alexandra's pile of notes

So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.

Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law — a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. “I went through pure hell just to get turned away,” Staten said. (The property manager disputed Staten’s account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.)

This previous weekend was particularly nuts, with an older gentleman snatched from the streets of Paris' 14th arrondissement on May 1 by men in ski masks. The 14th is a pleasant place—I highly recommend a visit to the catacombs in Place Denfert-Rochereau—and not usually the site of snatch-and-grab operations. The abducted man was apparently the father of someone who had made a packet in crypto. The kidnappers demanded a multimillion-euro ransom from the man's son.

According to Le Monde, the abducted father was taken to a house in a Parisian suburb, where one of the father's fingers was cut off in the course of ransom negotiations. Police feared "other mutilations" if they were unable to find the man, but they did locate and raid the house this weekend, arresting five people in their 20s. (According to the BBC, French police used "phone signals" to locate the house.)

Sounds crazy, but this was the second such incident this year.

It is hard to compete with Woody Guthrie’s timeless list of New Year resolutions from 1943, which includes these ever-relevant goals:

Work more and better. Read lots of good books. Keep hoping machine running. Help win war – beat fascism. Wake up and fight.

An attorney has said that jury selection may be very difficult in Luigi Mangione's murder trial as there is so much public sympathy for the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The real question, then, is not whether there are other timelines; there certainly are. Rather it is why we see only one. Perhaps life or intelligence would not be possible if the branching were too evident to us. Physics is replete with such preconditions for our existence. For instance, if temporal flow did not have a directionality—an arrow of time—there could be no lasting change, no memories, no intelligence, no agency. Keeping other timelines hidden might be of similar importance. Quantum superposition may serve some specialized functions in our bodies, but otherwise it—along with any traces of alternate timelines—is dissipated in biology’s vigorous exchange of material and energy with the environment. The very nature of intelligence is to be selective; we would be paralyzed if we had to assay boundless infinitudes. Rather than holding open all possibilities, a mind must settle—at least tentatively—on one. The effort required to make that choice—and, from there, to act upon it—may be key to giving us at least the subjective feeling of free will.

Pinball Map is an open source, crowdsourced worldwide map of public pinball machines.