Weymouth NJ Church
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Wait, a new Quaker blog, what retroness is this?
February 14, 2018
And just as we’re talking about the continued downward entropy of blogging, here’s a new Quaker blog. Isaac Smith of Frederick (Md.) Meeting (and Twitter) has the first post in a time-limited, “pop-up” blog. He’s calling it “The Anarchy of the Ranters.” I’ll overlook the similarity to this blog’s name in the hope that the people who have been dropping comments on mine since 2004 asking about the difference between Quakers and Ranters will start bothering him now.
The first post is “Defensiveness as a Theological Problem for Friends,” a good blogging debut.
The question of who belongs in the church, which has always been of central importance, is what’s at stake here, and unfortunately, it is often being answered in ways that are hurtful and alienating — the opposite of what the gospel promises.
Jason Kottke on blogging, 2018 edition
February 14, 2018
Two things on the internet that I consistently like are NeimanLab and Kottke.org. The former is Harvard’s journalism foundation and its associated blog. They consistently publish thought-provoking lessons from media pioneers. If there’s an interesting online publishing model being tried, Neiman Labs will profile it. Kottke is one of the original old school blogs. Jason highlights things that are interesting to him and by and large, most of the posts happen to be interesting to me. He’s also one of the few breakout blogging stars who has kept going.
So today Neiman Labs posted an interview with Jason Kottke. Of course I like it.
There are a few things that Jason has done that I find remarkable. One is that he’s threaded an almost impossible path that has held back the centrifugal forces of the modern internet. He never went big and he never went small. By big, I mean he never tried to ramp his site up to become a media empire. No venture capitalist money, no clickbait headlines, no pivot to video or other trendy media chimera. He also didn’t go small: his blog has never been a confessional. While that traffic when to Facebook, his kind of curated links and thoughts is something that still works best as a blog.
Although I don’t blog myself too much anymore, I do think a lot about media models for Friends Journal. Its reliance on non-professional opinion writing prefigured blogs. It’s a fully digital magazine now, even as it continues as a print magazine. The membership model Kottke talks about (and Neiman Labs frequently profiles) is a likely one for us going into the long term.
Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20
November Flashbacks
November 4, 2017
Once a month I’m doing flashbacks to past eras in my blog.
One Year Ago: November 2016
A year ago the shock to the system was Trump’s election. One reaction of mine was a promise to blog more; I set up the system but I’m still not as frictionless about it as I’d like.
Waking Up to President Trump: We do not get to choose our era or the challenges it throws at us. Only someone with historical amnesia would say this is unprecedented in our history. The enslavement of millions and the genocide of millions more are dark stains indelibly soaked into the very founding of the nation. But much will change, particularly our naivity and false optimism in an inevitable forward progress of our national story.
Five Years Ago: November 2012
Five years ago I wrote about how I had been blogging for fifteen years. Do the math: it’s now 20 frigging years since I started blogging.
Fifteen Years of Blogging: I keep double-checking the math but it keeps adding up. In November 1997 I added a feature to my two-year-old peace website. I called this new entity Nonviolence Web Upfront and updated it weekly with original features and curated links to the best online pacifist writing. I wrote a retrospective of the “early blogging days” in 2005 that talks about how it came about and gives some context about the proto-blogs happening back in 1997.
Ten Years Ago: November 2007
Freelancing and working the overnight shift at Shoprite, I wondered if my Quakerness was hopelessly useless to my new circumstances.
Who are we part one (just what pamphlet do I give the tattooed ex-con?): I love the fellow who gave the message and I appreciated his ministry. But the whole time I wondered how this would sound to people I know now, like the friendly but hot-tempered Puerto Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in federal prison, now working two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and trying to stay out of trouble. How does the theory of our theology fit into a code of conduct that doesn’t start off assuming middle class norms.
Twenty Years Ago: November 1997
Four years before 9/11, I was asking how we could break the cycle of terrorism.
How Come the U.S. Trains All the Terrorists?: It would seem a simple case of U.S. militarism coming home to roost, but it is not so simple and it is not uncommon. Follow most trails of terrorism and you’ll find United States government funding somewhere in the recent past.
