Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Mozi
New app, spearheaded by Ev Williams:
Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL. Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap.
iOS only at the moment, with “Sign in with Apple” as the only supported authentication method. One clever idea is that you can share travel plans and your location, and Mozi will coordinate when you might be in the same area as a friend. From their FAQ:
Why do you need access to my contacts? Will you ever contact people in my phone book?
Never. We ask for access to your contacts so that you can connect with the people you already know on Mozi. In order to see someone on Mozi, you have to both be on Mozi and both have one another saved as iOS contacts. We never send, sell or share any of your information, and we will never contact your people on your behalf. And instead of storing any actual phone numbers, we hash (encrypt) them. This ensures both your number and all your contacts remain anonymized and protected.
I’m in, and so far only have three mutuals. But — all three of them are people whose in-person company I truly enjoy. We’ve all, correctly, got our guards up regarding new “social” platforms that want our personal information, but we’ve collectively become so cynical that I worry people don’t even want to try fun new things like Mozi. Ev Williams is uniquely placed to make something like this happen in a trustworthy way.
I’m mostly rooting for Mozi to succeed because I think something like this could work in a way that has nothing but upsides, and there’s nothing like it today. But I’m also rooting for Mozi to take off just to burst the absurdity of Kevin Roose’s October piece in the New York Times trying to make the case that Apple “killed social apps” by increasing the privacy controls for our iOS contacts. I gladly shared my whole contacts list with Mozi, based on the track record of the team and the FAQ quoted above.
Speaking of the NYT, Erin Griffith wrote a profile of Williams for the launch of Mozi:
“The internet did make us more connected,” he said in an interview in Menlo Park, Calif. “It just also made us more divided. It made us more everything.”
Mozi is meant to be a utility. If a user wants to message a friend in the app to make plans, the app directs them to the phone’s texting app.
macOS 15.2
macOS 14.7.2 and macOS 13.7.2
Zach Baron Interviews David Letterman for GQ: ‘Interviewing the Interview Master’
One last Letterman link: a new half-hour interview about interviewing with Zach Baron for GQ. I watched the first minute and I’m saving the rest for tonight:
Baron: If you read pieces about you — pieces of press, profile stuff like that — from the ’80s and ’90s, even a little bit in the 2000s, you were often portrayed as miserable.
Letterman: (laughs uproariously) Yeah, that’s great. I love that.
The Amazing Kreskin Dies at 89
The New York Times:
George J. Kresge, who as the entertainer the Amazing Kreskin used mentalist tricks to dazzle audiences as he rose to fame on late-night television in the 1970s, died on Tuesday in Wayne, N.J. He was 89. A close friend, Meir Yedid, said the death, at an assisted living facility, was from complications of dementia.
Kreskin’s feats included divining details of strangers’ personal lives and guessing at playing cards chosen randomly from a deck. And he had a classic trick at live shows: entrusting audience members to hide his paycheck in the auditorium, and then relying on his instincts to find it — or else going without payment for a night.
Somehow his first appearance with Letterman wasn’t until 1990, but after that he was a regular. Just a canonical “late night talk show guest” of that era. He was good at the mentalist tricks, but what made Kreskin great — amazing even — was that he was just such a weird, fun, and funny guy.