Things I Like
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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.
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Oh, let me tell you what I see! Every day I journey to my cove, a small beach nestled into the edge of the lake. I close my eyes and listen to the waves. Their steady rhythm reminds me that some aspects of my life are untouched by the virus.
Beautiful words and pictures on the walks we take during this time. Walking and running are keeping me sane and I loved hearing about other experiences with it.
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Although staying put is hard, maybe we will be reluctant to resume our rushing about, and something of the stillness now upon us will stay with us. We may rethink the wisdom of having much of our most vital stuff – medicine, medical equipment – made on other continents. We may also rethink the precarious just-in-time supply chains. I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process. A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.
I've spent a lot of time during this whole thing thinking about supply chains, how we buy things, why we buy things, and what I really need. It's been good in some ways, good to figure that out, and now I'm starting to think about how I want life to be whenever things move back into the public realm again, the time when I can go out more freely and do some of the things I used to do.
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The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.
This is by no means an uplifting piece to read, but what I enjoyed about it and am thinking about a lot is the way in which Packer takes our current situation and puts it in context of what's gone on so far this century in the US. On the one hand it makes me sad to read these things, but on the other hand I'm also trying to work out how we got here and how we go forward.
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He sent some of his work in progress to friends, which led to him releasing one image of daffodils for publication, which he titled: Do Remember They Can't Cancel the Spring. He is now sharing nine more, all painted in the last few days.
Hockney is one of my favorite artists for many reasons, but one of them is how he keeps going, keeps trying new things, and keeps releasing new art. And if you want to see a good documentary on him, I just watched one on Kanopy that was fantastic.
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Now, though, the virus has done what a revolution never could: The social order has been upended, and extroverts find themselves living in the introverts’ world. How the outgoing, the world-beaters, the Good Time Charlies and Charlenes will react is anybody’s guest, but take it from one who knows: Introversion isn’t so terrible, even with the alternately sad and horrifying news that makes introversion a societal necessity, even a matter of life and death.
This piece made me chuckle, but I also felt a sense of kinship with the writer. As an introvert that works from home even before all this, that spends a lot of time on my own with books and in the garden, it's a bit strange to not feel the low level hum of societal pressure to be doing more, going out more, and finally they way I live is the norm.
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That doesn’t mean ignoring the class- and race-based stratifications that make this virus affect people differently. It doesn’t mean pretending the virus does not discriminate or suggesting that everyone’s struggle is even close to equal. But it does mean we can remember that the most effective way to diffuse collective action — and the sweeping, systemic changes it can spark — has always been to turn those who are suffering against one another.
I attempted to write about this same thing last weekend, but of course Petersen does it much better. But I'm finding that a lot of folks are making a lot of assumptions these days and the reality is that in different places in the country the situation is different. I feel lucky to live in an area that is doing OK and that I can get away from people and be in nature some each week. We're all doing our best and I'm trying hard to remember that when I see so much shaming and judgement online.
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Most of us are perennially short of time, and now we’re left hanging in it. This is an opportunity for a different kind of connection. During a long spell of loneliness, I found that art was among the richest consolations, and that voyaging into other people’s worlds by way of novels, paintings and films had a magical capacity for making me feel connected, seen, met.
I really like Laing's writing and this piece resonates with me so much. I'm trying, now that we're a ways into all of this, to take time to do things that take me out of what's going on and into another world. I watched a documentary on one of my favorite artists last night, David Hockney, and I'm reading the final Cromwell book by Mantel. Trying my hardest to escape it all when and how I can.
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I guess IndieWeb is still for devoted hobbyists rather than, you know, just people.
So much this. Ellis perfectly describes the many times I've tried to do more and participate more in the Indie Web movement. Each and every time I've failed because I don't have the technical skills to port content all around the web. And if I, who have some technical skill find this difficult, the average person isn't going to even attempt it. We often talk about owning your data, but in reality it isn't as easy as people like to think.
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The ugly truth is that design systems work is not easy. And what works for one company does not work for another. In most cases, copying the big tech company of the week will not make a design system better at all. And so instead we have to acknowledge how difficult our work is collectively and then we have to do something that seems impossible today—we must publicly admit to our mistakes. To learn from our community we must be honest with one another and talk bluntly about how we’ve screwed things up.
Robin continues to write interesting pieces about design systems and this one is no exception. This work is hard, and it brings up so much about how our organizations work and how various teams interact, and how we don't always work well together. And I appreciate Robin's writing because he's working on a system full time, so much of the writing on these is done by consultants, so I appreciate the few who're working to maintain and continue on with the same system over time.
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Remember, users really do change their settings under the hood, and we should be maintaining users’ control over their own browsing experience. If you use relative CSS units for your typography styles, you can maintain the fidelity of your layouts without negatively impacting the needs of your users.
A good reminder that relative units still matter, quite a bit. And as a user who's starting to up the base font size as I age, I'm noticing these things.
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In my experience, the challenge of design systems work is helping teams think in more cross-functional, interdisciplinary ways. They need an awareness on how changing a single slice will affect the hyperobject—or more specifically, how it will affect the other teams and people who work within the system.
A follow on from Robin's piece and a good reminder that the work is about people more than the technology and all the other things we usually focus on.