold after repeat listens. Listening to her music again and again, in fact, is the key to seeing the larger shape of her ambition. Bridgers is not a serial self-reinventor like David Bowie or even Joni Mitchell—she is a polisher and a honer. She is the kind of artist who seems to have two or three basic musical templates for songs and is constantly creating new versions of them.

If you put Lost Weekend on while you’re cooking or commuting or catching up on email you’ll miss all of the ambition in the new album, whose songs are very much Phoebe Bridgers songs, but whose production is “good headphones laying on the couch” worthy. Also, you’ll miss genius lyrics like this, the last line of Panorama: “If you’re drinking, then I’m drinking.”

What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:47:00 -0700

Via Kottke, a story of what happens when bots + LLMs + coding agents + prediction markets collide with plain old fashioned websites.

The open web was built on assumptions such as that visitors are mostly human, that traffic roughly tracks readership, and that the cost of serving your site is related to the value you get from serving it. Every one of those assumptions is now out of date.

…

A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy. Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

…

The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

Can Chez Panisse Change With the Times? Does It Need To?

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:44:00 -0700

The Times reviews the new Bar Panisse, as well as its more famous next door neighbor. This is a glorious bit of food writing, and makes me want to stand in the “chatty line of locals.”

Sit down at Chez Panisse and dinner starts, just like that. No scripted introduction, no mission statement, no spiel. Not even a little, “Have you dined with us before?”

If you didn’t already know that Alice Waters opened this place 55 years ago in Berkeley, Calif., that it became one of the most important restaurants in the country, mothering the modern farm-to-table movement and an era of rustic, ingredient-obsessed American cooking that leaned heavily on France, well, you could wrap up dinner and polish off your pluot galette without anyone tipping you off.

You might expect Chez Panisse to hammer home the values of building education and community through fresh local food that Ms. Waters has been promoting for decades, that it would pause now and then to flex. But dinner here is never didactic. It flows in the quiet, straightforward way of a bistro that’s been around forever. Service is calm, self-possessed, attentive, sometimes a little detached in the way that makes Americans complain about Parisian restaurants.

Here’s a shot I took of Chez Panisse’s upstairs kitchen back in 2017. If you can, go.

Lost Boys on Fallon

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:13:00 -0700

I don’t love linking to Fallon, but I do love Phoebe Bridgers, and even the fifth time I watched the camera pull back to reveal her backing band I grinned like an idiot. What a move. 🔥🔥🔥

Shadows

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:31:00 -0700

This weekend I saw Andy Warhol’s Shadows at Dia Beacon.

Shadows is “a single painting in multiple parts,” and is designed to be installed to fill the available space. Dia’s space, as you can see, is large. Dia’s website explains:

In 1979 Andy Warhol presented Shadows at the New York gallery of Dia Art Foundation co-founder Heiner Friedrich. The installation featured the environmentally scaled painting in multiple parts, which the artist created between 1978 and 1979. As “one painting,” Shadows consists of 102 equally sized canvases hung edge to edge and low to the ground (but not too low to be kicked, as Warhol noted in his review of his 1979 show for New York magazine). While fixed by these physical terms, Shadows is nonetheless contingent in its presentation. Since the number of panels shown and the order of their arrangement varies according to the size of the exhibition space, the work in total contracts, expands, and recalibrates each time that it is installed.

First reaction to this paragraph: “wow, kudos on that art speak phrase contingent in its presentation.” Second reaction: “wait, Warhol reviewed his own show?”

Yep, and here it is, archived at the Guggenheim Bilbao’s site:

On Tuesday I hung my painting(s) at the Heiner Friedrich gallery in Soho. Really it’s one painting with 83 parts. Each part is 52 inches by 76 inches and they are all sort of the same except for the colors. I called them “Shadows” because they are based on a photo of a shadow in my office. It’s a silk screen that I mop over with paint.

I started working on them a few years ago. But I get the most done on weekends because during the week people keep coming by to talk.

The painting(s) can’t be bought. The Lone Start Foundation is presenting them and they own them.

