still impressed by this iphone camera

I have the iPhone 14 Pro Max and I’ve been trying to use the camera as much as possible, not as a replacement for my more traditional cameras, but as something for quick snapshots or just to test out a particular kind of shot. I’m not a fan of the software processing, but as far as the output straight from the sensor goes — which you can get by using the “ProRAW” setting and an editor like Lightroom — I am very impressed. You won’t mistake these shots from a large sensor camera or film, but there is still an impressive amount of detail and sharpness and even a little character. Here are some photos from the past week that I took with the iPhone and like quite a bit.

The Lyric Theater in Waycross, Ga.

Abandoned gas station near the North Carolina border.

Oahu

I was in Hawaii for a week on a teaching residency. When I wasn’t occupied with students or with my own work, I did as much exploration as I could. I took photos using proper cameras, but I also used my phone quite a bit. Instead of sharing the phone photos directly, however, I edited them and printed them on instant film using an Instax Wide printer. I then scanned those prints, for an effect that makes the original photo look like it was shot on film. It’s kind of cool I think.

ego trippin’

Josh Marshall on Elon Musk:

Most of us know what it’s like to be caught up in the moment. In a moment of tense confrontation or ego injury it is natural to pull tight to those who are there to defend you. Some of this is simply human nature. But with the likes of Musk and Trump it operates on a qualitatively different and more explosive level, the consequence of an innate narcissism, an ingrained sense of grievance and entitlement and the unique dynamics of social media. Of course, their power and wealth make their meltdowns vastly more consequential than yours or mine.

Probably not a good thing that we have a social and economic system that rewards extreme narcissism and sociopathy.

Antisemitism as cartoon-ideology

John Ganz:

Antisemitism is sort of an obscene graffito scrawled on the bathroom wall of bourgeois society. But it also has something of an air of mystical hocus-pocus and the direct, graphic power of occult symbols, like say, the swastika. Like cartoons, it is also plastic: shapeable and moldable to new conditions and subject to limitless morphological variation. Fans of other simplistic renderings of society will have a tendency gravitate to the world of antisemitic vignettes as providing more vivid and pornographic kicks.

There is a reason that almost every conspiracy theory tends to migrate back to antisemitism. It is, in many respects, the ur-conspiracy of Western modernity, always ready to assert (or reassert) itself under the right conditions.

Harrison Ford’s Last Truly Great Performance

Josh Spigel on Harrison Ford in The Fugitive:

It's especially a shame to think that Ford could've gotten so much more credit for his work as Richard Kimble. Here, much more than in other recent films, you simply get to watch the lead character think a lot. Kimble has to rely on the kindness of strangers for much of the mid-section of The Fugitive, both before and after he's shaved off his beard and colored his hair to alter his appearance as much as possible. He speaks softly and infrequently here, only using as many words as he has to. Whether he's speaking with the woman renting out a room to him, to a one-armed convict he hopes is the one he tussled with on the night of his wife's murder, to a friendly colleague of his (a young Jane Lynch), to a pushy young ER doctor (a young Julianne Moore) or to Gerard himself, Kimble's introverted. It suits Ford well, as we get to watch him slowly piece together what happened to Kimble, why it happened to him, and how he can try to right this series of wrongs.

Ford really does elevate this film with a wonderfully nuanced performance that does so much to sell what is otherwise a somewhat convoluted story.

Andor is good →

Adam Serwer explains why:

When I say politics, I do not mean that Andor is a liberal or left-wing show. It can be read that way—one can see the echoes of the issues that animated the George Floyd protests in the show’s portrayal of Imperial law-enforcement agencies cracking down on dissent, or in the Imperial prison that has debt clocks in every cell. What I mean is that the series attempts to imagine an internal politics of class, culture, and ideology that motivates its principal characters and fictional institutions.

You can think of Andor as one of only a few attempts to put the political economy of Star Wars on screen and unlike previous attempts, this one really works.

"Time is forever just running out"

I have been on a bit of a Richard Hofstadter kick, and at the moment I am (slowly) rereading both The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. I was struck, in the latter, by this paragraph toward the conclusion of the title essay.

The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.

The paranoid spokesman sees the face of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, who systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out.

Although some of this is at work across the American political spectrum, it is hard to read this diagnosis and not think immediately of QAnon and the apocalyptic fantasies of the far-right and, to a great extent, the Republican Party.