Fluid Imagination

An eclectic blog, written & curated by Kyle Callahan.

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Keeping the Faith

Constance Callahan, 1947-2026

Round Two: This Time With More Christ

The Architecture & Implications of Thinking Without a Thinker

On Winning the Culture and Losing the Country

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Coding Like a Home Cook

I am the programming equivalent of a home cook.

The exhortation “learn to code” has its foundations in market value. “Learn to code” is suggested as a way up, a way out. “Learn to code” offers economic leverage, professional transformation. “Learn to code” goes on your resume.

But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook”. People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn because they’re bored! Or even because they enjoy spending time with the person who’s teaching them.

The list of reasons to “learn to cook” overflows, and only a handful have anything to do with the marketplace. Cooking reaches beyond buying and selling to touch nearly all of human experience. It connects to domesticity and curiosity; to history and culture; to care and love.

Well, it’s the 21st century now, and I suspect that many of the people you love are waiting inside the pocket computer you are never long without, so I will gently suggest that perhaps coding might connect the same way.

When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen.

— “An app can be a home-cooked meal,” Robin Sloan

Just Steal It From Other Programs

The Trump administration plans to spend at least $900 million for construction projects on the White House grounds, a significantly larger price tag than has been previously reported and one that would be covered primarily by taxpayers, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post. 

Instead of securing money directly from Congress, the records show, the administration has pieced together funding from other agencies and private donors and directed it to a little-known account that typically holds a few million dollars for routine maintenance of the executive mansion.

— “Trump administration set to spend at least $900 million on White House construction,” Washington Post

Unfathomable

We have to sit and listen as men worth unfathomable sums speculate about whether our species will survive their companies’ initial public offerings.

— “I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This.,” Bill McKibben, The New York Times

3.77 Billion

While elections are banned in conventional dictatorships, elections are regularly held in electoral dictatorships. But to ensure their continuous grip on power, the electoral dictators—who identify as presidents and prime ministers—hold uncompetitive and unfair elections after aggressively suppressing political opponents.

In 2016, an estimated 1.94 billion people lived in electoral dictatorships.

In 2025, 3.77 billion people did.

If Republicans retain control of Congress in the midterms, then an electoral dictatorship is likely to emerge in the United States.


— “The Global Rise of Electoral Dictatorships. Is the U.S. Next? Midterms Could Decide,” Ibram X. Kendi, The Emancipator

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