Expanding the Quaker writing pool
November 3, 2017
Shhh: there have been a few times lately when I wish we had more options when choosing articles forFriends Journal issues. Yes yes, we did notice that the feature article contributors for the October issue on “Conscience” were all older men and that the topics were perhaps a bit too familiar for Friends Journal (nonviolence, civil disobedience, conscientious objection). They were all great articles. And I think cliches can be important (see footnote below) for a publication like ours. But yeah.
I had hoped the idea of conscience would leap up to new writers, especially in our current political climate, and that the articles might serve as a bridge between 1960s Quaker activism and today. Sometimes our themes inspire writers and sometimes they don’t.
I’ve occasionally written Quakerranter blog posts about upcoming submission opportunities but I’d like to make it more official and post these every month from the Friends Journal website. We’re calling the feature “From the Editor’s Desk.”
I’d also like you all to share these with people you think should be writing for us, especially if they’re new writers coming from different perspectives. Diversities of all kind are always welcome.
I was a Quaker blogger (and thus writer) for many years and I worked for Friends Journal for part of that time but I only once sent in a submission before I became senior editor. Why? Was I waiting to be asked? Was I unsure what I might write about? Whatever the reason, we need to always be finding and encouraging new people. Some of the most interesting articles we’ve published started after one of our fans shared an upcoming issue topic with someone who was outside of our network. My goal with these posts is really to encourage you all to share these in emails and on your Facebook walls so we can keep expanding the Quaker writer universe.
Here’s the first one: a call for writers for the March 2018 issue on Quakers and the Holy Land.
Friends Journal Footnote: Every once in a while we’ll get some article in and I’ll sigh because I can remember a previous article that covered the same ground. When I go to look it up I realize that the earlier article was published fifteen or more years ago. We have new readers every year and it’s okay to circle around to core themes every decade or so. We also need to remember the interesting people and incidents that happened long enough ago because our collective memory is always in the process of fading. I’m a peacenik longtime Quaker so I knew Dan Seeger was the named defendant in a major landmark Supreme Court decision in the 1960s, for example, but I don’t assume most Friends knew this. It’s still a cool story. It still inspires. It’s important to keep the story alive.
Essential Mac Apps 2017
November 1, 2017
Oh dear: a few weeks ago Wess Daniels started a Twitter discussion about the new Mac app Cardhop. In the thread he asked me about other apps which apps I find essential. I thought I’d type up something in ten minutes but then the draft post kept growing. I’m sure I still missed some. I guess I didn’t realize how particular I am about my computing environment. 🙂
Bartender
Okay, maybe it’s a bit OCD but I hate cluttered Mac menubars running along the top of my screen. This app was just rebuilt for High Sierra and is an essential tool. I have most everything hidden and have set up a keyboard shortcut (the little-used right “option” key) to toggle the full menubar icon set.
Fantastical
This is my favorite calendar app. It sits in the menubar, ready to give a beautiful agenda view with just a single tap. It can open up to a full view. Manage calendars is easy and the natural language processing is suburb.
Cardhop
Just released, this is Fantastical’s newest cousin, an app for managing contacts from Flexibits. It works with whatever you have set up for contacts on your Mac (I use Google but iCloud is fine too). Given Flexibit’s track record, and Cardhop’s resemblance to the discontinued Cobook, this is likely to be a winner for me.
Favioconographer
I’ve been a Chrome user since the week it debuted but lately I’ve been trying to switch to Safari, wanting its superior battery management and syncing of bookmarks and tabs with iOS. Many of Safari’s annoyances have lessoned as Apple itinerated with each release. There are enough extensions now that I can get by. I am, though, one of those weird people whom John Gruber identified: wannabee Safari users who really like Favicons in tabs. Fortunately, Faviconographer has come along. There are occasional oddities (floating icons, icons that don’t match site) but overall it improves the Safari experience enough to make it a win over Chrome.
1Blocker for Mac
Uses the built-in content filtering system built into Mac Safari. Good syncing with the iOS app. “Content filtering” (aka blocking) has become an important security concern and let’s face it: the web runs so much better without all the crap that some sites throw in along with their content. You can whitelist sites that respect readers. Honorable mention in Chrome or as an alternative for Safari is uBlock Origin, a great blocker (and distinct from standard uBlock, which I don’t recommend).
Karabiner-Elements
Lets you remap the generally useless Caps Lock key. I have it mapped Brett-Terpstra style so that a single click opens Spotlight search and a hold and click acts as a hyper key (imagine a shift key that you can use for any keystroke).
