This and That, Volume 11. - Today, I'm Bobbi.

It’s a holiday week and I’m back to serve up some Good Reads and Food for Thought in case you need to do something other than doom scroll while you are hiding from your gatherings or coping with the turkey hangover. But, before you fire up that Thanksgiving recipe, you might want to double check it.

Let’s dig in.

Good Reads

Kaleb Horton died earlier this year, and I was moved by one of the most beautiful reflections on life (his life, any life) I think I’ve ever read. Check it out. He was a beautiful writer, so here’s a vignette of life, through his own words:

“One consistent thing this time of year is that there are crows everywhere. I spend a lot of time thinking about crows. They have the most obnoxious vocalizations of maybe any animal, they’re aesthetically unpleasant and feel like a harbinger of death, and they know when they’re bothering you and they enjoy doing it. Drives me crazy how well they’ve adapted to LA. I saw one just this week going through a garbage can, methodically picking items out of it one by one and tossing them on the ground, looking for foodstuffs. It was making a horrible mess, a mess you’d normally associate with humans. They’re such a pest, and the worst part is you have to respect it. They’re fat and happy and they thrive. They’re annoying in a way that suggests profound intelligence. If they could get around to inventing money, they should get tickets for littering. Treated like equals. I have met crows that should be in jail. There’s one in my neighborhood that seems to have a problem with me personally. They’re my favorite bird.”

The hidden cost of polish.

For the nerds: How Ruby went off the rails.

On The Decentering of Female Sexual Pleasure in Pop Culture and Real Life (not unsafe for work, but maybe don’t open on the work wifi.)

This book was recommended in the article, by the way!

There has been a slew of incredible reporting on this topic before and since I read this piece…but. Man. What are we doing?

“Part of what keeps us sane is other people’s perspectives, which are often in tension with ours,” says Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI…“When you say something questionable, others will challenge you, ask questions, defy you. It can be annoying, but it keeps us tied to reality, and it is the basis of a healthy democratic citizenry. Truth is intersubjective, meaning that we need other people — their testimony, their experiences, their rationality — to be well informed. And chatbots are not people. They don’t have experience. They are not witness. They are fancy wordplay.”