The co-founder of iconic New York Mac computer shop Tekserve has died. I learned about Tekserve after I moved to New York from Berkeley in 2014. My new employer, The Intercept, dealt in sensitive files (e.g. from the Snowden archive of NSA documents) and had a healthy paranoia about buying things like laptops online.

Tekserve was very close to our first office on 5th Ave. The Intercept, funded by the founder of eBay, had a very tech startup-y approach to IT: I was told to walk over there and buy whatever I needed. My boss told me they sold to pretty much all the news media outlets in the city.

I opted for a little Macbook Air with an 11 inch screen, maxed out on RAM and flash storage (I think we still called those SSDs). I also bought an NEC MultiSync monitor (27 inches?) since I'd wanted one of those since I was a teenager, and also because my wife's uncle (by then retired) was an NEC sales rep traveling to the U.S. for many years. And an external keyboard and trackpad.

I remember being awed by the size of the store. I also remember distinctly that there was already another Ryan Tate in the database -- I gave them my name and they asked something like, "OK ya you live on <address in Manhattan>?" And I said no, must be a different Ryan Tate, I live in Brooklyn. (I had probably met this other Ryan Tate, probably it was the chef whose SoHo restaurant Savoy I visited right before it closed, maybe two years before all this, on a trip to NYC, and he came out that night to say hello to his name twin.)

It was probably the nicest, smoothest, most informative sales process I've been through at any computer store. I had done the Apple store thing to buy two Macs at this point, it was fine but always a lot of standing around (this has not changed) and at no point did I feel like someone on staff knew more than me about what I was buying. Tekserve flipped that around. It was all very human. I remember something at some point got mixed up about the monitor but they corrected the mistake on the spot.

I did deal with two Mac stores in Berkeley, M.A.C. on University Ave, which was great but much smaller than Tekserve. Actually they are still around it looks like! When I went there, as I recall, they were up a narrow flight of stairs in a second-floor retail space not even a block from the university. Indie Mac stores always felt a bit like pirate operations in the best way, and M.A.C. definitely was part of that aesthetic. I also got my first Mac from the UC Berkeley computer store (do those exist any more?).

I also patronized my friend Thomas Oh's Mac consultancy, Platinum Systems, also based in Berkeley (I can't remember if they ever had an office). He upgraded my Performa 636CD.

Tekserve went out of business in 2016, under pressure from company-owned Apple Stores, including a spectacular-looking one on 5th Ave.

The Apple Stores were an excellent move for Apple and its customers, but I always thought it was crummy and cheap that Steve Jobs' Apple didn't throw a bone to the indie shops that supported the company for decades, including when it was on the ropes. There's a thing I learned about recently called Record Store Day, where recording labels support indie shops with special vinyl releases and deals. There was a half block line out the door of my local record store for this last year. Apple could have had something similar, with some exclusive windows here and there for indie shops on some products or versions of products.

Anyway, it was nice to read about what a decent person and boss David Lerner was at Tekserve.

Earlier this year, iPhone developers Marco Arment and David Smith sat down to discuss how they efficiently manage their apps as sole proprietors. Arment makes a podcasting app and Smith makes an app for customizing your homescreen with widgets. Both are successful businesses.

One thing that made me a little sad was that both men said they found it important to avoid facilitating direct communication between human beings.

Here's Arment, for example:

I intentionally have not created any way in Overcast for users to write text or post images that would be visible to other users. Because then you have user to user communication, then you have things like harassment, illegal content being posted, takedowns, all sorts of stuff you have to deal with.

And so, you know, and you look at the problem set of a podcast app, it's like I can do 95% of what people want without incurring some of those giant burdens that would require a staff to moderate and things over time.

Smith similarly called it "a massive sort of obligation" to enable features like allowing users to, for example, send pictures into one another's widgets. "So I just don't go near those," he said.

On the one hand, I completely understand where both developers are coming from and can't fault their choice. I've actually been the editor sending a reporter to ask a tech company why they allowed bad behaviors to fester on their platform for so long (if only because others were leveling this criticism). I've become very familiar with how far some powerful people expect platforms to go to police their content, and why that expectation exists.

