iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 28/09/2026

My student calls Home Depot "the man's Nordstrom's."

Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 28/09/2026

"What's Opera, Doc?" is my absolute favorite animated cartoon. It works on several levels at once, especially if you have seen even an hour of the Ring Cycle in a theater. I collapse laughing every time I see it. I bring it out to watch when things have gotten as bad as they can get.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 25/09/2026

"Opposite of genocide" is the resurrection of the dead. Hey, Bibi buddy, can't you ask your mehadrin haredi pals to arrange that for you? I suppose there is a downside: the Heavenly Bet Din will be a lot harder on you than the ICC. The sentence will be a lot longer, too.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 25/09/2026

Oh, I should add that on my first Opera in the Park, the opera was Carmen. I got really excited when the orchestra played the overture: "Dad, that's the theme song from 'The Bad News Bears!'"

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 24/09/2026

Central Park (NYC) has been doing Shakespeare in the Park since 1954. It is a complete scene. You have to get on a long line at 7-8 AM to wait many hours for the (free) tickets, so you go with friends and food and make a day of it. Performers and buskers work the line for tips. It's fun!

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 24/09/2026

Here, Starbucks doesn't have enough crew to enforce the policy, and the shopping center's security staff is unimpressive. All they can do is escalate to the police, and that's a ding on the store. We have criminalized homelessness in many other public places.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 24/09/2026

The other thing you can do is to restart summer unstaged opera performances in local City parks. I loved those growing up, they are not expensive to do, they give understudies performance opportunities, and you bring opera into the ears of kids and adults who have never heard it before.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 24/09/2026

Here, Starbucks are rental open-plan offices for students. When you come in, you can see rows of laptops and little 10 oz drinks next to each student's place. Not very welcoming. Meanwhile, the employees, understaffed, are racing like mad to fill all the online orders.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 24/09/2026

We all do, at least the living. :-)

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 24/09/2026

Recovering gifted child here. I hope Joe stays on this trajectory. Sometimes ultra-gifted kids like him run out of gas and don't have a non-intellectual way to value themselves or solve personal problems.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 22/09/2026

I just realized this, but Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z"l and William Tyndale have something in common: both died shortly after having translated the Five Books of Moses.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 22/09/2026

California AG Rob Bonta had to balance the equities. Should he get the California legacy film industry a few more bucks, or prevent the formation of a third national right-wing cable news channel during a crucial election period? He picked the film industry, SOB.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 20/09/2026

Righteous anger is not a sin; your introspection in noticing it is a sign that you will have a worthwhile Yom Kippur. You are not going to be one of the "tzadikim anachnu v'lo chatanu" crowd and it will be a merit for you. G'mar chatimah tovah!

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 20/09/2026

If he builds two of them and paints them gold, he can put a McDonald's at their base.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 20/09/2026

That was the glory of the 1970s: you could get any kind of informal part-time work - say, in a burger restaurant, a picture framing shop, or as a museum guard - and make enough to keep you going and do something meaningful on the side, like art or music. Those times are long gone.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 19/09/2026

China has successfully synthesized a dihydrogen monoxide lookalike: hydrogen hydroxide. We must intensify our efforts!

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Reposted by Jonathan Cohen

Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco @joshpizpom.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

EXC: 90 programmes in Edinburgh University's College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences are to be closed. The casualties, which include 48 language and literature programmes, will be 'taught out', w/ no admissions after 2027. @heraldscotland.bsky.social www.heraldscotland.com/news/2655839...

heraldscotland.com

Ninety programmes to close at leading university as savings plan takes shape

According to the document, a total of 90 programmes will be “taught out” over the next several years, including 48 in the School of Language.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 16/09/2026

That antisemitism is about social exclusion, not just confrontation. In the early 1950s, a close relative, after he passed his bar exam, could not land a job with any of the white-shoe firms because he was Jewish. If they had taken him, he would have experienced suspicion and microaggressions.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 16/09/2026

I surmise that the sales are supposed to slide in under the wire before the 120th Congress is seated in January.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 15/09/2026

I have no idea why anyone likes Driscoll's blueberries, other than their dominance in U.S. markets. They are hard, tart little blue pebbles that have to be macerated in simple syrup to create the pretense that they're edible.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 14/09/2026

Santa Claus may be able to help on this question.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 12/09/2026

Add USENET, and you are on! I think for all the fallibility and "uncoolness" of those providers and their clientele, they represented a degree of personal engagement and a willingness to explore and create that isn't here now. Here, it's television with a "buy" button.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 11/09/2026

I want to know where I can get the quilt, or at least the pattern! I have a friend who studies Francophonie and would love it.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 11/09/2026

At $39.95 a throw, even for the copy made of electrons (the alternative has protons and neutrons, too), I will have to wait and see what the future holds.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 11/09/2026

Now, after a couple of inconclusive "culture wars," the State is finally taking academics at their word and is trying to extirpate them. To replace them, the State is queuing up factories to turn out little Straussians and neocons. I don't know what the outcome will be.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 11/09/2026

I wish I had heard the lecture. The interesting part (in my narrative): the decades-long period when academics asserted that they could not/would not serve State interests, claiming they were subversive/transgressive.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 10/09/2026

www.proliteracy.org/wp-content/u...

proliteracy.org

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 10/09/2026

Proliteracy (a major literacy org.) says that "59 million US adults have literacy skills at or below Level 1—the lowest level. They can understand very short, simple sentences, such as seeing from a job listing whether the work is during the day or at night, or locating a phone number on a sign."

