The New Yorker recommends a slew of the best books of 2024. I spent more than any hour scanning this, and added far too many books to my booklist.

by Jorge Almazan

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A fascinating discussion of features that make Tokyo a unique and livable city. The discussion of yokochō alleyways is particularly interesting. These narrow streets of tiny two-story bars and restaurants grew from a postwar effort to shut down the black market traffic that centered on Tokyo rail stations. Black-market vendors were removed from their haunts and sent off to new-built market stalls, and these grew into entertainment districts that people like and that show up all the time in movies. This is very on-trend: there’s maybe space for five customers at a time, but rents are low and you can cater to very specialized interests. If you squint, you can see the germ of Robuchon’s atelier and David Chang’s noodle bar.

I’m interested because a small group of us are reviving an old idea of the imaginary city as a view of a hypertext.

Photo: Lan Pham

The Winter Festival of Artisanal Software. Tinderbox, DEVONthink, Scrivener, BBEdit, and lots more. Not to be missed.

People sometimes assure us that there's no need to organize notes, that search will always find what you want.

Not long ago, I read the 12th-century travel book of Benjamin of Tudela. This fellow was a Jew from a small town in Catalonia who, for reasons undisclosed, set out to travel the Mediterranean world. He went to Constantinople, and Baghdad, and Alexandria, and everywhere in between. He always asks, “How many Jews are here? Who are the most accomplished? What do they argue about?” (This was why I ended up traveling with Benjamin: I wanted a footnote to demonstrate that Jews like to argue.)

Four manuscripts of this travel book, which was written in Hebrew, survived the Middle Ages. One of them was printed in 1543; there was demand, perhaps because the Expulsion from Spain had occurred only about 50 years before. Three of the manuscripts were titled with variations of “Travels of Benjamin of Tudela”, but one of them, known as the Roman Manuscript, is titled “Ben Knows.”

The title “Ben Knows” is a truly awful search target. There are lots of Bens, and “know” is a very common verb. For all its early modern popularity among sephardic scholars of the diaspora, Ben Knows would be hard to search for if you hadn’t saved it a good place.

“From one angle her determination to work rather than drink or fuck glints like the single-mindedness that one day becomes greatness. From another angle it looks wrong, but even kingfishers don’t always catch the light in the right way.” — Rosalind Brown, Practice

Don’t miss Porcelain War, a documentary about making art while fighting against the Russian invasion. Now at Coolidge Corner, and lots of other places.

Today is the anniversary of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking.

We recognize that an immense amount of useful information is available digitally, and that tremendous value can be gained by connecting this information. Connected knowledge enables people to create great products, solve important problems and improve themselves.

My paper from Hypertext 2024: A New View.

Hypertext visualizations embed interesting assumptions about the underlying structure of ideas. Few novel approaches to hypertext maps have been presented in recent years. The Gaudí view tessellates the idea plane, exploring an approach to presenting a greater number of notes on the screen, at the cost of restricting the fixity of the visualization: you can move notes, but notes can move themselves.

by Charles King

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An interesting examination of the libretto of Messiah and how it relates to Georgian England, with an emphasis on slavery. Messiah started as Charles Jennens’s commonplace book, with headings on hope, suffering, and redemption. Jennens was a Handel superfan and had money, and he worked out a deal with his favorite composer, whom he call “The Prodigious”. I wish the book said more about the music, but you can’t have everything.

Question: King makes a point that the first contralto aria in the Dublin premiere was “He Was Despised”, and that Mrs. Cibber’s exquisite acting (and, I presume, phrasing) more the compensated for the shortcomings of her voice. But don’t you need an alto in Part I for “For who may abide the day of his coming?” and “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion?”

A documentary biopic of Claude Shannon, the originator of information theory. Because Shannon died in 2001, interviews are reenacted, very plausibly, by John Hutton as Shannon, with other actors as Shannon’s wives and the filmmakers. Shannon hated to be bored, and he was bored a lot; he hated to cheat, and he felt that not working when he was at work was cheating. You can see from this sketch (though it doesn’t mention it) how Shannon could have lived in the same apartment building at Lévi-Strauss, at a time when Lévi-Strauss was desperate to learn about computing, without meeting him. Shannon spent an astonishing amount of time making hilarious toys, including a ski lift between the porch of his shore house and the beach, constructed with Marvin Minsky.