Someone asked me if I thought they were art and I say no. You see, the opening party had disco. I guess that makes them disco décor.

This show will be like all the others. The reviews will be bad—my reviews always are. But the reviews of the party will be terrific.

I had the painting(s) hung at eye level. Any lower and people would kick them, especially at the party. The only problem with hanging the show was the gallery floor. One end of the gallery floor is one foot higher that the other.

But the kids helped me, and when we finished we all had lunch. I ate a pickle and drank some Evian and then some Perrier Jouet.

Lone Star(t) foundation renamed itself Dia, btw. Also? The reviews of Shadows continue to be bad. Here’s Christopher Knight in the L.A. Times in 2014 when it was exhibited at MOCA:

Vapid and pretentious, the overblown installation ranks among the worst works Warhol made.

Whatever. I thought Warhol’s disco décor looked pretty great. Especially at Beacon. Afterwards I drank some Pellegrino and ate a strawberry fig bar.

The surprising conflict and chaos in Taylor Swift’s songs about commitment

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:15:00 -0700

On the verge of some big mysterious event at MSG, BD McClay goes deep on her songs about relationships and marriage:

In Love Story, Swift sang: “This love is difficult / But it is real.” That real and difficult love remained her ideal across most of her 12 albums. Love you chase, love you let go; love that heals you and breaks you; love the false god, love the king of your heart; love as freedom, love as prison; but never, never, easy love. I’ve always liked this side of Swift, this scheming screwball heroine who wears a thousand disguises to pursue a man so that she can reveal that she is, as one of the great screwball movies says, “positively the same dame”. The twist in the songs, though, unlike the movies, was that the guy always knew. It made Swift’s stories truly emotionally satisfying – that the hard work was a true labour of love because it was also completely unnecessary. That’s the thing about Americans, of which Taylor Swift is a superlative example: we don’t really trust anything that is not hard work. She wants us to know she has guitar string scars on her hand.

Trailer for Klara and the Sun

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:54:00 -0700

Looks funnier than I remembered the book being? In the novel Ishiguro created this weird distance between the reader and Klara. Who won’t be able to connect with Jenna Ortega as their Artificial Friend? Here’s a relevant bit from Radhika Jones’ review of the book in the Times…

Klara is likable enough — as she was manufactured to be — but it’s hard to empathize with her on the page, which is maybe the point. The stilted affect that so often characterizes Ishiguro’s prose and dialogue — an incantatory flatness that belies its revelatory ability — serves its literal function. Klara’s machine-ness never recedes. Unlike most of Ishiguro’s first-person narrators, however, she seems incapable of deluding herself. Her technological essence presents some childlike limitations of expression, but are they more pronounced than the limits born of the human desire to repress, or wallow, or come across better than we are? “I believe I have many feelings,” Klara says. “The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.” This statement had the peculiar effect, on me anyway, not of persuading me of her humanness but of causing me to consider whether humans acquire nameable feelings all that differently from her description. Which is maybe also the point.

It’s been five years since the novel was published; so much has changed since then. Maybe we just wouldn’t be able to believe a future where our Artificial Friends speak in an “incantatory flatness?”

J. D. Vance’s Contemptuous Conversion Memoir

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:20:00 -0700

Jessica Winter eviscerates our Vice President’s new book (HOW DOES HE HAVE TIME TO WRITE A BOOK? ISN’T HE SUPPOSED TO BE NEGOTIATING THE IRAN DEAL? Oh, right…I see.) in The New Yorker.

