I was a child, but adults should know better than to believe that other cultures speak in spells. The concept of “untranslatable words” preserves the idea that the world can never be fully mapped out and expunged of mystery. That’s a comforting thought. It keeps alive the possibility of escape—of something surviving far beyond our everyday experiences.

— Why We Love Untranslatable Words, David Shariatmadari in Lit Hub

One incident stands out in particular. We were about an hour into the lesson and had just graduated from the backroads of the student’s hometown to a two-lane street with steady traffic. The car in front of us had slowed down, signaled, pulled over toward the shoulder, and made a smooth right turn into a shopping complex. Bob was impressed. “See how nicely he positioned that car?” He explained to the girl that that was exactly how it was done. And then a while later, long after the moment had passed, he said quietly, more to himself than to either of us, “I really liked the way he did that.” It had the ring of nostalgia to it.

— Learning About Work Ethic From My High School Driving Instructor, James Somers in The Atlantic

VII. The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem

• What is the minimum amount of technology needed to solve the problem?
• Slim the feature set down so that the product does what it needs to do and no more.

— Calm Technology, Amber Case in Designing Calm Technology

While Bobby, the never-married protagonist of “Company,” would seem at first blush to have little in common with the divorcing Charlie in “Marriage Story,” Driver found both men had a stubborn unwillingness to really confront themselves. When “Marriage Story” begins, Charlie’s wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) has moved on and is moving out, but it takes Charlie ages to realize that things will never go back to normal, and that he is now shouldering a significant loss.

“He can’t name the thing, he can’t express it,” Driver said. “Only through an abstract way can he process it and grieve.”

— Adam Driver Has Put Everything He’s Got On Screen, Kyle Buchanan in New York Times

Hughes cast himself, for the rest of his life, as the gatekeeper of Plath’s work: a snarling, sexy Cerberus. Permission to quote from Plath’s texts was next to impossible to secure, with the estate refusing the right if they disagreed with anything the author wrote; some Plath biographies from the time rely almost entirely on paraphrasing. Hughes made it clear in multiple letters to scholars and friends, some of which were published in newspapers at the time, that his was the definitive stance on Sylvia’s life and work. Moreover, sexy Cerberus had an affair with at least one Plath scholar, the British journalist Emma Tennant.

— What We Don’t Know About Sylvia Plath, Emily Van Duyne in Lit Hub

This is less nostalgia than simply hearkening back to a tonier iteration of Saturday dinner at the country club. And that sort of reaching backward worries me, because the past few years have made clear the perilous line between the glow of nostalgia and the myopia of Making America Great Again. But more saliently, the restaurant industry has endured a reckoning in the past two years, forced to confront the Mario Batalis and Ken Friedmans of the world—revealed as serial harassers and ejected, somewhat forcibly, from their restaurant empires. It has finally started wrestling with its deep issues of inequality: a look at any recent lineup of top restaurants and chefs will show a sudden influx of women and chefs of color into the culinary conversation. In other words, if you feel the desire to play with nostalgia, you’d better be careful about how you use it.

— The Great Regression, Jon Bonné in Taste Cooking

Examples of good news stories about information warfare are rare. Here’s a story about Finland’s quick and comprehensive response to Russian information warfare and interference in western elections.

The Finns introduced programs for schools, businesses, government workers and more to address the problem.

The initiative is just one layer of a multi-pronged, cross-sector approach the country is taking to prepare citizens of all ages for the complex digital landscape of today – and tomorrow. The Nordic country, which shares an 832-mile border with Russia, is acutely aware of what’s at stake if it doesn’t.

There were a couple of articles this week about people behind screens undertaking pain-staking work to protect vulnerable children.

Firstly, there’s this article from The Verge about poorly treated contractors reviewing imagery depicting violence and child abuse for large platforms like Google and Facebook.

Secondly, there’s this investigation by Bellingcat that takes a collection of anonymised images from Europol and finds the precise location and date range in which they were taken through increasingly complex methods.

Tying it all together, I just finished Tinfoil Butterfly this week. From the synopsis:

Tinfoil Butterfly is a seductively scary, chilling exploration of evil—how it sneaks in under your skin, flaring up when you least expect it, how it throttles you and won’t let go.