Acquisition | Chris Aldrich

Acquired Breaker – podcast listening & discovery (Breaker)

Listen to the best new podcast episodes with Breaker. Follow your friends to see what they’re listening to, and discover new shows that you’ll love. Like, share, and comment on your favorite episodes. Join the Breaker community and listen to the best stuff!

Downloaded a copy of this to my Android Phone to test out the functionality. Not much hope for using it as a daily driver, but I’m curious how they handle sharing URLs and if it could be used in creating listen posts.

Reminds me that I should throw a few podcast feeds into Indigenous for Android to see how it might work as a podcatcher and whether it would make a good Listen post micropub client.

↬ IndieWeb.org 2020/Austin/fromflowtostock Session (2020-02-22) (#)

Acquired Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)

America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results.

“The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”

In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.

This is a revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.

↬ Ezra Klein Why the media is so polarized — and how it polarizes us (Vox) (2020-01-28) (#)

Acquired Dyson V8 Animal vacuum cleaner

Acquired Dyson V8 Animal vacuum cleaner.

The Dyson V8 Animal stick vacuum is engineered for homes with pets. Captures dust, animal hair and allergens.

I got one of these at Bed Bath & Beyond for $239.00 which was one of the better deals I’ve seen recently. I was loathe to try out yet another vacuum cleaner and didn’t have much hope that anything could win against the inimitable German Shepherd Lily. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen our carpets cleaner! I think the first pass at the living room rug took about two whole dogs’ worth of hair out. How did I manage to live without this for the past two years.

Now if I could just get the Furminator version of this vacuum so we could get it at the source…

Acquired Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell

Acquired Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell (Faber & Faber (2016))

The story of Twelve Apostles is the story of early Christianity: its competing versions of Jesus’s ministry, its countless schisms, and its ultimate evolution from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today in all its forms and permutations. In his quest to understand the underpinnings of the world’s largest religion, Tom Bissell embarks on a years-long pilgrimage to the apostles’ supposed tombs, traveling from Jerusalem and Rome to Turkey, Greece, Spain, France, India, and Kyrgyzstan. Along the way, Bissell uncovers the mysterious and often paradoxical lives of these twelve men and how their identities have taken shape over the course of two millennia. Written with empathy and a rare acumen—and often extremely funny—Apostle is an intellectual, spiritual, and personal adventure fit for believers, scholars, and wanderers alike.

Purchased at UCLA Store for $6.99+tax