Seth Godin on Variety and the Long Tail:

It’s easy to miss the feeling of a monoculture if you grew up with it. Hits gave us something to talk about, adhere to or even work against. There are so many pockets of culture, it can’t help but feel a bit more lonely from a certain angle.

I might also add: It’s easy to miss the feeling of the early web if you grew up with it.

The Atlantic: If There Are No Stupid Questions, Then How Do You Explain Quora?

Provocative content started to take over, perhaps because it led to more engagement and then, in turn, to more advertising revenue.

Also available on Apple News+ for those of you with the Apple One bundle.

The user experience for setting up a kid’s account on most services is terrible… I understand why people just set up normal accounts for their kids and type in fake birthdates. It’s frustrating.

Over the holiday, I had to search on Google for some obituaries and I’ve learned there are tons of sites that scrap obituaries, funeral home sites and social media and then flood Google results with AI-generated, ad-covered garbage.

Both of the textbooks I need for the class I’m taking this semester are available as ebooks, but my options are Kindle or a proprietary publisher owned system. Of course, I can read them on my computer, but now I’m pondering buying a Kindle.

Got word a couple of days ago that a coworker of mine passed away unexpectedly. She’s got two young kids. Just devastated for the family.

It’s Christmas Eve and two of the presents we ordered haven’t arrived. One is scheduled to arrive Dec. 26. The other one hasn’t shipped.

How to fix American democracy, from ranked-choice voting to open primaries - The Washington Post

There are some interesting ideas for reform in this article. I was especially interested in the idea that maybe the House of Representatives needs to be significantly larger.

I was thinking about buying my middle child a non-smartphone camera for her to experiment with. She loves taking pictures and has a great eye. I looked at what’s available and realized that the market only offers really cheaply-made cameras, or really expensive cameras. Virtually nothing in between.

Woke up this morning to low water pressure. Turns out a water main at the front of our neighborhood burst overnight…