Things I Like
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Not an article, but a link to a relatively short podcast series about wildfire in the west, created by Montana Public Radio and The University of Montana School of Business. I've been reading and listening to a lot of things about wildfire over the course of the past 11 months or so, mostly because a wildfire started just blocks from my house last September and took out 2500 structures in my area, so I've been trying to understand what it means for us and where we live. This podcast series is, by far, the best thing I've read or listened to on the subject. The host is empathetic, curious, and he talks to a wide range of people and takes on a lot of the complex issues surrounding the current situation. There are no easy answers, but I highly recommend giving this a listen if you want a better understanding of not only how we got here, but also how we can all live with fire going forward.
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This is not a feature of a healthy society. Even before the pandemic pushed things to further extremes, the primacy of consumer identity made customer-service interactions particularly conflagratory. Being corrected by a salesperson, forgotten by a bartender, or brushed off by a flight attendant isn’t just an annoyance—for many people, it is an existential threat to their self-understanding.
I found the history in this article really interesting and also the way in which consuming has become so central to so many identities. I'm not sure it's the only reason people are awful these days, but it's probably part of it.
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The United States government—whether controlled by Democrats, with their love of too-complicated-by-half, means-tested policy solutions; or Republicans, with their love of paperwork-as-punishment; or both, with their collective neglect of the implementation and maintenance of government programs—has not just given up on making benefits easy to understand and easy to receive. It has in many cases purposefully made the system difficult, shifting the burden of public administration onto individuals and discouraging millions of Americans from seeking aid. The government rations public services through perplexing, unfair bureaucratic friction. And when people do not get help designed for them, well, that is their own fault.
A must read on the problems with our programs and systems in this country, we punish those that need help, making it very difficult for them to get it. Other countries don't work this way. I often wonder how many people don't even realize that it doesn't have to be this way.
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Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.
My experience with remote work is that it's so much easier to see who's productive and who's not. When you're judged based on the work and the work alone, not how well you can get along in an office, it also brings a new level of confidence for folks who may lack it and lays bear those we are all talk.
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But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.
This is an older post (based on the date in the url) but it's still quite relevant. And it brings up something I've been thinking about a lot with all the talk of shifting how people work post pandemic and so many people taking breaks and looking to change their work lives, but what happens if we all decide to make less so we can't spend as much and therefore we aren't helping to prop up this system? Personally, I'm spending a lot less, as I slow down for a bit, and I can't help but wonder how our system keeps going if a lot more people do that.
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And that’s when I realized what those bastards in Silicon Valley had done to me. They’d wormed their way into my brain, found the thing that was more important to me than Twitter, and cut the connection.
This piece was so funny, but also so true. I loved how her sons reacted when she wanted back on and how they kept giving her things to read instead.
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It is infuriating. It is also entirely understandable. Some days, as I am reading the news, I feel as if I am drowning. I think most of us do. At least online, we can use our voices and know they can be heard by someone.
Some really good thoughts about the online discourse, I'm still chewing over some of it. Over the course of the last six months I've been offline more than I have in years. I've been trying, not always successfully, to find more activities with people in my community. The difference to my mental health and my brain has been pretty amazing. The lack of constant online chatter means I can think, read deeply, and process what I do choose to take in on a daily basis.
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Caffeine is not the sole cause of our sleep crisis; screens, alcohol (which is as hard on REM sleep as caffeine is on deep sleep), pharmaceuticals, work schedules, noise and light pollution, and anxiety can all play a role in undermining both the duration and quality of our sleep. But here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes – which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.
I enjoyed both the science about caffeine in this piece, but also the history. I didn't know about coffee houses in London at all, I may need to read more about it.
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My Gram, whose mother made these clothes, recalls that her mother just delighted in designing, making, and even playing with the doll and her wardrobe. Apparently my great-grandmother didn’t have much opportunity to play as a child; her hands were necessary for farm work. I love that her sewing and knitting skills allowed her to rediscover her playful side as an adult. They are, after all, practical crafts, intended to clothe and keep us warm, but their fullest expression goes beyond that, entering the realm of art and creative play.
A lovely story and the photos of the clothes, wow! As I've been learning to sew I've started following more pattern makers and sewists and this post is beautiful.
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Just as abstaining from flying for moral reasons won’t stop sea-level rise, one person canceling Prime won’t do much of anything to a multinational corporation’s bottom line. “It’s statistically insignificant to Amazon. They’ll never feel it,” Caine told me. But, he said, “the small businesses in your neighborhood will absolutely feel the addition of a new customer. Individual choices do make a big difference to them.”
I could've quoted several different things in this article, but this one is the one I came back to again and again. My local businesses notice that I'm there, I go out of my way to not buy things on Amazon and I haven't had prime for a long time. Free isn't free, someone is paying a price, and this article illustrates that very well.
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But now, in my late middle age, the check mark serves a different purpose: It is the visible symbol of my realization that who I am is defined by what I do. I am a writer, so I write every day. Maybe you are a writer, too. Maybe you are not. The point still stands. The check mark is more important than whatever comes of the daily work whose completion you’re marking. The first represents actual living; the second, merely a life.
I really enjoyed this article and it's old school way of tracking work done.
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But the paradox and masochism of busyness is also laid bare: the study found that while people aspire to be more like a busy person, they also con- sider the busy person to be less happy. An obsession with busyness also taints how people spend what little leisure time they have, Bellezza said, by wanting leisure to accomplish as much as possible in as little time as possible—called “productivity orientation.”
I've written on this site about my disdain for the word busy and people wanting to be busy all the time and this article really nails how much it's a signal to others that you're important as well as a privilege to bemoan how busy you are.
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This post-pandemic summer is evidently expected to be one long orgiastic reunion, after which, once that’s out of our system, it’s back to work, back to school, to what we used to call “normal.” And if the pandemic had ended, say, last June, after a couple months of lockdown, we probably would’ve returned to our lives with relief and jubilation. But after a year in isolation, I, at least, have gotten acclimated to a different existence—quieter, calmer, and almost entirely devoid of bullshit. If you’d told me in March 2020 that quarantine would last more than a year, I would have been appalled; I can’t imagine how I would’ve reacted if you’d told me, once it ended, I would miss it.
I've been every so slowly getting out and about and being around people. But I'm not gonna lie, I enjoy a quiet, slow life, and so I'm being careful and choosy about what I do. Being busy isn't that great, having time to be thoughtful is so much better and I'm hoping to find a good balance as we "open up."
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But this rosy story about how alcohol made more friendships and advanced civilization comes with two enormous asterisks: All of that was before the advent of liquor, and before humans started regularly drinking alone.
I probably think about alcohol too much, but it's been a problem in my family and so I constantly evaulate what my relationship to it is. I found this to be one of the best articles I've read in a long time, the history is fascinating and I'll be reading the book Julian references, but I also found the difference between Americans and much of the rest of the world fascinating: we drink alone.
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Questions like, “Who’s got the power?” “Who has the money?” You could figure out a dynamic — who was profiting, who was being oppressed. That doesn’t really work anymore, or at least I don’t have the skills to apply that analysis because it’s much more complicated and crazy. I feel like people have just really lost their minds.
I've read both of Bechdel's previous books and want to read her new one, I love her style of writing and drawing, but I was mostly drawn to this interview because of the way in which she talks about how the world has changed over the course of her career. And I completely relate to the above quote. How do things work these days is incredibly opaque and difficult to figure out.