But I'm also old enough to remember when the internet was a more free and hopeful place, and when connecting people directly — strangers very much included — was considered one of its great superpowers. We've spent the last decade or so becoming intimately familiar with what can go wrong when you connect people online and how to mitigate the risks inherent in doing that.

There are also costs on the other side, though, in creating expectations for how platforms should police communication and in focusing a good chunk of interface design on stopping the worst actors. If we designed parks and cafes and sidewalks to thwart the most malevolent people who might use them, they would be a lot less enjoyable for the rest of us, and much of the web increasingly feels nerfed in this way.

I hold out some hope that the pendulum of conventional tech wisdom will swing the other way soon, and that we can collectively see the value in online spaces that bring people together and find some ways to make it easier for people like Marco and David to build and manage those spaces in a way that feels safe for everyone.

Because I think we've only begun to scratch the surface of how the internet can bring people together to accomplish great things.

Bret Victor in a talk with profound implications for modern communications:

The wrong way to understand a system is to talk about it, to describe it. The right way to understand it is to get in there and model it and explore it. And you can’t do that in words. And so what we have is people are using these very old tools — people are explaining and convincing through reasoning and rhetoric instead of the newer tools of evidence and explorable models. We want a medium that supports that… that is naturally show and tell.

Related:

• Me: The Tyranny of News
• Julia Angwin: Journalistic Lessons for the Algorithmic Age

I was recently one of 20 people laid off from The Intercept, and one of my sources of comfort in the wake of that event has been re-watching Drifting Clouds, a 1996 film from the gifted director Aki Kaurismäki. It portrays a couple who lose their jobs amid recession in early 1990s Finland. There's a great scene set at the closing night of a restaurant where one of the couple works as head waitress. The owner spends her last moments there listening to a band play the sentimental iskelmä song Kohtalon Tuulet, or "Winds of Fate," and watching the aging clientele dance. Subtitles helpfully translate the wistful lyrics into English:

My youth is gone, but bitter I never should be
Happiness I was able to feel
With my friends to accompany me

All of our dreams now faded away
Bringing tears to my eyes

The winds of fate took all that away
All of our dreams never fulfilled

When those winds blow over me some day
You will never see me here again

As the band plays its final notes inside the plush and colorful restaurant, the head waitress, from the cold grays of a Helsinki sidewalk, bundles the owner off into a cab. "Thanks for everything, Ilona," says the owner. "And farewell."

"Goodbye manager," says the head waitress.

It is about as moving a depiction as I've seen of the last moments of a job, of the heartbreaking blend of sentimental humanity and brutal reality.

But really what sticks with me are the lyrics, and how Kaurismäki links the "winds of fate," a kind of death, to the end of a job. It's a perceptive move, because these days our careers feel like a series of hypotheses about how the world will work — and all of them are eventually smashed.

The Intercept I just left is, for example, one in a series that were born and died in my seven and a half years there: The editor in chief who hired me left a few months in and was replaced, the parent company's business model switched from blogs to streaming video, the publication went from for-profit to nonprofit, we housed and then relinquished the Snowden archive, the staff grew and shrank, the focus evolved.

Another provocative media company where I used to work, in the same building as The Intercept, was profitable and thriving until one day it ended up bankrupt because its reporting angered the wrong billionaire.

The couple in Drifting Clouds persevere, even as the setbacks pile up to comical heights, and with some merciful good luck create a new start for themselves. Similarly, change in the media business has done me more favors than harm. When I started college, my expected career track was to start at a small newspaper and hop to a series of progressively larger ones, earning a pittance along the way. By the time I graduated there was an explosion of web publications, then blogs, then digital media juggernauts like BuzzFeed and Vox, nonprofit investigative publications like Pro Publica and The Intercept, then the micro-nonprofits, and now further atomization into the likes of Substack and Patreon-supported publishers. I find these new vistas invigorating.

I'm on record as saying that some post-me Intercept is going to be the best yet, but I'm still proud of the ones I was a part of. My colleagues there (and the contractors and freelancers I worked with) were unbelievably talented and generous human brings, and thanks to them my teams

• revealed hidden NSA listening stations in a New York skyscraper and across the U.S.;
• exposed Google's secret plans for a search engine censored by the Chinese government;
• revealed Facebook's secret blacklist of people and groups too dangerous to praise;
• reported out the biggest-ever leak of files from Chinese authorities;
• explained new forms of surveillance, from tower dumps to your car's onboard computer to plug-in video surveillance networks;
• shined light on Oracle's activities in China;
• carefully redacted, reported out, and published more than 2000 internal NSA documents; and
• caught Zoom lying about encryption.

