“The best way to preserve a child’s vision is to let them see things their way rather than yours”*…
Kira Cook contemplates a series of photos taken by kids of their (unaware or surprised) parents…
… somehow, these malevolent images are borne from the tiny fingers and eyes and perspectives of the ones who love us… most?!
Children, of course, know little to nothing about “crafting” a good portrait. They know naught of symmetry, or contrast, or depth of field. They do, however, know the specific power of finally having control over the rectangular device normally glued to their parents’ hands. They pound that round red button at will, capturing images from their abbreviated heights, their lilliputian thumbs obscuring the lens, often blurring the image with their relentless movement.
These pictures remind us that while we study our children, they study us back. Before we speak, we see. For months before spoken language ever enters the relationship, a child gazes upon its mother for hours, every day. The gaze of the child is the least judgmental, the most accepting. When a child takes a portrait of their parent, there is an absence of so many of the elements that inherently exist in the portraits an adult makes. There is no moralizing, for one. No manipulation. They don’t bother to hide or deny the aspects we normally do in photos. In fact, unlike in every other photographic example, there is a total absence of forethought or editorializing…
More (and more on the) unflattering portraits that do what kids do best, wholeheartedly engage with the present moment: “The Humbling Tyranny of the Photos Our Kids Take of Us,” from @kirahesser in @romper.
* Jacob Liberman
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As we say cheese, we might recall that it was on this date in 1839 that Samuel Morse, a professor of art and painting at the University of the City of New York (now New York University) in Paris to promote his invention of the telegraph, met with Louis Daguerre.
Morse was fascinated by Daguerre’s daguerreotype—the first practical means of photography. Morse wrote a letter to the New York Observer describing the invention, which was published widely in the American press and stoked broad interest in the new technology. On his return to New York, he taught classes in the technique to his colleagues at NYU and others– including Mathew Brady, one of the earliest photographers in American history, famous for his depictions of the Civil War.

“Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair”*…
Mike Konczal unpacks happens when one takes the AEI graphic of items that have had high and low inflation, but extend it to all categories…
This graphic is in the news again:
Its creator is Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, who last posted an update to it in July 2022. He’s been doing a version since at least 2016, and if you read enough economics blogs or content you’ve probably seen some iteration of it.
People are talking about it again after Marc Andreessen posted it under the headline “Why AI Won’t Cause Unemployment.” Andreessen describes what people generally take away from it – blue line capitalism and dynamic, red line government regulations and stagnant…
Matt Yglesias noted on twitter that he’s “come to think it’s misleading — by being very selective in which categories of labor-intensive services it chooses to chart, it’s generated a narrative that relative price shifts are just about government regulation.”
That seems correct to me; these categories are pretty loaded. Let’s see if we can do better by including every possible category… let’s download all of the current Consumer Price Index (CPI) data off the BLS download site…
Since the BLS is constantly changing categories, we have to select the items that exist in both January 2000 and February 2023 to duplicate the chart. That leaves us with 62 categories. Doing a quick glance (and seeing in Perry’s own chart) the year-by-year evolution over time doesn’t really tell us much, so we can go with a simple bar chart for overall change. Let’s chart that here in full:
There are a few key takeaways looking at it this way:
In our version of the AEI chart the number one item isn’t health care but ‘delivery services,’ which is “fees for delivery of items such as letters, documents, and packages at non-US Postal Services facilities.”Think UPS or FedEx. This is pretty far from a government monopoly, indeed it’s the private sector alternative to a government program. But it is services and it is labor intensive.
The biggest thing, to me, isn’t “regulations” but whether it’s a service or a good…
More on how and why that matters in “A Better AEI Graphic of Inflation Over the Past 20 Years.”
* Sam Ewing
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As we ruminate in the rise, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet.
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