Linked List: March 19, 2022

Saturday, 19 March 2022

‘Inside the Palace With Mohammed bin Salman’ ★

Graeme Wood, in a remarkable feature for The Atlantic, profiling Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia:

In Washington, many see MBS’s rise as abetted, perhaps even made inevitable, by American support. “There was a moment in time where the international community could have made it clear that the Khashoggi murder was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that we weren’t willing to deal with MBS,” Senator Murphy told me. The Trump administration’s support, when MBS was at his most vulnerable, saved him. “If MBS ultimately becomes king,” Murphy said, “he owes no one bigger than Jared Kushner,” Trump’s personal envoy to the crown prince. (“You Americans think there is something strange about a ruler who sends his unqualified son-in-law to conduct international relations,” one Saudi analyst told me. “For us this is completely normal.”)

What’s New in Shortcuts in iOS 15.4 and MacOS 12.3 ★

Apple support document:

Double-clicking on an item in “Choose From List” now chooses the item and continues running on macOS

Text entry dialogs can now be dismissed with the ⌘+return keyboard shortcut on macOS

These two have been high atop my list of “Have the people making Shortcuts for Mac ever used a Mac?” questions. Glad to see them fixed in a mid-cycle update.

“Get Current Web Page from Safari” now supports retrieving details like name, page contents, and selection on macOS

That’s a big one for a lot of typical automation needs — while you’re doing something in some other app, it’s convenient to get the details of the frontmost Safari tab without having to actually switch back to Safari manually. Truly excited to see how much better Shortcuts will get this year at WWDC.