It’s now been over six months since the transfer of the Kirtland Temple from Community of Christ to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and there’s still a lot to process for folks on the Community of Christ side of things. I remain committed to what I first said after hearing the news: that I have no interest in telling people how to feel about things, and that even if I did, I wouldn’t be on solid ground doing so. Yet, a thought occurred to me this morning that has helped contextualize some of my other thoughts over the past six months, and I did want to go ahead and share that.

Bors has some great political cartoons in this collection, but I also don’t like political cartoons in large doses, even if that doesn’t necessarily reflect on him!

After being ordained earlier this summer, I was added to my home congregation’s preaching rotation. Today was supposed to be the day that I gave my first sermon there, but once I started to make plans to attend a family funeral, I reached out to ask if someone could sub for me. Before getting the bad news, though, I’d already written most of the sermon, and so I figured I should post the text here so that I get some use out of it. That said, I don’t want to post the text as my last draft had it—while reading the news today, I came across a story about the 2024 U.S. presidential race that would have made a better addition to my sermon than what I had written at the time, and I want to think about that connection.

Taking cues from neo-Nazis is a great look for the GOP ticket.

24 hours on Elon’s Twitter feed is a great idea for a story, and I’m glad someone did it!

Who benefits from AI? Who doesn’t?

A good take by Molly White. I remember when I stopped thinking about ebooks in terms of screens (as opposed to paper) and started thinking about them in terms of DRM (as opposed to free use). DRM helps the already powerful at the expense of everything else, and I want to do more to push back against it.

I’m currently reading Extremely Hardcore and can’t wait to read Character Limit. The Twitter purchase alone ought to dismiss any serious ideas that Musk could do this kind of work.

Good for the dad, and shame on the politicians being this terrible.

Can something be shocking but not surprising? I’ve been thinking about this all day and still can’t believe it’s real.

I wish that wearing an implicitly anti-surveillance EFF t-shirt through airport security this week had been a deliberate decision, but I just like wearing EFF shirts and it wound up being a happy coincidence.

Wish it were for more principled reasons, but I’ll take it.

It is wild—and worrying—just how close this race is.

I’m bookmarking this episode for later because it does a better job than I’ve ever heard of talking about how messy and complex and difficult it can be to have Mormon roots in Community of Christ—and it doesn’t even get into some of the “outside Utah” vs. “in Utah” dynamics that I personally think get overlooked.

This is a take on digital labor and datafication that I can honestly say I never expected.

It’s really hard to know how to rate this book! It is meandering to the point of tangential—Graeber confesses that it evolved out of an essay that didn’t stop growing, and I wonder if it would have been better if forced to be more concise. It also has some of the same issues that I saw in The Dawn of Everything (indeed, this could have been a section of that book), in that it’s working with data and history that are impossible to nail down for sure. While Graeber fully and repeatedly acknowledges that, it’s still hard to see this as more than a predetermined thesis supported by particular interpretations of scanty evidence.

Deeply appreciate Masnick’s writeup. I don’t know the ins and outs of the law, and that’s given me some pause in being upset about the ruling. To see a lawyer find fault with so much gives me greater confidence in my own frustration.

The most dangerous part, though, doesn’t require a law degree to understand. The logic of the findings poses a threat to all libraries, not just this one.

This is hands-down the best book in the Little Brother series and may even be my favorite Doctorow book? It’s hard to beat Walkaway, but this book is so perfectly written for our time (and such a perfect self-critique of earlier books in the series) that I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of it.

What a disaster.

In a weird kind of Streisand effect, I’ve only started using the Internet Archive library since this lawsuit began and it’s a fantastic service. I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs of copyright law, but this sucks.

This isn’t a particularly deep post. There’s not a thesis to it, I’m not critiquing what I’m describing, and I don’t know that there’s anything to really take away from it. I just had a memory come to mind last night related to Book of Mormon Christology that I wanted to hold onto by sharing.

When I was a Latter-day Saint missionary, the Preach My Gospel missionary manual that we used had a suggested activity encouraging missionaries to read through the Book of Mormon and record “each reference to Jesus Christ (any of His names or pronouns related to Him).” The point of the exercise was to demonstrate just how central Jesus is to the volume of scripture, and early on in my service, I decided that I would give it a try.

I come from settler colonial stock and, more specifically, from a religious tradition that was (and still is!) pretty keen on imposing a particular identity on Indigenous peoples. I am the kind of person who really ought to be reading more Indigenous perspectives, but I’m also cautious about promoting those perspectives in my writing, lest I rely on a superficial, misguided understanding and then pat myself on the back for the great job I’m doing.

This is one of these stories where I’ve been waiting to get Masnick’s take on it, and he does not disappoint.

I’ve been trying to think through Durov’s arrest since I first heard about it—there are a lot of complex things going on here. I think this captures nicely my thoughts and taught me a few things, too.

Telegram is a sketchy platform (technically even more than in terms of content), but that doesn’t mean arresting the founder is warranted. Yet, that doesn’t mean that outcry on the right is in good faith, either.

One thing this article misses is how often CAPTCHA has been used to train AI. It’s always been playing both sides against each other.