Yes, the "winds of fate" eventually blew over me, and I got bundled into my metaphorical cab. That was the price of being able to work at a fearless investigative online magazine with the kindest and most capable coworkers I've ever encountered, and it was absolutely worth it. At some point I'll figure out what comes next; hit me up on LinkedIn! In the meantime I'm enjoying some much-deserved beach time with my family this summer, which thankfully comes with some much nicer winds (and sadly not any iskelmä).

—Ryan Tate, June 15, 2022

I make coffee using a stainless steel, double filter, 32 oz french press called the Espro P7. It’s a big improvement over conventional french presses — producing a cleaner cup and keeping coffee hot and insulated — but you may need to substantially alter your brewing process to obtain an equivalent cup of coffee, particularly if you are a bit finicky about coffee. Below are some tips

It brews more quickly

The P7 seems to need about 25 percent less time to extract equivalent flavors from a given amount of coffee than a conventional glass press. I hypothesize this is due to the insulated stainless steel walls keeping the water hotter during the brew process.

You may need a trick to keep the lid on during brewing

The P7 has a double filter exposed to coffee both below and on the side of the plunger. This innovative design is superior to a conventional flat, single filter at removing coffee bean particulate from your brew slurry, but occupies much more space in the press:

With a conventional press, the filter protrudes below the lid only perhaps 1 cm and it is no problem to keep the lid on while brewing by simply retracting the filter into an “up” position. With the P7, retracting the filter in this way creates perhaps 5cm+ protrusion, seriously limiting how full the press can be, particularly if you do not wish the grounds to be touched by the filter. In fact, I had trouble filling even to the “minimum” fill line in the beaker with the lid on and filter attached.

Nonetheless, you can brew the P7 to maximum capacity with the lid on by simply removing the plunger mechanism from the lid prior to the start of brewing. This involves unscrewing the filter from the plunger stem, perhaps five seconds of work (and something you do when cleaning anyway). Then remove the plunger stem. Then you put the lid on by itself. Then you attach the plunger and screw on the filter before brewing.

(In practice you don’t actually remove and re-attach the filter every time you brew. You just never put it on in the first place, after disassembling it to clean, then you attach it when it is time to plunge.)

There is no need to let the coffee fines “settle” after you plunge

With conventional french presses, some connoisseurs like to give 30-60 seconds after they plunge to allow fine particles that made it past the filter to settle on top of the filter as gravity pulls them down; this keeps them out of the dispensed coffee. The technique is suggested by (for example) James Hoffman and Tim Wendelboe. It is superfluous in the Espro P7 in my experience, so you can just skip that step.

(One exception: I have found more darkly roasted beans that are ground quite fine, for drip coffeemakers, can, in fact leave particulate that makes it past even the P7 filters. This is not an issue for me now since I have moved to a slightly coarser grind, see next section.)

You may want to adjust your grind settings

If you are still grinding your beans quite coarse for french press, buying a P7 offers a good excuse to experiment with finer settings, since the filters can handle finer grinds. You may find more desirable flavors are extracted from the coffee at finer grinds, and/or that brew time may be shortened.

Conversely, some people, per Wendelboe and Hoffman above, were already grinding finer for the french press than conventional wisdom has historically dictated, for example all the way down to drip coffee maker levels. They may find that the higher, more even brew temperature of the insulated P7 actually encourages them to go a couple of notches more coarse. This is because the hotter water in the P7 is extracting more flavor from the beans, and, for the same quantity of coffee and brew time as a conventional press, may produce bitter and overexacted coffee, particularly at fine grind settings.

Personally, I use a Baratza Encore burr grinder, and went from a setting of 15 (drip) with my Bodum to a setting of 21 (Chemex) with the P7. The Encore manual suggests a setting of 30-32 for french press, in keeping with traditional advice for conventional press filters.