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 10/09/2026

These are some of the most tortured business relations since the days of interlocking directorates.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 09/09/2026

Is it possible the falloff has an economic basis—IOW, that subscribers are increasingly worse off financially? I know my monthly newsletter subscriptions are the first thing I will have to cut back on if money gets tighter.

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Reposted by Jonathan Cohen

Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Standard 206 required law schools, as a condition of accreditation, to take meaningful action to ensure the legal profession is accessible to all qualified and talented individuals, especially Black people and and other PoC, women, LGBTQ+ people underrepresented in law schools and legal profession.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 06/09/2026

If G-d wants to give the Israelites exotic, virulent skin diseases (Deuteronomy 28), why did He create board-certified dermatologists?

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 06/09/2026

Killfiles and scorefiles. 35-year-old technology, known-good implementation (trn). Why not now?

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Reposted by Jonathan Cohen

Jason Scott @textfiles.com · 05/09/2026

You know, honestly, more than monetary donations, if somebody worked at a company that had access to a lot of 18 terabyte and larger hard drives and could talk to us, that's where we are really suffering. The internet archive has no special priority in buying hard drives and those things are insane.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 05/09/2026

While researching a bit of frippery, I found it was made in Montréal. When I typed in that I wanted it shipped to the U.S., two tariffs popped up in the shopping cart, and suddenly the frippery cost 160% more. A first-world problem, but I hope this nonsensical trade war ends. Frippery conquers all!

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 05/09/2026

Now that the authorities of many X States, under pressure from politicians, are shedding humanities courses as fast as a dog sheds on your couch, there will be substantial differences between its offerings and those of its private counterparts.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 05/09/2026

I know about most of the destruction in the world. We are going to be off the climate charts. We have leaders who would sell us out for our lunch money, and we have perhaps 2+ years for the tide to turn. Still, I have some hope. I hope you will, too.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 05/09/2026

The point is that even in chaos and destruction, there may be ways you can do good. The race is not always to the swift; survival is not always to the preppers; and hope is not merely the leftover spirit from Pandora's box. Hope is worth a great deal.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 05/09/2026

They nursed many along, just with what came to hand - a scrap of sausage, etc. They were scarily optimistic. But some of their "graduates" made it to the liberation of the camps. I believe there is a JW in Yad Vashem.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 05/09/2026

So, a couple of Witnesses get out of the boxcars and look around - emaciated slaves, crematoria, etc. They turn to each other with the same thought: This is the worst. The Kingdom of God must be at hand! They weren't thinking about their own safety; they could help the other prisoners.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 05/09/2026

In the 1930s, JWs were Hitler's third most hated minority after Jews and homosexuals. They would not affirm his state, pledge loyalty to him, or do his bidding. He sent them to the camps. JWs have given up on a fixed date for the Second Coming, but believe it will be when things are at their worst.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 05/09/2026

Please stay safe. As it says (more or less) in the Book of Esther, "Perhaps you were put in this position to help [your people]." We don't know everything about the part we play, but it may be more important than we think.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 03/09/2026

"Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Mail Voting Limits" - this could be the inflection point towards hell. Non-doomer viewpoints are welcome and appreciated.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 03/09/2026

Amazing what propaganda can do.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 03/09/2026

Have you tried Emgality? I have had good results - it knocked 3 Imitrex migraines/week down to 1 every 2 weeks. My neurologist and I were overjoyed.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 02/09/2026

Mac-and-cheese is the answer. It shines with aged (not smoked) Gouda! Invite friends over, and if they aren't vegans, they will devour it.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 02/09/2026

RIP Wendell Berry. Regrettably, many in our government and their supporters would cheerfully answer this questionnaire in detail. They might need extra paper and/or extra time.

This white rectangle contains the text of the Wendell Berry (RIP) poem "Questionnaire," which reads as follows:

1. How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons.
2. For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks with the names of your favorite evils and acts of hatred.
3. What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization? Please list the monuments, shrines, and works of art you would most willingly destroy.
4. In the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate? List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without.
5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child. Name, please, the children whom you would be willing to kill.

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Jonathan Cohen @jkcohen.com · 01/09/2026

The issue isn't really the ballroom. It's that the Supreme Court majority, regardless of the facts and law before them, will crown the President the victor and vanquish his opponents. It's as simple, mechanical, and ugly as that.

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