It is difficult to connect Tokyo—Tokyo around the Yamanote, Tokyo of the central wards, Tokyo of fresh construction and manicured parks, Tokyo as we see it on our television screens—with the numbers that people use to gauge the health of a nation. Pull
What a complex book, I realize, every time I come back to That Hideous Strength. In many ways, it is Lewis' thickest book: most viscous, densest. THS manages to be both evergreen and a product of its time. That Hideous Strength is the third book in Lewis
"What is going on!?" the three-year-old exlaimed at the breakfast table the other day. And it's indeed a valid question. Energy and food pric
Plans made while eating Cookie Crisp on the balcony, looking out on the elevated highway. Contemplating my buckets of yuzu, approaching their second winter. Listening to the white noise of traffic. The chimes of garbage trucks. To go to Jinbocho. Or to
In the fires of desire
The flame will devour
Your faceless face
And mold it restlessly in place
Bushes of greasy hair are growing out
Primal rage, you are falling out
You are being eaten by the flames
And there is no escape, there is no
Truth be told, investing legend Hugh Hendry had a point when he [recently](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2022-09-15/-the-fed-doesn-t-know-what-it-s-doing-says-eclectica-founder-
The financial system / the banking sector has arguably increasingly been used as a political tool over the past several years, sometimes an extra-legal one. And not only against various "a
When you're one step ahead of the crowd, you're a genius. When you're two steps ahead, you're a madman
-- Shlomo Riskin
I was recently asked by a former colleague why I had increased
Why is inflation so high, and what does the powers that be plan to do about it? Let's start our attempt at answering these questions by look
Are they going to stay there, set down, left in utter neglect, abandoned? Maybe. For they have been there all year. I believe I took this same picture a year before, too. The empty lot between the supermarket and a barbershop. On taking that picture a
"To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners se
The cause is Ozymandian
The map of Sapokanikan
Is sanded and bevelled
The land lone and levelled
By some unrecorded and powerful hand
Which plays along the monument
And drums upon a plastic bag
The brave men and women so dear to God
The tourists are returning to Asakusa. Well. I always say this. I say this mournfully. Three summers of peace and quiet. Three summers without hearing about “tourism pollution.” Three summers of warm reception, without the chilliness and silence that c
Claims that we need greater centralisation, more EU, or more globalisation are pre
Adachi Masao is filming a picture about Yamagami Tetsuya. Jean-Luc Godard is dead. His more fearsome Japanese apostle has never given up his brand of nihilistic leftism. His years in the desert have only sharpened him.
This morning, a man set himself
The Glass Hotel is the fifth novel by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel. Mandel’s most notable work is Station Eleven, released to acclaim in 2014 and finding a second life in the last few years due to its subject matter: a post-apocalyptic tale foll
25
Shonan. On a weekday in late August, the beach is mostly locals. Now, the trains from the city only come fully loaded on Sundays. A few kids in wetsuits. Middle-aged surfers with tans that will never fade. A drunk that gave up his post with a v
Let not my love be call’d idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence,
Therefore my
In the window of a bookstore in Kanda, a 1982 first edition of Araki’s Midori. The store is not open. I know that if it was, and I worked up the nerve to go in and ask the price, whatever the figure, that I would be forced to pay it. (How much would it
People tend to associate Thomas Pynchon with post-modernism, however, I don't think he wrote about post-modernism in a hopefull way. I think he wrote about post-modernism to warn society of the pit that it is descending into. His novel,V., is in my opini
Even in the summer, Onoterusaki seems to be in perpetual gloom. The trees block the sunshine that the apartment towers do not. Except for a few days in late August, the shrine’s dirt yard is never completely dry. Several safe paths are laid out in flat
Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their houres,
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the ayrie towres,
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o'erflow with wine:
Let well-tun'd words amaze
With harmonie divine.
Now yello
8
I had already moved out of Kanagawa by the time news broke that a twenty-six year old man had stabbed nineteen people to death. But I knew the area, generally if not specifically. Maybe that is why I paid closer attention. I suspect most people
The reflexive greeting in the elevator is a comment on the weather. “It is raining today.” “It’s very cold.” “The typhoon will hit soon.” “It might snow today.” There are subtleties that I don’t appreciate, so I believe it’s best to echo the forecast:
I moved my TV out to the balcony. It serves as a windbreak, stopping the blast of the air conditioner’s compressor from knocking over the slender beanstalks that I have already propped up with plastic straws.
