The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I’ve deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I’ve tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings. I think I used to be a gaping maw that inhaled current affairs from near and far and exhaled analysis and anxiety. I try to do less of that. Touch grass, if you will. I still read a lot but I try to read fewer feeds and more books and long articles. Is it helping? Do I still feel obligated to have a working knowledge on this or that current thing? Well…

The West has managed to make the deaths of thousands of people in Israel-Palestine about itself, in more than just an original sin Sykes-Picot kind of way. The editorial board at The New York Times equivocated on whether demanding Israel give a humanitarian pause is a necessary. The New York Times then hosted a gala for the Committee To Protect Journalists, which is awkward because Israel has racked up a body count of journalists of late. A demonstration against that hypocrisy was well covered by none other than Nan Goldin. Meanwhile in Germany, various liberal Jewish artists are being de-platformed by German institutions for criticising the actions of the State of Israel. One example here.

Institutions fail us. This long and somewhat indulgent piece by the painfully former Editorial page editor of The New York Times does read like a bitter post-breakup album. However, it is at least interesting as another account of the paper’s inability to step up to the Trump moment. God only knows what’s going on in there right now.

The Verge has published a collection looking back at the year that former institution Twitter died, with fun editorial design straight from the freshest parts of Topolsky-era Bloomberg Businessweek. See, right there. I should excise the accumulated media cack from brain that has me making references like that. Anyway, I liked this bit on on the way the feel of the place changed from the perspective of the employees.

An institution that is failing in perhaps a more classical way is Google. It is grinding to a halt under the burden of its own bullshit, with no elon ex machina required to drive the plot forward at all. Yet another former employee piece clarifies why the company just can’t do anything any more. Surely related is the threat posed to their very first product: search engines, by the very same AI product that they’re failing to innovate on themselves. Though many of their products are no longer fit for their original purpose, humans still set up shop in their decaying husks to do surprising things. They leave Google reviews appraising a remote highway bridge based on how viable it is to sleep underneath.

Humans often surprise themselves in their tender responses to uncaring and cruel things. We’re the baby monkeys clinging to the cloth mother that, whilst giving the outward appearance of care provides nothing. We’ve created a world of diverse objects that dwarf us in size and are unyieldingly hard and astonishingly fast. Somehow we live amongst them. We are mown down by speeding cars in astounding numbers. Unlike splattered hedgehogs and may bugs our mourners leave written records. That’s something we count on and that we feel sets us apart. It alarms us when people die, but also when libraries burn, or when they are hacked to such an extent that even their physical hordes are made inaccessible to us.

The library will rebuild the digital shell around its treasures, but so many things are lost every day. The more you think about how much is lost in the pulping process by which breaking news slides through zeitgeist to neo-nostalgia to the era at an end before being pressed flat and slipped between the pages of History, from a short while ago to the beginning of time… the more you hallow the archivist. Search the records of the Old Bailey and find the indictment of 1726 against “Samuel Johnson, alias King Cabbage” for stealing “4 Coach Seats, the Goods of Bridget Buckley” and kiss the hands of the cataloguer. Can you read it? The English language is so promiscuous that it has nodded in wave upon wave practically every grammatical device and shred of vocabulary that has washed upon its rainy shores, just like so many other languages.

The amount of nosepickings I’m finding in library books these days. — Lorenzo Dervani, London