Consider making more coffee in fewer batches

When I used a Bodum french press, I would make one cup of coffee at a time, three times per morning. This ensured that each cup was hot and properly extacted; the filter on a conventional press exposes too much of the used coffee grind to any liquid left in the beaker, in effect continuing some of the brewing process rather than properly holding the coffee.

With the P7, not only does the coffee retain more heat due to superior insulation, it is also much better sealed off from the coffee at the bottom of the pot. So now I make all three cups at once. It can take me an hour or two to dispense all the coffee and it remains very good.

A note: The P7 is actually bad at making small batches like a single cup of coffee. It retains so much brew under the filter compared to a conventional press that it is pretty inefficient to make a single cup. Espro makes smaller models if you want to make a single cup.

You will “waste” a bit more coffee

Even brewing a near full press of coffee at a time, the P7 seems a bit less efficient than my Bodum, Since the filter rides higher up the sides of the pot, per the picture above, it seems more volume is left outside the filter.

I intended to quantify this difference with a test, but unfortunately my Bodum pot shattered before I could do this. I can report that the P7 yields about 850ml of coffee when you brew 1100ml of water and 61g of coffee beans. Although this seems significantly less efficient than the Bodum, it is completely worth the slight extra waste, in my experience, to get the superior tasting coffee. The espro coffee tastes so much “cleaner” I can’t go back.

Bringing it all together: How I  brew

So given all the above this is specifically what I do to brew an excellent cup of coffee in a P7, in case anyone finds it useful. For context, my water is always 208F (via our trusty Zojirushi pot).

(Remove plunger rod and filter from lid per above if not already separate. I always leave mine separate after washing.)

Ensure the two filters, detached from the lid, are twisted and clicked together. This will make it faster to attach them later.

Grind 61g coffee at medium coarse (Chemex, 21 on Baratza Encore), put into P7 pot.

Put pot on scale, zero scale. Start count up timer.

Fill pot with 1100g (ml) of water, making sure to wet all grounds.

Put lid on pot.

At 1 minute 20 seconds, remove lid, stir grounds, re-attach lid.

At 2 minutes, remove lid, stir again, skim foam from top with a spoon (per Wendelboe in this video at 3:30).

Attach plunger to lid: Put plunger rod through lid, screw filters on to it.

At 3 minutes, place plunger + lid on top of press and press.

Dispense and enjoy coffee, returning to pot for more as needed. It stays pretty hot! In fact, I pour half cups initially in order to let the dispensed coffee cool more rapidly.

Notes

As you can see, I brew at a 1:18 coffee:water ratio, which works well for the beans I buy, which tend to be medium roast and relatively fresh.  I also prefer sweet flavors to bitter; based on what my local coffee shops serve, other folks seem to enjoy more bitter compounds and may like a richer ratio.

I also think finer grinds will probably work well with the P7, given (probably) some adjustments to the timings above, although some beans (darker roasts) seem to “shatter” more in the grinder into finer particles which can escape the P7 filter, and for those you may want to experiment with providing time for the grounds that make it past the P7 filters to settle.

At one point around 2010 I was researching and writing a book while working full time as a gossip blogger at a very fast-paced website. I was basically working both weekdays (on the blog) and weekends (on the book) and as the stress built I coped by making elaborate fatty foods, shaking increasingly esoteric cocktails, and watching the Big Lebowski, which had been something of a touchstone since I saw it as a fifth year senior at Berkeley.

The cocktails and the fatty food paired well with the Lebowski, and the newly invented iPad allowed me to combine these activities in bed, until my laughing and spilling woke up my wife one too many times and my little Lebwoski parties were banished to the couch.

Anyway the book was successfully published and the blogging job gave way to a slightly slower paced magazine/website job. After a breather I released some audio transcription software I had written during the book project. But I never got around to releasing a video I had made in the same period about the Big Lebowski. Until today.

It’s truly the work of a disturbed mind. While watching the movie literally dozens of times I was able to notice, despite the whisky sours and daiquiris and martinis and yes White Russians, that the filmmakers (Coen Brothers) repeated certain phrases and speech patterns a lot, seemingly strategically. This is, it turns out, a known tick of theirs, but I was curious the meaning, and threw myself into compiling examples of the repetition and reading books about the movie.

