Things I Like
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But that is wrong. Mastery isn’t our default state of being. Mastery is a great accomplishment, achieved only temporarily and with tremendous help from other people. From birth, we fitfully climb the ladder from childlike clumsiness to adult virtuosity. Loss of that dexterity is part of life. We use our prime years to help the weak, to raise our own children, to ease our parents into old age. Or at least we should.
I wish we weren't as blustery and quick to hide anything that's wrong in this country, and this piece illustrates how much it hurts us to be this way. We all need others and we all have weaknesses and I feel like this year of all years has reminded many of us of that.
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Consider instead a system that externalizes work. Following the lead of software developers, we might use virtual task boards, where every task is represented by a card that specifies who is doing the work, and is pinned under a column indicating its status. With a quick glance, you can now ascertain everything going on within your team and ask meaningful questions about how much work any one person should tackle at a time. With this setup, optimization becomes possible.
I found the history in this article really interesting, but I'm not so sure I agree with the conclusion. As someone who helps make software, I think it's very easy to LARP your job at times, to spend more time updating things and making it look like you're doing things than actually doing things. One other caveat that I have to note: Newport talks so much about deep work and time blocking and I can't help but wonder if he has a great deal of support in order to do that, meaning someone else is seeing to a lot of the details of life (food, cooking, cleaning) and therefore he doesn't have to.
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What I’ve always believed is that humanity has the capacity to be kinder, more just, more fair, more rational, more reasonable, more tolerant. It is not inevitable. History does not move in a straight line. But if you have enough people of goodwill who are willing to work on behalf of those values, then things can get better. America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold.
There's a lot in this article that had me thinking, but here's one thing that I think sums up Obama better than anything else he said: he's always looking to make things better. What your definition of better is may differ from his, but that feels like a fundamental way he operated while in office.
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Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists.
Solnit expresses better than I ever could my frustration at constantly being told I need to hear what the other side has to say, when the other side never ever wants to hear from me.
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I found this grove of trees not far from my house on an otherwise unspectacular residential road next to the freeway. It’s cedars and oaks and a lot of locusts, which are invasive and weedy but are also very lush and tropical-feeling. This grove is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, and people just drive by it every day.
I'm not a gym person, I prefer to get my exercise in other ways, and walking is my favorite right now. I flirt with running again and again, but I always come back to walking for an hour or so and seeing what I can see with no devices and my own thoughts for company. And I love how Miller talks about walking here.
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I don't normally love interactive scrolly type things, but I really enjoyed the look into the life of Octavia Butler, one of my favorite writers, and how libraries shaped her. I love libraries and one of the hardest parts of the pandemic for me is how they've had to shut down and limit services. And it's so awesome to see how they shaped a writer and gave her space to work, read, and explore.
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We all need to make money to live and that isn't going to change anytime soon. But it's how we make it, and how much we think we need, that creates problems. Who we are steamrolling in an effort to "get ours."
Another newsletter, I know, I know! But Anne Helen Peterson recommended this one and I'm so glad I subscribed. The first issue I received is this one and it hit on so many things I think about so often. What is enough and how much do I really need to be happy are questions I ask a lot, and I realize it's a privilege to even ask them. But I'm much like La Tray, working my way towards decreasing what I need monthly and thinking about getting ahead by being able to have more control over my work life. I also really appreciated pointing out how many people are making ridiculous amounts of money that they really don't need. The system isn't changing any time soon, but it's a very broken system.
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One thing I like about Cunningham’s understanding-based view of technical debt is that it leaves room to justify a big refactor when necessary. If there’s been enough organizational turnover or enough feature creep in a product, then maybe doing a rewrite is the best option so your team has a collective understanding of the code. You can’t expect people to be productive in something that was a culmination of rushed code, poorly understood requirements, and shortcuts made by people who no longer work there. At that point your technical debt balloon has popped, you are in possession of a toxic asset, and it’s time to pay the piper.
