Nowadays when everyone is on lockdown and there are days with nothing but spaces of time to pass, nights too, and you can make a hot tea or a coffee and sit down but when you look there’s nothing to read. You can’t access those unique voices writing about the things they care about, that are happening to them.

— If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs, TTTThis

Sale goes on to list four ways in which cities should think about slowing traffic down:

1. Cities should not try to move people to facilities but provide facilities where the people are.

2. Cities should be small enough so that inter-community trips, when necessary, could be managed either on foot, by bike, or with some simple subway or trolley system.

3. Cities should attempt to slow down the flow of traffic, particularly with plenty of squares and plazas and parks, places where wheeled vehicles are forced to halt, endpoints that invite stopping and resting.

4. Cities should try to bring home and workplace back together.

— Cities Are Meant to Stop Traffic, Jason Kottke quoting Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1980 book Human Scale

In one of the biggest car-free initiatives of any city in the world, the capital’s mayor announced on Friday that main streets between between London Bridge and Shoreditch, Euston and Waterloo, and Old Street and Holborn, will be limited to buses, pedestrians and cyclists.

— Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased, Matthew Taylor in The Guardian

I was prompted to write this article by the experience of a friend of mine who was somewhat embarrassed by having his full, legal name called out in front of a room full of people who only knew him by another name. The was the result of a software system suffering from precisely the ailment I described: someone used the ’name’ field for the name displayed to kitchen workers who were preparing an order. There was no need for his legal name to be used there, but either the integration was made before the ‘preferred name’ field was added, or the developer of the integration simply didn’t think to use it.

— Names, Legal Names, and Fractally Deferred Responsibility, Nora Codes

So, in adapting on the fly through March and April, the Spinach Bus partners took an ancient flower - evidence of cultivation goes back more than 1,000 years, and seed banks in the Netherlands, the heart of the global industry, have specimens grown continuously since the late 1500s - and ignored much of what had been done before in selling it.

— Mother’s Day Bouquets: How Five Friends Saved a Tulip Farm From Covid-19, Kirk Johnson in The New York Times

Q: Aside from Hudson’s ship, what do we see?

A: Whales and porpoises. One of the earliest sketches we have of Manhattan shows a whale in the Hudson River. The charter of Trinity Church includes a provision specifically saying dead whales found on beaches in the province of New York are property of the church, which could use them to make oil and whale bone. So whales were clearly a meaningful part of the local economy and ecosystem.

— When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries, Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times

But like my friends and I, not everyone browsing Chatroulette is doing so alone-we flipped by the occasional scantily clad couple, the young person ignoring an offscreen parent’s command, or the roommates crowding around a screen, eager for a break from movie marathons and videogames. ‘We have nothing to do, we’re just here like, stuck in here,’ said Hugo, isolating with his roommates Joel and Ignacio in North Carolina. ‘It’s fun conversations. There’s some shit out there, but the people we’ve met… they’re pretty cool.’

— How to Talk to Strangers During Quarantine - VICE

One day I ask Robert Eggers, who directed Pattinson in last year’s The Lighthouse-in which Pattinson plays a man driven to insanity and avian homicide by isolation and loneliness-why he cast Pattinson in his movie. ‘Well,’ Eggers says, from his own solitude in Belfast, ’that paranoid quality about Rob that you kind of feel in his everyday life, I think, is why Josh and Benny wanted him in Good Time and why I thought that he made a lot of sense in The Lighthouse. Although he’s good enough that he can transform. But I think that paranoid quality is something that is special for him.’

— Robert Pattinson in Isolation, Zach Baron in GQ

I can, for example, guarantee that this blog is faster than any Gatsby blog (and much love to the Gatsby team) because there is nothing that a React static site can do that will make it faster than a non-React static site.

— Second-guessing the modern web, Marc Wright

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

— The real Lord of the Flies, Rutner Bregman in The Guardian