BetterTouchTool
Remap keys and key combinations. With Karabiner, I can use it to have Capslock‑C open a particular app, for instance.
Tunnelbear
I used to think VPNs were a luxury but with people hacking in on public Wi-Fi accounts and the loss of privacy, I’ve signed up for this easy-to-use VPN service. One account can power multiple devices so my laptop and phone are secured.
Evernote
It’s been around for years. I currently have 13,000 notes stored in Evernote, including every issue of the magazine I work for going back to the mid-1950s. There was a time a few years ago when I was worried for Evernote, as it kept chasing quirky side projects as its main app got buggier and buggier. But they’ve had a shake-up, ditched the distractions and have built the service back up. Most of my projects are organized with Evernote.
Ulysses
There are a gazillion writing apps out there that combine Markdown writing syntax with minimalist interfaces (Bear, IaWriter, Byword) but Ulysses has edged its way to being my favorite, with quick syncing and ability to post directly to WordPress.
Todoist
There are also a gazillion task managers. Todoist does a good job of keeping projects that need due dates in order.
1Password
You should be using a password manager. Repeat: you should be using a password manager. 1Password is rock solid. They’ve recently changed their economic model and strongly favor subscription accounts. While I’ve tried to limit just how many auto-pulling subscriptions I have, I understand the rationale and have switched.
Airmail
A great email app for Mac and iOS that can display and sort your Gmail accounts (and others too). Almost too many options if you’re the kind to fiddle with that sort of thing but easy to get started and great with just the defaults.
Google and Apple and clouds
The Big‑G should get a shoutout: it powers the databases for my email, calendar, contacts, and photos. All my hardware has migrated over to Apple, helped in large part by the opening up of its ecosystem to third-party apps.
What’s also useful to note is that all of the data-storing services are cloud based. If my phone or laptop disappeared, I could borrow a new one and be up to speed almost immediately. Since many of these apps run on databases run by Google, I can also switch apps or even have multiple apps accessing the same information for different purposes. There’s a real freedom to the app ecosystem these days.
October flashbacks: Turns of phrases, Quaker political influence, and of course Halloween
October 12, 2017
Apparently I once had an idea of periodically sharing posts from earlier eras of my blogs: flashbacks to archival posts written one, five, and ten years earlier. Maybe I could manage this once a month.
1 Year Ago: October 2016
Bring people to Christ / Leave them there: One thing I love to do is track back on cultural Quaker turns of phrase. Here I looked at a phrase sometimes attributed to George Fox and find a largely forgotten British Friend who laid much of the groundwork for Quaker modernism and the uniting of American Quakers.
5 Years: October 2012
The secret decoder ring for Red and Blue states: Discussion of the Quaker cultural influence of American voting patterns based on David Hackett Fischer’s fascinating (if over-argued) book Albion’s Seed.
10 Years: October 2007
An Autumnal Halloween: A family post, pictures of kids posted to the web long before Instagram was founded.
The lost A List
October 11, 2017
As A List Hollywood stars come out to tell their Harvey Weinstein couch harassment stories, I have to wonder about those who didn’t make it through after saying no — actresses who saw their roles evaporate and left acting. The New York Times headlines profiling Weinstein accusers touts Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie but also introduces us a woman who is now a psychology professor in Colorado. How many better actresses and strong-minded women would there be in Hollywood if so many hadn’t been forced out?
I thought of this after reading by a tweet from the actress Rose Marie. She’s best known as one of the jovial sidekicks from the 1960s’ Dick Van Dyke Show. Not to diminish the rest of the cast, but Rose Marie is one of the best reasons to watch the show, especially during those rare moments she’s allowed to step out from her character’s wisecracking spinster persona and sing or act. On Twitter, she shared that she lost a music contract in the 1950s because she wouldn’t sleep with a producer.
What if a talented actress like Rose Marie had been given more opportunities and wasn’t just known for a supporting part in a old sitcom? What if the psychology professor had gotten the Shakespeare in Love lead? (Imagine a world where Paltrow was only known to 800 or so Facebook friends for too-perfect family pics and memes from dubious health sites.)
Disclaimer: This is a minor point compared with any actresses who weren’t able to deal with the harassment and the industry silencing machinery. I’m sure there are tragedies that are more than just career pivots.