Things I Like
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Looking out the airplane window at the great blue sky, I thought about how making friends in midlife, while challenging, might also be a gift, a chance to enlarge one’s world and one’s self. It sometimes feels at 40 as if our lives have assumed their final shape, entrenched as we so often are in our careers and cities and relationships. But to meet new people like Steph—who has already taught me about the Mountain West and what it’s like to grow up in a Mormon community, and who sees me as I am right now, not as who I used to be—is to acknowledge the growing that we all have left to do. When I imagine my life in another 40 years’ time—full of old friends, yes, but also friends that I have yet to meet—it looks like a sketch of heaven indeed.
This piece spoke to me so much! I've found as we've moved twice as adults, importantly, adults not having children, how incredibly hard it is to make friends, true friends. And this article hits so much of it on the head.
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To stop this from happening again, I have come up with a personal Theory of Stuffness, a way to structure and understand my local stuff ecosystem, especially the digital stuff. I divide Stuffworld into the Object (drum machine), the Enhancements (all the extras), and the Experience (sick beats). Another example: The Object is the phone. The Enhancement is the Spotify app. The Experience is that of listening to music. In the past, you might buy a record player and spend 10 years curating a collection of really good jazz albums. You'd read the liner notes and learn new things over time, boring your friends in the process.
So many quotable bits in here, but and I gotta say, thinking about the experience of the stuff and what it brings you is a great idea, I'm gonna use that in the future.
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The first thing to understand is that your nemesis is not your enemy. Or, put differently, your nemesis is more than just an enemy. Rather, the nemesis is an adversary is who is like your dark twin. Even as you battle with the nemesis, you share a kind of DNA. The gaze at your nemesis is like looking into a mirror, but one of those fun house mirrors at the carnival, where everything is both recognizable and distorted.
This made so much sense to me and I can totally look back at my career and see that when I had a nememsis,even if that person never knew it, I was spurred on to do better work.
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Before, I wished that BookCourt would last forever. Now I wish that someone, anyone, will love Books Are Magic as much as I loved BookCourt, that it will be a part of children’s internal maps of their neighborhood, that couples will stroll the aisles together and flirt and marry, or flirt and not marry, but still think about those dates fondly. I hope that some of my booksellers will think of their time at the store as warmly as I think about BookCourt. I hope that my husband and I will get better and better at being bosses, which is a hard thing to learn.
A beautiful piece on both working at a bookstore and owning a bookstore. Also: books are magic.
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That’s the kind of cooking I’d like to do more of in the new year. If I resolve to find those small moments of “all-powerful joy” in the kitchen and out, at my desk and in life, maybe they’ll be more likely to reveal themselves to me.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm a bit tired of cooking so I've been falling back on dishes that I can cook in my sleep. I have a chicken soup recipe that is easy and my partner loves. But I've also spent this winter upping my game with beans, being able to take a type of bean and throw together a soup that is satisfying and delicious and, most of all, easy to cook.
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Move Oregon’s Border’s true purpose is threefold, McCarter told me: First, obviously, to move the border. Second, to send a message to the state legislature “that you’ve got some very unhappy people, and here are the reasons why.” But the third is more subtle: “It provides a vent for all this anger.” McCarter sees himself as a peaceful guy proximate to violent movements.
The best article I've read on the Greater Idaho movement, that acknowledges all the various views and complexity of these issues. Also: that kicker, woof.
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We need to stop thinking a dashing rescuer in a red slicker or yellow fire-resistant shirt should come save us from wildfire. We don’t fight hurricanes. We don’t fight tornadoes. No one assumes there will be an armed defense from an earthquake or a flood. Instead, we bolt our houses to our foundations. We raise our homes on stilts. Now we, Californians of the Anthropocene, need to grow up, take responsibility and stop expecting to be saved.
I've been reading a lot of the long form articles on wild fire as well as listening to podcasts, given where I live and what my area experienced in the fall of 2020, it makes sense. This paragraph is very much a theme I'm seeing emerge from a lot of what I'm reading and listening to. Wild fire is gonna happen and it's up to all of us who live in these regions to start taking some responsibility and stop thinking that it's all the job of government and fire fighters to save us.