It stopped working. When it did, I only fl
When first published in 2005, many reviewers seemed caught off guard by Cormac McCarthy's latest book No Country for Old Men. Is this Lee Child, or the author of Blood Meridian we're talking about? Is he angling for a movie deal? Did the old man decide t
aka, "some people suck but urbit has tools to begin to discourage shitty behavior" month.
The impetus for this post is the recent update that Urbit just rolled out: naive rollups for Azimuth, the public key infrastructure (PKI), of the network. If you
Not having anything better to do, I walked north to Minowa.
The rainy season has finished. Now, there will be a month of grey, humid days.
I bought a paper sleeve of kakiage with pickled red ginger and ate it in the park that abuts the shopping ar
Similar content available at networked subject_
Updated June '22 with v3
The release of layer 2 rollups for Azimuth means planets can be spawned very cheaply – so cheaply, in fact, that Tlon is picking up th
In contrast to the PhD's in charge, the US yield curve (i.e. the difference between the 2y yield and the 10y yield on US Treasury bonds) has a fairly long history of being predictive of economic recessions. M
The news marveled for one day at the details from a Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office white paper: sixty-five percent of men in their twenties are single, forty percent have never been on a date, and the number of marriages has slipped to a record
For the ten thousand years of history before the internet, if an entrepreneur built a brick and mortar business—a general store, a blacksmith’s workshop, a widget manufacturering factory—they could touch and feel and deeply understand what they owned, an
IF thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou
May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, 5
As if
When Josef von Sternberg got the offer to make a film in Japan, he was already on his way out.
He couldn’t make the kind of movies that he wanted to make. The sumptuous pictures he made with Marlene Dietrich seemed like artifacts of another time. The
"I want to do all of these things at once—be called a writer, be a rooted family man, be a tribal elder, be an outcast shaman—and this is ludicrous, impossible. Art that doesn't come from pain is just entertainment. And what does that mean for a man with
The Imperial Palace is below, and so is the national road system's kilometer-zero terminus marker. Everything emanated out from here.
All the energy, manpower, and expertise for imperialist expansion turned inward at the end of the war and was directe
This book is perhaps the best starting point for anyone who is interested in learning economics from a behavorial and social perspective. Basic Economics is a simple, straight forward book that is very easy to read. However, don't let its simplicity turn
A street performer had set up under the railway overpass at Yurakucho. He was juggling long, dull knives. When he got down, he gave a heartfelt speech about the life of a busker. Two police officers watched as he solicited donations.
I could see that
Welcome back to The Stack. This week
I insist on writing about enka. I know that nobody is interested. This is a challenge to the reader to get through the next thousand words and try to get something out of the performances I'm talking about. But it's also a reality that few people under t
"It's a beautiful day. In all our lives, we may not have many like this - so perfect", said Honda, stirred by some premonition.
"Are you talking about happiness?" asked Kiyoaki.
"I don't remember saying anything about happiness."
_"W
This entry is brief. I am still testing the limits. I am not sure what to do with the medium, first of all. The freedom is scary. In order to restrict myself thematically, I have confined myself to writing about a city—Tokyo—that I am not in love with. I
This essay about Misora Hibari begins in Beijing in 1966.
It begins with Zhang Chengzhi, who was the original Red Guard of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He came up with the name. “Red Guard” was what he signed on a May of 1966 poster cri
I am leaving Osaka tomorrow.
I had no particular reason to stay past the weekend. I figured I could get some work done, if nothing else, shut up inside a hotel room. I moved to a nicer place. There is nobody around. Unless there is a wedding rehears
Is technology political? The answer is a resounding yes! All technology is political, though some technologies are more political than others...
In society, we see a trend of increased polarization, there is talk about filter bubbles, and more and m
_Disclosure: I took a course from Robert Shiller, which I paid for, and had lunch with him once, which he paid for. This post also contains affiliate links from Amazon as well as materials understood by the State of California to cause concern in even
US inflation has recently been surging and is now "trotting". From Gerald Feldman's description of Germany's inflationary episode a century ago, one is struck by many similarities with today...
US CPI inflation recently hit 7.9% - not only is this a 40-
From the Old Country you came
having grasped the last straw
to corral your people on the outside
of a fence even one more time.
They cursed your name & stirred
up calumny & assassination.
Degataga, you spat in their eyes
to wrest again a
Bitcoin is a technology for decentralized consensus about global value allocation; often accompanied by the saying fix the money, fix the world.
Smart contracts are economically-incentivized, programmatically-enforced contract law; thus the saying `co