One suspects that Vance would have a better grasp of Catholic customs and vibes if he spent more time around rank-and-file parishioners in “fraternal sharing and in ecclesial communion,” to borrow Pope Leo’s words. But Vance admits that, about “half the time these days, we attend Mass at home.” (Your book is called “Communion,” my brother!) A surpassingly strange thing about Vance’s book, in fact, is how often he sounds not much like a Christian at all, Catholic or otherwise. “Religious beliefs are less like certainties such as the boiling point of water—which can be verified through testing—and more like claims about complex systems,” Vance writes. “Take, for example, the following: An increase in the minimum wage would raise the standard of living for low-income people.” Raising wages might sound nice, Vance goes on, but it might also “reduce the number of jobs available to low-income people. . . . The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

Now, there is some off-the-charts breezy impertinence! Religious beliefs are actually very much like certainties to those who hold them, for one thing. And a policy proposal is not a religious belief, for another. The passage is incoherent, yet, in conflating progressive reform with arrogant blind faith, it is perfectly suited to Vance’s cynical conservatism.

If you contend that a belief is less like a certainty and more like a claim, and if a claim—that workers deserve a fair wage, that immigrants are human beings with God-given rights—can be debunked, then perhaps you hold no true beliefs at all. I’ve written in the past, as have others, about “Vance’s essential mutability—his willingness to change his positions and convictions according to the prevailing winds of the political moment.” (It took Vance just five years to complete his transition from “Hillbilly Elegy”-era Never Trumper to MAGA-aligned Senate candidate.) “Communion,” far more than “Hillbilly Elegy,” is the work of an inveterate opportunist, one who appears torn between the urge to camouflage his careerism—Vance’s true religion—and an equally strong desire to be admired for how well and how profitably he plays the game.

Midjourney Medical

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:22:00 -0700

2026 just keeps delivering bangers:

It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.

The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.

You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you’re done.

When the woman in the weird promotional video stepped on the thing and it was clear they were going to lower her into the tank like Han Solo, inside my head I shouted “You’re insane!” And she replied, calmly, “I know.”

The Israeli Ultra-Hawks Who Feel Betrayed by Trump’s Iran Deal

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:13:00 -0700

This Isaac Chotiner interview in The New Yorker with Shimon Riklin, a television anchor and Benjamin Netanyahu ally, is wild.

Putting aside the merits of this war, do you think people such as yourself and the Prime Minister misjudged Donald Trump? I know you said a joyful prayer on the air when he was elected in 2024. You must have had some sense of who this guy is—that he isn’t loyal to anyone, that he had no real core values—

Listen, I was really happy when he was elected. I admit it. I think it was good for Israel. And, in the beginning, it was. But today I don’t know what to think. I am really in shock.

It’s hard to fathom.

I don’t have a lot of moments like this. I don’t remember someone in modern history who would go with you and do wonderful things, and then suddenly disappear and go against you. So now I am the bad guy? I supported you! I was the good guy! How did I become the bad guy, and the Ayatollah is the good guy?

This is why I was wondering whether you had ever observed Donald Trump.

I don’t know what motivated him. You know he is a Gemini? Geminis are not really ones to say the same things a lot. They change their minds. You know Geminis?

Yeah, I’m a Gemini, so don’t be too mean.

The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:09:00 -0700

Andy Baio:

It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (“No copyright intended!”) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in your portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.

And I had completely forgotten that John Koenig, the creator of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, coined the word sonder:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Lettera

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:57:00 -0700

From the folks behind Bear:

Lettera is a native, refined Markdown editor for macOS. Built for writers, researchers, developers, and anyone who works with documents, from a quick blog draft to a complete technical documentation system. Lettera works around your setup. Open a single file to read and edit it, or open a folder as your writing workspace.

I dig it. See also: Vergecast interview with Chairman Gruber on the epic history of Markdown.

Let them eat cake

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:41:00 -0700

Brian Elliot:

There’s a fork in the road right now, and Big Tech is waving everyone down the wrong path. The story they’ve been selling is simple: AI makes you productive by letting you cut people. Fewer humans, same output, fatter margins.

…

We hollowed out the middle of this country once and told ourselves the market would sort it out. It didn’t—many of us were wrong. We can’t afford to do it to ourselves again, faster, and pretend we didn’t see it coming.

Will we find and put in place leaders willing to make the sizable changes to policies, tax code, investments and infrastructure to avoid a train wreck? And if we do, will we stand behind them when times get tough?