After I compiled enough examples in a text file I decided to begin splicing copies of those examples out of a digital copy of the film and smushed them together into a sort of rough “supercut” compilation. Then I spent months (very occasionally) obsessively editing and adding new clips to these supercuts. Then I would forget about the project for months or years, watch the last supercut, and make a new, better, version.

Anyway it looks like the last version I made, version 24, was done in January 2019, and the one before that was made in 2015. And it looks pretty good! If you really like the movie maybe give this compilation of repetition a watch, I think it builds and builds and toward the end you may find some examples you had not noticed before. Only 1 minute 48 seconds and pretty fast paced. Enjoy.

For centuries the cost of distributing information polarized publishing between books, which were comprehensive and timeless, and newspapers, which were essentially diffs of information in books. Centuries ago, as today, understanding a newspaper was impossible without a lot of background knowledge, although back then you were more likely to have this context, your leisure options and reading choices being quite constrained.

The cost of printing and distribution, and in particular the cost of books, constrained the availability of material that might bridge this gap and educate readers about topics that were both vital and complex  — information that was a bit timely and a bit deep, with a medium shelf life, neither entirely fresh nor perfectly comprehensive. This sort of information, with the potential to quickly educate the citizenry, particularly as society grew ever more complicated, tended to get published only when there was a particularly strong political or commercial imperative to justify the cost. Revolutionary era pamphleteers, door to door encyclopedia salesmen, and independent product guides like the Whole Earth Catalog come to mind. 

For some reason, 25 years into the age of widespread internet use, we have only begun to disrupt this paradigm. In fact, news has proliferated online, and in this medium tends to provide little to no additional background information as compared to print, offering an occasional hyperlink that provides precious little additional context, and mostly contemporaneous context at that (that is, news articles tend to link to other news articles or to press releases or the like). Many of the new information forms that have emerged online only serve to heighten the importance of news or even more ephemeral information: Aggregators like Reddit (adding only importance ranking and brief comments), social networks like Twitter and Facebook (heavy on opinion and personal moments), and the democratic cinema of YouTube (tending toward the viral and off-kilter). Books, meanwhile, seem to have changed very little online, although their digitization has made them more conveniently available, and, arguably, slightly widened the number of authors of which a given reader avails herself.

This state of affairs is odd, given that the web was created by a scientist with the specific complaint that “keeping a book up to date becomes impractical,” in particular when organiziing “general information about [nuclear] accelerators and experiments,” which would seem to envision a platform that accomplishes quite a bit more than circulating newspaper articles.

But if you’re attentive you can start to see examples of how the web can foster new forms of information that go further than news in educating citizens, providing a deeper understanding  on a range of topics before, or in the absence of, relevant books. To wit:

• Wikipedia - A resource that is both criminally underfunded and routinely underestimated but which nevertheless dominates both the Google results and reader mindshare for any given topic. Why? Because it takes the time to go deeper (and thus more educational) than news; because it organizes by topic rather than by what recently happened; and because it has relentlessly honed a useful system for harnessing the work of a distributed team of volunteers (the sort of work news organizations would be wise to engage in more often).
  
  
• StackOverflow - A network of sites that has brought about nothing short of a revolution in how software engineering knowledge is exchanged. The site was consciously designed (per the podcast made by its creators as they created it) to foster knowledge with a considerable shelf life, information that for months or years would surface on Google to help programmers looking for solutions to their challenges. The system of software, rules, and human moderators used to make this happen is so consciously attuned to this goal that it is routinely criticized for being so strict as to border on unwelcoming. And at times the site fails to keep pace with the rapidly churning world of software libraries that have become central to applied computer science. But no one has argued that StackOverflow failed to achieve its primary goal. Its business model, the last time I checked, revolved around helping tech companies hire engineers.
  
  
• Wirecutter - A site that creates product guides with a shelf life of approximately one year and which has changed how many people buy things online. Wirecutter has become so widely used and imitated that it’s easy to forget that this format had to be invented, and invented at that by Brian Lam, who as editor of Gizmodo had overseen the production of a great many reviews with much narrower scope and a much shorter shelf life. After he retired from Gizmodo to Hawaii he made a site with a much more laid back pace and, relatedly, with more depth and educational value per article.
  

