Read George F Kennan by Gideon Rachman (ft.com)
John Lewis Gaddis’ biography of the US diplomat works brilliantly as a piece of intellectual history
George Kennan is a rare example of a diplomat who changed history through the power of his ideas and the clarity of his writing. In February 1946, Kennan, the number two at the US embassy in Moscow, sent a “long telegram” to his superiors in Washington DC. At a time when many Americans still regarded the Soviet Union as an ally, Kennan explained, in limpid prose, why there could never be a normal peacetime relationship with the USSR.
This looks like an interesting read.
Read China sends a message with Australian crackdown by Richard McGregor (ft.com)
Pressure by Beijing offers a glimpse of the road map for a more illiberal order
For a glimpse of the future in a world dominated by China, a good starting point is Australia. Beijing’s embassy in Canberra last week handed the local media a short document detailing 14 grievances that China says are the cause of its rapidly deteriorating relations with Australia.
Watched December 1, 2020 - PBS NewsHour full episode from PBS NewsHour
Tuesday on the NewsHour, a look at what President-elect Joe Biden and his team say about their plan to revive the economy, a CDC committee recommends who should receive the earliest doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, and why the pandemic is forcing millennials to move in with their parents.
Replied to Various Updates by Christine DodrillChristine Dodrill (christine.website)
One of the major new features I have in this rewrite is WebMention support. WebMentions allow compatible websites to "mention" my articles or other pages on my main domains by sending a specially formatted HTTP request to mi. I am still in the early stages of integrating mi into my site code, but eventually I hope to have a list of places that articles are mentioned in each post. The WebMention endpoint for my site is https://mi.within.website/api/webmention/accept. I have added WebMention metadata into the HTML source of the blog pages as well as in the Link header as the W3 spec demands. If you encounter any issues with this feature, please let me know so I can get it fixed as soon as possible.
Congratulations on getting Webmentions working! (I love your site btw!) 

There are a bunch of us out here that can send and receive them, you just have to poke around a bit to find the (ever-growing) community. Services like micro.blog and those involved in the IndieWeb will (often, though not always) have support for it. Here’s a short Twitter list of people whose personal sites likely have the ability to send and receive webmentions as well.

One of the largest senders is Brid.gy which sends Webmentions on behalf of services like Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, etc. If you set your site up to syndicate content to those sources and register with Brid.gy, it will send likes, replies, comments, etc. to your site as webmentions. Ideally this is meant to aggregate all the conversation around your posts to your own site.

Are you displaying them on your site as well?

As a visual indicator on posts, I took an extra step to add a Webmention button/badge and a URL field to my posts with a note about webmentions so that people could send them manually even if their platform/CMS isn’t capable of doing it automatically yet. (I don’t have a lot of direct evidence yet that these things help except for edge cases, or when I want to force mentions of my website from my referral logs.)

Oprah meme photo of her pointing at audience members with the overlaid text: You get a webmention, and you get a webmention! Everybody gets a webmention!

 

Replied to a tweet by Stephanie Stimac Web WitchStephanie Stimac Web Witch (Twitter)
Coincidentally I ran across SpaceHey earlier today, and I had the very same thought…

I prefer living in the slightly older blogosphere though. Maybe with some improved infrastructure over what we’ve lost?

Winter Counts and related holiday traditions

Some indigenous American tribes kept annual winter counts which served as both a physical historical account of their year, but served as visual mnemonic devices leveraging a bit of the idea of a drawn memory palace along with spaced repetition by adding a new image to their “journey” each year.

I was reminded about the idea over the weekend by a dreadful, cheeseball Hallmark Holiday movie A Royal Christmas Ball (2017) (please don’t torture yourself by watching it). The two main characters had a Christmas ritual of creating a holiday ornament every year for their Christmas tree with a design that represented something significant in their lives that year. Because most families generally use and reuse the same ornaments every year, the practice becomes a repeated ritual which allows them to reminisce over each ornament every year to remember past years. It’s a common occurrence (at least in Western society) for people to purchase souvenir ornaments when they travel, and these serve the same effect of remembering their past travels.

If others haven’t come across this idea as a fun mnemonic device for the whole family with built in spaced repetition, I recommend you give it a try. Just don’t everyone necessarily make coronavirus ornaments for this year.

Non-Christians could leverage a similar idea for their annual holidays, feasts, or events if they like. Of course, you could follow the Lakota tribe and make a more traditional winter count.

For those interested in some of the further history and description of the idea of an annual count in the framing of mnemotechny, I would recommend LynneKelly’s book Memory Craft or some of her more academic works.