Kerim's Triptych for Sunday May 21st, 2023

Welcome to the first issue of Kerim's Triptych! Triptych is a free newsletter that delivers 3 items to your email inbox, 3 times a month. An "item" might be a news story, a blog post, a photograph, a video, or something else. The idea is to keep it short and sweet, so nobody feels overwhelmed. I got the idea from Maggie Koerth's short-lived Fellowship of Three Things, and have been planning to do something like it for years, I just couldn't come up with a good title of my own, but I asked ChatGPT for suggestions and even though I didn't like any of them, the word "triptych" jumped out at me, and I thought it would be fun to go with a Hieronymus Bosch theme, so that brings us to:

Item 1: Garden of Earthly Delights

There is a wonderful interactive exhibit of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Garden of Earthly Delights. The exhibit "lets you explore the painting in incredible detail down to the most minute brush strokes, it also includes sound design as you move through various sections of the painting and a series of audio essays describing over 40 areas of the painting!" (source).

Item 2: On Beyond Twitter

Over on my own blog, I have a long post about the newest player in social media: Bluesky and how it differs from Twitter and Mastodon. Here's a taste:

Social media infrastructure has become as crucial for the functioning of democracy as the existence of a free press. I would go so far as to say that having access to social media that is free of hate and lies should be viewed as a human right, akin to having access to clean water. The problem is that nobody has figured out how to achieve this just yet. Do we give all the power to private corporations answerable to shareholders? Do we trust algorithms to make decisions for us? Do we set up small fiefdoms, each run according to their own rules? These are just some of the questions that people are grappling with, and Bluesky and Mastodon have each answered these questions in similar, but different, ways.

Item 3: John Oliver on the Monarchy

I knew that watching John Oliver make fun of the British monarchy would be fun, but what really got me was when he started talking about the monarchy's legacy in the colonies.