This post really hit home with me. I'm living in a situation where the amount of technical debt is overwhelming and the amount of work to clean up and get to where we want to be is overwhelming and it's led to a bit of paralysis. It takes a lot of fortitude and comfort with risk to get out of it and I'm not sure when we'll get to that point.
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That’s my argument in favor of this world, against the determinists. I depend on what I know of human goodness, but also on the flowers and the butterflies and the birds. The otters and the swallows — a lot of their life is just spent having a hell of a good time. The animals, so far as I can understand them, have a great deal to say in favor of life. It’s a good world, still.
There's a lot going on in this piece, but I really enjoyed the push and pull between the two people having the conversation. I'm a big Berry fan, but I think the challenges that DeChristopher is pushing him on are things we have to think about and I'm not sure everyone is prepared to do that, including Berry.
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What happens if what you once used to make sense of things no longer helps you make sense of things? What happens if the patterns and habits and metaphors we lean on do not serve us in the moments we need them? What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? What then?
Really beautiful essay, via Nicole Zhu's email newsletter.
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The systems on which design operates are fundamentally and hypnotically flawed. They don’t just need improvement. They don’t just need resistance. They need complete change. Systemic change normally happens as an ultimatum, democracy in its multiple variations, protests and demonstrations, a directive from a global or continental institution. It usually takes place when there seems to be no other option. Designers, and the systems they sustain and validate, are in the business of future-making. They love to shine and also like to churn out stunningly attractive visions of the future on a daily basis, as if they were just another entry in their portfolio. The time for manifestos is out, and for just good intentions, too. If designers don’t think about and practice design at the level of systems and put politics at the core of what they do—with climate crisis, fascism, racism, xenophobia—when we realise that we don’t have any other option, there will be no future at all.
So many systems feel like they're flawed right now, but I really liked how this article pointed to people thinking about the flaws but also skewered the flaws in the graphic design education world as well.
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I’d maybe simplify this people problem a bit: the codebase is easy to change, but the incentives within a company are not. And yet it’s the incentives that drive what kind of code gets written — what is acceptable, what needs to get fixed, how people work together. In short, we cannot be expected to fix the code without fixing the organization, too.
In all the places I've worked I've had a hard time getting other folks to care or prioritize the things I think are important. And Rendle hits the nail on the head here as to why. He uses performance as his example, but in my world it would be accessibility. And it's true every single place I've worked, there is no incentive, until a lawsuit pops up, to do the work. And it makes me sad and I'll admit I'm so tired of pushing for doing the right thing in environments where it will never happen.
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The existential dread of a global pandemic is pervasive. I find myself often caught in a state of hopelessness and helplessness, unable to celebrate newborn babies, birthdays, graduations, and marriages. Unable to properly grieve losses or sit with a close friend undergoing chemo. Worried about the chefs and restaurant workers who rely on our collective ability to go out to eat. News is bleak and we are all feeling physically and socially isolated. But every day, there is also Thelonious, a chipmunk who sits down to eat in a world without a doomful election and a deadly virus. This is how I am coping, laying out a picnic, watching tiny hands hold my tiny food. It’s silly, yes, but sometimes silliness is needed.
I love everything about this article, so fantastic and silly and needed in these times.
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This is Robinson’s entire cosmology: the world is self-evidently miraculous, but only rarely do we pay it the attention it deserves. Robinson calls her style of writing cosmic realism, a patient chronicling of the astonishing nature of existence. Her attentiveness to creation at every level is what makes her fiction so convincing: she sees everything, including us.
It was hard to figure out what to quote from this long profile, I love Robinson's writing so much. Her attention to detail and her characters are so detailed, is amazing. And she is quietly firm in her convictions, showing us so much about the world with the perfect words.
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Resentment displaces hope and purpose the way carbon monoxide displaces air. This fact has been reflected in the policies of any number of tyrants and demagogues. Resentment is insatiable. It thrives on deprivation, sustaining itself by magnifying grievances it will, by its nature, never resolve.
A bit more Robinson, but this time her own words. And the way in which she describes our situation was helpful for me. I have a hard time with so much that is happening right now, but these words were a balm in this moment.