I think we are going to see more sites that fit this general mold — medium shelf life, between books and articles; greater depth and educational value than news articles, but less than books; relying more on expertise and less on reporting. This is the part of the web, and of publishing, and of the digital world, that really excites me right now. It is where we as a society are going to heal some real systemic weaknesses and build some real strengths. And how we will finally end the tyranny of news.

Before she died last month, Renée French was a nurse at New York Presbyterian Columbia Hospital. At some point before that, she rendered an unforgettable performance in downtown indie film icon Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes as herself, or at least a version of herself with the same name, leafing through a gun magazine in a restaurant. She was poised and smoldering, gracefully insisting, to a persistently helpful waiter, that she be left alone to simply drink her coffee. “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” she says at one point, as he pours an unsolicited refill. “I had it the right color, the right temperature — it was just right.”

Coffee and Cigarettes was released in 2004, but French’s scene was shot some time during the preceding 18 years, during which Jarmusch filmed the movie’s 11 distinct stories. It’s not clear how much acting she subsequently did; IMDB lists just one other performance credit. Presumably, French might have found more work had her performance in Coffee been released sooner. (Jarmusch did try to do so, at one point reportedly nearing a deal to showcase the shorts on MTV before concerns about glorifying smoking scuttled things.)

After Jarmusch memorialized French on his Instagram, photographer Stephen Torton wrote about her recent life, saying in a comment, “Renee was a single mom and a front line nurse who died after months of near round the clock work.“ Another commenter wrote, “ She helped my mom when she was at her lowest during the peak of this pandemic. I’ll be forever grateful for her compassion and love for helping others.” French was a longtime New Yorker, and other friends remembered her working at and patronizing various downtown bars in the 1990s. “She cared about fellow humans,” one wrote. Jarmusch remembered her as “a truly rare and remarkable human being... kind, selfless, beautiful.”

It’s clear, in other social media posts, that French was grappling with the emotional toll of her work. At one point she wrote, as the pandemic waned, “I am struggling coming out of this ‘dream’.” Another time: “Just wanna have a few drinks and SLEEP.“

In the week and a half since I learned of French’s death, my thoughts have repeatedly returned to her. I saw Coffee for the first time maybe a month ago, part of a Jarmusch binge that began in March, as the city began its move indoors. In her work we see that peace is necessary for compassion, that providing solitude is as much an act of love as active care. I wish as a city and community we could have provided Renée with more of these things, and looking at what we together have gone through, and what many brave people have fought for, these last few days, I think they clearly are also needed by our most vulnerable citizens. Let people alone to live in peace, to care for others and to pursue happiness.

I’m noticing a new sort of news site: Supported by philanthropy and reader contributions and focused on a relatively tight niche.

One example would be the venture forthcoming from Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, who will build a team to cover algorithms and “the impact of technology on society.”

Another might be The Trace, focused on gun violence in the U.S.

Then there’s The Appeal, which is zoomed in on local prosecutors across the country.

One obvious benefit of this model is that it can be very attractive to donors, from major individual givers to grant committees to readers and grassroots activists. They get a clearer sense of what they are supporting than they might with a broader news organization. As reader and philanthropic support  becomes more central to the sustainability of journalism, this clarity becomes much more important. At the same time, as advertising revenue falls away, raw scale (pageviews, unique visitors), which has tended to mitigate against journalistic focus, becomes less important.

Another benefit of the microjournalism model is that the community of readers, tipsters, commenters, and social media posters that forms around the site might tend to be more impassioned.

The downside, I’d imagine, might be a lower bound on the size of that community. Of course, a niche site that succeeds can always broaden; Angwin and Larson, for their part, have clearly scoped out a meaty topic beyond algorithms, for example, and envision, as Angwin put it, “a substantial newsroom that aims to publish daily.”

There is, of course, an old microjournalism, but it was and remains commercial — the trades, who cover any conceivable topic where a critical mass of advertisers can be found. At one point during the dot-com downturn of the early aughts, a coworker and I at a tech magazine joked that we’d end up at one of two competing publications we had discovered covering the practice of raising meat goats.

The trades have been notoriously captured by advertisers. By making it easier to raise funds from, solicit information from, and publish to a small community, the internet may have enabled a journalism that is more adversarial than the trades and blessed with more resources and investigative power than the first wave of individual independent bloggers.