Things I Like
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But after a certain point, the expectations become the anchor, not the engine.
I love this.
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I think the American obsession with symbolic freedom has to be traded for a desire for actual freedom: the freedom to get sick without knowing it could bankrupt you, the freedom for your peers to live life without fearing they’ll be killed by police. The dream of collective well-being has to outweigh, day-to-day, the dream of individual success.
There's a lot to quote in this piece and it was a toss up for me between this one about freedom and one further on when she talks about hope. But the entire thing is worth your time, there is so much in this interview that had me pausing and rereading the words.
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‘Florida and Ohio, man,’ the barista at the local café said to my husband, when he asked about the tourist trade. ‘People here at least acknowledge that it’s real. But people from Florida and Ohio don’t even seem to think it’s happening.’ Having lived in both places, I believe him: I have long had a theory that the surrealism that has overtaken the political landscape in America can be traced back to the poisoned ground of Ohio Facebook.
I have no words to describe this piece, but read it, it's worth it.
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Stegner’s settings range from academia and the literary world to mining camps and boomtowns, but his most consistent subject is marriage, represented in a mode more epic than romantic. Monogamy, with its crags and chasms, is the most salient and imposing feature in his imaginative landscape, the human undertaking around which all the others are organized. Marriages in his books are not always harmonious — spouses quarrel, separate and sometimes stray — but they always endure.
Stegner is one of my favorite writers and I really enjoyed this piece by A.O. Scott looking at his work as a whole. He is by no means perfect, but I'm always drawn into his books because of the focus on relationships and as the above quote says, marriage. I find marriage a fascinating thing, how it works so differently for everyone and how it changes over time. Stegner writes about all of that in ways that never fail to make me think or see it in some new way.
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My perspective is, I’m trying to talk about what I believe is wrong systemically that gives us corrupted outcomes because the system is incentivized to do that. It is incentivized for conflict as well as for corruption in a more classic sense, which is money from larger sources pouring into a place not to help but to gain control.
There's a lot in this interview and I could've grabbed several different quotes. I don't always agree, but wow, Stewart is bringing a perspective that I find really helpful right now. Looking at the systems and how those systems in so many ways are problematic. Until we change them, I don't know how anything will truly get better.
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The price of collaboration in America has already turned out to be extraordinarily high. And yet, the movement down the slippery slope continues, just as it did in so many occupied countries in the past. First Trump’s enablers accepted lies about the inauguration; now they accept terrible tragedy and the loss of American leadership in the world. Worse could follow. Come November, will they tolerate—even abet—an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?
This piece goes in depth with history and our current situation and it is so worth the time. Applebaum's writing over the past several years has continuously been good, but this piece goes so much further into how much what's going on in the US right now is akin to that which has happened before in other countries. I deeply wish it weren't so.
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Put another way: what kind of decisions does your technical stack make about who’s allowed to contribute to the front-end? And how expensive will it be to alter those decisions, and introduce a different way of working? For many organizations, the technical barriers to cross-functional collaboration can be unacceptably high. And what’s more, the cost of that complexity is rarely acknowledged.
I think about this a lot. I recently worked on a project where the designer had our code base up and running locally and felt comfortable and preferred to do a lot of the smaller customizations of the design himself. It was amazing, we both worked to our strengths, but it's also a rarity. Our code base is difficult to run locally and not something many non engineers want to dive into (even I dislike it, to be honest). But it changed the entire tenor of the project to be able to collaborate in that way.
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For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.
Ever since the pandemic started I've been reading about supply chains, about how the things I buy get to me, about the way in which these systems feel invisible, yet they so obviously broke down quickly in the face of the lock down measures that were taken and people worrying about having enough of everything they normally eat, use, buy. Pollan speaks to how these systems are so broken. The one system that's kept going during this entire time has been my CSA, delivering me quality food every Friday, like clockwork.
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In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.
An amazing piece on academia, fairy tales, motherhood, and life in quarantine.
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All this comes down to the need to recover and sharpen a functioning sense of justice based on a reverent appreciation of humankind, all together and one by one. The authenticity of our understanding must be demonstrated in our attempting to act justly even at steep cost to ourselves. We can do this as individuals and as a nation. Someday we will walk out onto a crowded street and hear that joyful noise we must hope to do nothing to darken or still, having learned so recently that humankind is fragile, and wonderful.
A piece that I'll need to read several times to let sink in, to think about how we're reacting to this moment and how we can learn from it.
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This is where pandemic-induced reductions in spending, decadelong resentment over income inequality, the resurgent progressive and labor movements, sustained millennial/Gen X burnout and precarity, and burgeoning Gen Z idealism collide. What if we decided that things didn’t have to be the way they were before all of this happened? Part of that shift would involve taxing the rich and disarticulating healthcare from employment; it would involve forming and protecting unions and focusing on reimplementing regulatory systems, decentralizing production, and restoring the supply chain. And it could also mean disabusing ourselves of the idea that buying things is a solution to our problems.
Petersen talked about this in an email newsletter and it got me thinking. I've been very careful about where I spend my money for a years, not just if I'm buying now. I know, Amazon doesn't miss me or notice that I'm not spending there, but how I spend my money is one of the only ways to send signals in this society of ours. And during the pandemic, I've hardly bought a thing and I waited for my local shops to open up before getting some things I needed, like new running shoes.
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STOP READING BOOKS THAT AREN’T DOING IT FOR YOU. SERIOUSLY. STOP.
I liked this list, I've been seeing a lot of folks saying that they're having trouble focusing during this weird time and I think this is a helpful list. The one thing I'd add to it is this: stay off line and away from the news for a day or two and see if that helps. Things are frenetic right now and the pace of news has made it harder for me to focus, so I've been staying away from it more.
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The work itself — cooking delicious, interesting food and cleaning up after cooking it — still feels as fresh and honest and immensely satisfying as ever. Our beloved regulars and the people who work so hard at Prune are all still my favorite people on earth. But maybe it’s the bloat, the fetishistic foodies, the new demographic of my city who have never been forced to work in retail or service sectors. Maybe it’s the auxiliary industries that feed off the restaurants themselves — the bloggers and agents and the “influencers,” the brand managers, the personal assistants hired just to keep you fresh on “Insta,” the Food & Wine festivals, the multitude of panels we chefs are now routinely invited to join, to offer our charming yet thoroughly unresearched opinions on.
This is an amazing essay, about so much more than one restaurant, but about what our culture around restaurants has become, about how they can survive in this world. I've read it so many times, because it's beautifully written and so much of what's said needs to be said over and over again.
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How should we collectively record and affirm the extraordinary conditions, language, emotions, and experiences before they evaporate? And how could my own practice learn from commoning-in-crisis, and adapt to become a better model of communal care?
I heard a version of this talk last June at Eyeo, but this new version goes farther and deeper and it so worth your time. As I've said elsewhere, I've started thinking about how I'm dealing with all of this and how I'm recording it for myself, what will I share, and how I will share it.
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Why is it, one might ask, that services such as hospitals and news organizations are closing when the public seems to need and want them most? The answer isn’t that we have bad nurses or bad reporters, or that people have turned away from medical authorities and the press has grown too liberal to gather a mass audience. The answer is that our economy had come to rest, over the years, on the cheap, endless consumption of things whose true costs were carefully hidden from us, a sleight of hand we called financialization.
Lots of good stuff in this essay, but I'm glad to see folks thinking and talking about hope and how we can find bits and pieces of it. And the added bonus of seeing some explanations for the way in which we fund the things that matter, in ways we pay for even when we don't see it, helps me explain some of what I've been feeling as an employee at a media company these days.