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Things I Like

  • You don’t have to be there

    So: in the morning I go through my RSS feeds and newsletters, and then when I’ve read everything I want to read I’m done. Maybe I check back later in the day, maybe not — I have things to do.

    Jacobs has been on this for a while now, but he's right. And I've been adapting the way I take in information this year and I gotta say, checking things in the morning with my tea is the way to go. I tend to read a book or poetry first thing, then breakfast, then check in online. And as more and more people fill up my RSS feeds, it's become more and more enjoyable to open Feedbin.

  • We're getting the social media crisis wrong

    My explanation of what is happening is this. We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation - that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.

    I found this piece super duper interesting and it is long, but the conclusions about how so much of our public discourse is being controlled by really rich dudes with clear agendas is awful for our public life. We're seeing that in a lot of ways and I fear it's going to get worse before it gets better.

  • The Overlooked Lesson of The Parable of the Sower

    Over time, I came to understand it differently. Butler is saying: people need a transcendent goal, a way of tapping into the awe and wonder of the universe. The impossibility of travel to the stars in the Parable is neither here nor there. The power of Earthseed is that it demonstrates that anyone in any circumstances can hold an audacious and global dream for humanity in their heart. The existence of a nearly impossible vision inside Lauren Olamina is, itself, a form for power; it says, you cannot kill off the spirit through brute force and immiseration.

    There's been a lot of talk about Octavia Butler and Parable of the Sower lately, for good reason, and this piece really resonated with me. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot since the US election is that neither candidate gave me a vision for the future, it was about not going back or going back, but I didn't get a clear sense of the future and what that would look like. It feels like a huge missed opportunity.

  • Living Well as a Practice

    Through it all, one truth has become increasingly clear to me: the quality of our lives isn’t measured in grand gestures or accomplishments, but in the small, intentional choices we make each day.

    This is so dead on to the way I ended 2024 and my thoughts about a whole slew of things. I have some concrete things I'm doing in 2025, but in the end I've realized that it's the day-to-day that makes a huge difference and what will help me get through whatever is coming.

  • You might just have to be bored

    Boredom is when you do the dishes, run the errand you’ve been putting off, respond to the text you’ve left on read. Boredom is when you bring a book to read on the subway or make small talk with the person in front of you in line about how slow the pharmacy is. Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.

    This, so much this. Letting your mind wander, being bored, it's when the ideas also pop up and usually for me it's when I'm doing the life things that turbo charges this because I'm just distracted enough to let things percolate.

  • Living in alignment

    This is among the reasons why I try to use the word “work” expansively, referring not only to waged work but also to creative work, care work, work in our homes and in our neighborhoods and in our hearts. Not because everything should be work (it should not), but because work in all its many forms is the means by which we weave and cultivate and nurture a different world. It is liberating, in that respect, even when—perhaps especially when—it’s difficult.

    Words I needed to hear this month.

  • Let This Be a Moment

    A quick post that I think about a lot. I don't want to quote it because I think reading it in its entirety is worth is much more than skimming anything I could quote.

  • Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones

    Zadie Smith is quickly becoming a voice in my generation that I listen to carefully and read carefully and this interview with Ezra Klein shows a lot of the reasons why. The way in which Smith thinks about social media, technology, words, and our current times always makes me think. I especially enjoy the way in this interview that she pushes back on Klein and rejects some of the premises he bases his questions on. Also: I love that she carries a map book instead of using a smart phone.

  • The Dream of the Raised Arm

    False flag operations. Disproportionate cultural panics. Disproportion generally. Censorship. Self-censorship. Conspiracies. Deep dives. Doing your own research. Keeping receipts. Putting you on blast. Registering your deafening silence. Living in bubbles. Living in echo chambers. Let that sink in. #Nuance. Team Fact. Team Feeling. For the past fifteen years we have—all of us—been subjected to a truly monumental network of psychological influence that our governments have failed to regulate in any real way whatsoever. Just as it was in the Thirties, our version of the propaganda megaphone is “subject to no legal or moral restraints.” Maybe it’s time that it is?

    More Zadie Smith but this piece is really interesting, taking something written about living in Germany in the 1930s and seeing how that can help us view today. As is usual for Smith, her insights on social media and algorithms and how they are affecting our society and us as people. Something I'm thinking about weeks after reading it.

  • The Tao of Cal

    Your phone should be used as a tool, not a constant companion. To accomplish this: (1) keep your phone plugged into the same spot when at home (instead of having it with you); and (2) remove all apps from your phone where someone makes more money the more you use it.

    I don't love everything Cal Newport posts, mostly because I think in order to live the way he advocates he must have someone doing a lot of the work of life for him (cleaning, cooking, etc), but I did find some of this post making me stop to think. I'll admit that I do treat my phone the way he talks about by leaving it mostly in one spot most days, but I'd not thought of apps in quite the way he put it, about making money off of you.

  • He’s Been Successful for a Quarter of a Century, but He’s Still Trying New Things

    Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content.

    There's a lot I really liked in this article, the above quote about how we're not searching things out anymore, or nearly as much. But I also finished it thinking about the loss of commonality because there is so much to watch that it's really rare for me to talk with people who are watching what I'm watching. I think about that a lot, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not sure, but I do miss some of the commonality that I used to experience with folks over a popular show or movie.

  • Substack vs. Indie

    If Substack — and Bluesky, another platform getting a lot of love these days — does not enshittify, that would be a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes. If you’re a creator who wants to avoid enshittification and remain independent, your best bet is to claim your turf on the open web — that is, where we are right now.

    Jacobs nails it in this post with all the ways in which Substack is not indie. I get why people talk about it that way, but you are at the mercy of the platform and you don't have any control over what they do.

  • The great escape from Reichsdummvogel.

    I’ll always be online—that’s never going to change. But I’m done with platforms tethered to the dark cloud of debt to billionaires and those chasing billionaire dreams. There’s no blue sky in that direction.

    I'm not on Bluesky so I have no experience with it, but I did find a lot of what Storey had to say here really interesting. I've been thinking about the way in which I've changed and the world has changed and how much that's had an impact on how I view social media.

  • Brandon Taylor: how I'm taking notes (for now)

    As more and more AI gets marketed shoved down our collective throats, the accompanying benefits are often couched in terms of speed as an unalloyed good: “I did this in X minutes using Copilot.” That tells me nothing about why you chose the shortcut. Was it a tedious task like reformatting data? Or was it something that required experience, and creativity, and that would have required too much of you to acquire through traditional means?

    A really good piece that takes some great quotes to make a thoughtful piece on AI. I'm with Mark, I'm not sure how I feel about AI, but I do know that most the ways big tech want me to feel aren't it. And I really, really wish that more people were talking about the costs of it, because they are great but hidden—just like getting fast stuff from Amazon has a cost for someone, it just may not be you.

  • I’m a journalist and I’m changing the way I read news. This is how.

    I’ll read news, not other people’s reactions to news.

    This was linked by someone in my RSS feeds, I forget who, but that line hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm not on a lot of social media, but I do check a few feeds of people I like and I realized last week this was not great for me, so I started to do it less frequently. The above line makes me realize why it's not good for me. I'm still figuring out how I'll consume news, I'm not going to get print papers given that in my rural area that's hard and expensive, but I'm starting to see a way forward that works for me, I'll share more at some point, maybe.