Things I Like
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But I don’t think about other people when I’m adding something to my website. My audience is myself.
I've always thought of the blog section of my site this way. Right now it's the only real section as I've stripped the site back to the bare bones, but when I post links and book round ups or reviews and other things on here, many times it's because I want to remember it. Many people use a service like Pinboard for this, but for some reason I prefer doing so here. And it's been really helpful to me in recent years to think of the site this way, rather than as being for any specific audience.
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Picking up details, thinking about the lives being lived — about how much regret or happiness lives inside the owner of a rag on a fence or a rusted old Honda Cub. About who owns that cat sunning itself in the middle of the road, the cat itself, the road. And about who I am as I pass the cat and who I’ll be remembering it months and years from now. All without judgment, simply observing, wondering, noticing, jostling for a peek inside the clockworks of the world passing by.
I'm woefully behind on reading the articles I've save, but this one spoke to me about how we live, how we notice what's around us, and how we live life. I know that for many this isn't possible as they struggle to survive, but I'm trying to figure out how to slow down and notice more in my own life.
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It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process. (Although yes, there are exceptions).
A wonderful rant from Robin that also brings up some very good points about the web, how hard it is to do on your own and make money from and make it all work. I too love newsletters (see my end of 2020 post for some recommendations) but I also wonder what happens when someone writing for something like Substack closes up shop? Where does all that content go? Will it disappear? Also: this is beautifully done, such a wonderful piece of customized design.
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If staying home with a cold still requires a full day of work or you can’t find a seat at your local coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon, iPhones are not responsible for ruining your life. The novelty and early popularity of smartphones seem to have distracted America from how quickly its laptops were also dissolving much of the boundary between work and home.
A piece from pre covid work from home lock downs that makes a point that I read recently and found myself nodding along to. So many attribute the smart phone to be the problem with being always at work, but I agree with Mull here that it's really the laptop that did this to us. The fact that it all happened at the same time means laptops as problematic often gets overlooked.
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If this tool represented the culmination of our attempts to figure out how to best work together in a digital age, I’d be more concerned, but Slack seems to be more transient. It’s a short-term optimization of our first hasty attempts to make sense of a high-tech professional world that will be followed by more substantial revolutions. The future of office work won’t be found in continuing to reduce the friction involved in messaging but, instead, in figuring out how to avoid the need to send so many messages in the first place.
I feel like I link to Newport a lot, but I find the way he thinks about work really interesting. I also dislike Slack and miss email something fierce at my current job. Slack is the way we communicate and email is a rarity and usually sent as an announcement and then the email is copied into several Slack channels. But I find that email allows for more thoughtful responses and I miss that because not every situation can be done in quickly typed out short fragments.
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We knew we were fortunate to have good jobs—and this was well before our country was facing a pandemic and massive unemployment—but we were facing the existential crisis that comes from spending your days doing something you don’t enjoy and wondering if this is how the next five, ten, 20 years will play out. We were in our thirties, young, but not so young. We’d seen the articles linking sedentary lifestyles to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and misery. We wanted to get out of our respective offices and try something different.
This piece is delightful in so many ways, not least of which the way in which the writer is so honest about th travails they go through and yet still wanting to do it all again.
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But: I’m dissatisfied with the wringing of hands. It’s not that I expect A.M.C.s to arrive just because one might wish. But I do want the courage to seek first principles, and not just the questions. There must be grounds for the positions we take, axioms to interrogate, ones that beg for an internal alignment among our ideas, our politics, our decisions. And, as a separate matter, I want to be unafraid to seek strategic, conciliatory identification of first principles that share some bedrock with those of others whose politics depart from mine.
This is a thought provoking and great piece, I've been thinking about it since I read it.
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Nobody talks seriously about writing the Great American Novel anymore, but Wiseman belongs to a generation that used to, and his body of work, when considered in the manner he lays out above, represents the nearest contemporary equivalent I can think of. Especially when viewed in Wiseman’s terms — as a single, ongoing project — the scope and ambition become panoramic, a national monument. Norman Mailer used to refer to his desire to write the Great American Novel in tragic-heroic terms, casting himself as an Ahab in doomed pursuit of what he called “the big one.” Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if the Great American Novel actually does exist, only it’s not a novel and has been quietly appearing in serialized form on public television for the past 50 years?
I'd never heard of these films until I read this profile, but wow, I now want to watch them. I'm grateful they're on Kanopy so I can see them for myself.
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But it took me a long time to be comfortable with that. And I guess I’m still figuring it all out. Is this place where I’m super vulnerable about relationships? The drama! Or is it where I publish weird little stories that pop into my head? Is it where I focus solely on writing about typography?
This sums up so well the way I feel about this site of mine. What is it? I'm not really sure, but I keep adding to it, dumping my thoughts, things I like, and what I want to hang on to here for future reference.
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We think the story is about what happens in these interior rooms once we get there, about the objects in the room and how we feel about them, about the arguments we have in these rooms, about our desire to stay in or to leave the rooms and which desires we act on, about the things we eat and the times when we fuck, when we sleep and when we can’t sleep and what we say in the blue of the becalmed hours at night if we are still awake and start talking. We think the story is about what goes in the interior rooms when really most of it has already happened before we get there, because most of the story is about whether we get to go inside at all. I think my story is about the small rooms, and it is, but the meaning of that small room is much more the fact that I get to go inside it at all, and less what happens there.
Beautiful writing about what this year has been.
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So much has been written about cancel culture in the past year that weariness sets in just reading the words. What it is, what to call it and whether it even exists are all in dispute. The term is shambolically applied to incidents both online and off that range from vigilante justice to hostile debate to stalking, intimidation and harassment.
So much going on in this piece and I've been thinking about it since I read it. I feel like the history and way in which a lot of different writing and thinking are linked in it is what keeps me thinking about it and how we use the term it's attempting to understand.
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Hedrick’s collaborations with the fall have become a full-fledged campus tradition. She said she spends up to eight hours at a time sculpting the designs, which have become more elaborate with each passing year. The groundskeepers know to steer clear.
This is lovely.
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Making things hygge or koselig is not just about fuzzy blankets and warm beverages. It’s about feeling content — a sense of coziness that is not just physical, but psychological.
I grew up in what is the most like Scandinavia that we have in the US, Minnesota, it's why so many folks who came from Scandinavia settled there. (Full disclosure I'm descended from those people.) But I moved to a rainy climate in graduate school and that tested my metal to be outside in the winter. I can handle the snow and cold, but rain gets me. This year, with what's going on, I'm determined to get outside and I have been more in the last month. It's been very good for my mental health.
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With all this sex and primping, mirrors were associated from early on with vanity and self-obsession, particularly in women. During the medieval period in Europe, paintings of vice would include women gazing into hand mirrors while the skeletons of demons lurked behind them.
This is a really fascinating history of mirrors and how they changed the way people acted and in turn became the first selfies.
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I bought a pole that could hold six feeders at a time. We’ve only gotten drive-through twice in the last eight months, but kept our fly-up fully stocked at all times. Two kinds of suet. A feeder built for woodpeckers. One that could hold whole peanuts for the blue jays; it became a prize the neighborhood squirrels dedicated their lives to claim. A second hummingbird feeder went up after we read they were highly territorial.
I love reading about how people are coping with what's going on this year and this is a beautiful piece on that. I hope that when we get to the other side some of these things remain with us, that instead of thinking of them as coping mechanisms, they become a way we can stop and slow down. Watching the birds, possibly, or whatever it is you've been doing this year.