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It’s possible that the metaverse idea is too flawed to exist in any incarnation. Connecting services so they can collect our data, track us, and dominate our attention even more completely will likely make the world worse, not better, at least for those of us who aren’t VPs at Meta or Microsoft.
Everything old is new again, at least it feels that way a lot of the time, and with the introduction of the metaverse I fear we aren't seeing anything new, just a rebranding of the same things these companies have been doing for a very long time.
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Americans began thinking about health care decisions this way only recently; during the 1950s polio campaigns, for example, most people saw vaccination as a civic duty. But as the public purse shrunk in the 1980s, politicians insisted that it’s no longer the government’s job to ensure people’s well-being; instead, Americans were to be responsible only for themselves and their own bodies. Entire industries, such as self-help and health foods, have sprung up on the principle that the key to good health lies in individuals making the right choices.
So many things have been laid bare by this pandemic, but one of the biggest is how we treat health and how much the idea that individuals doing what they think is best for themselves is how we should be living. Is there an idea of common good anymore? Do so many not want to acknowledge that we live in a society together and that means we have a responsibility to each other? I've found this the hardest thing to understand during the past two years.
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So ask yourself this: Who would you be if work was no longer the axis of your life? How would your relationship with your close friends and family change, and what role would you serve within your community at large? Whom would you support, how would you interact with the world, and what would you fight for?
I think much of my family doesn't really understand my lack of ambition when it comes to work and career. I've thought for a long time that a job is just that, a job. It provides me with money in exchange for my knowledge work and, if I'm lucky, doesn't overtake the rest of my life. I'm very much not my job and that feeling only grows every day as I cultivate hobbies and connections in my community.
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In his bones, Fuller knows that change is coming as the clock of nature and temporal existence keeps ticking. Old Faithful's eruption seems predictable, reliable and eternal; his tenure in Yellowstone—it's been a longer one than any of his peers in the park's storied history—is ephemeral, he admits, as seasons of memories flash by.
A really lovely piece on a job that may not be existence for much longer. The photos are amazing as well.
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Whether these products achieve that aim is much less certain. What seems more likely than these cameras leading to some semblance of justice is people posting these videos for the same reason we might relate the story of a lost package to a friend: to be heard, to achieve a sense of catharsis.
I absolutely hate it when I walk around my neighborhood thinking about all the doorbells that are cameras, as well as other cameras people have installed. It's kinda awful that we're constantly being surveilled. And I don't think they're at all doing the things people think they're doing.
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Finally, if we are truly serious about protecting the planet, being a good global citizen will take more than driving an electric car or installing solar panels. It means consuming less so that we throw less away. Maybe that means getting by with only one refrigerator or avoiding fast, disposable fashion.
I think a lot about how much is enough, enough clothing, enough yarn for my hobby, enough decorations for the house, etc. And this article, in many ways, expresses a lot of the changes I've been making in my own life this past year. I just bought a book on how to mend demin because I want to make some jeans last that are starting to fail in a few areas and I'm slowing down what I buy and thinking about it a lot. Not just to save money, but also to consume less overall.
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This is Rosen’s savviness brought to tech, a locus of power every bit as consequential as politics. The savvy response is to say everything that’s bad is a humanity problem, or an internet problem, not the result of deliberate choices made by a massive corporation. In the same way that savvy political reporters refuse to acknowledge that, for example, the biggest problem facing the United States is actually the Republican Party, savvy tech commentators won’t take it as a given that Facebook is actually uniquely irresponsible.
Really interesting thoughts on taking the idea of political savviness and applying it to how Facebook is responding to the hard evidence that it is an absolutely awful company.
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What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.
I live in a small town and I can't tell you how hard it is to figure out what is going on in my town. We have only a regional newspaper that is in a deal with Sinclair which skews the news heavily and it ignore the actual civic news that I would love to read. It's a shame and it's no wonder people rely on social media to try and see what's going on.