Things I Like
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While healthy policy differences between the traditional right and the left will continue, they should not prevent Americans from uniting in the defense of democracy and our Constitution. There are deep differences and misunderstandings between both sides, each of which have somewhat different definitions for even words like liberty and equality. But on their most basic meaning, I believe there is broad consensus. We should celebrate this; it’s critical that we do.
Evan McMullin is extremely conservative and I think in a normal political year I wouldn't agree with him very much, but since the election, he's been a critical voice of the incoming administration. And I'm grateful he's still speaking up.
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Like the specialists at the Graham Center, the generalists at Jamaica Plain are incrementalists. They focus on the course of a person’s health over time—even through a life. All understanding is provisional and subject to continual adjustment. For Rose, taking the long view meant thinking not just about her patient’s bouts of facial swelling, or her headaches, or her depression, but about all of it—along with her living situation, her family history, her nutrition, her stress levels, and how they interrelated—and what that picture meant a doctor could do to improve her patient’s long-term health and well-being throughout her life.
This article describes what frustrates me so much about care in the US health care system. The person who should know me the best and be able to spend time to ensure my treatment is what I really need, is the one who is paid the least and expected to rush through their days. I went to the same clinic from the time I was born until I moved out of state at 32. The history and knowledge they had about my life and my health is something that can't be replicated easily, but it can make all the difference when a crisis or chronic illness strikes.
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As we move our code to CodePen, our writing to Medium, our photographs to Instagram we don’t just run the risk of losing that content and the associated metadata if those services vanish. We also lose our own place to experiment and add personality to that content, in the context of our own home on the web.
I'm so with Rachel on this, this space is my home, and I'm increasingly all in on it with syndication to other places. And it's why I care less about Twitter and other social media.
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So back to fundamentals. My first duties are to my family and close friends, to my communities of work and care, and to myself, though that last has taken me a very long time to understand. The panicky rhythm of Twitter is no longer compatible with those duties, so I’m off it. I was genuinely sad about its decline for a couple of years, but I don’t have any sadness to spare anymore.
One of the benefits of the decline of Twitter is that more people that I've followed on RSS for years are blogging again and also writing Tiny Letters. I'm excited as I like reading long form thoughts from great writers and I'm seeing more of it in my feed.
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One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time “productively”, too – an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough. And so we find ourselves, for example, travelling to unfamiliar places not for the sheer experience of travel, but in order to add to our mental storehouse of experiences, or to our Instagram feeds. We go walking or running to improve our health, not for the pleasure of movement; we approach the tasks of parenthood with a fixation on the successful future adults we hope to create.
I don't really do much for time management. I have routines, because they help me be healthy; things like take work breaks, getting up for breakfast, and leaving my desk periodically to move around. But I've found lately that there are people who think you need to be productive with every second of your day. I'm not, I like leisure, and sometimes that may mean a nap or taking an aimless walk slowly through the neighborhood.
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There are, it should be noted, heartening attempts to correct this consolidation, and many voices are still speaking up for the future of media. (Also, Teen Vogue is likely going to save us all.) But in the meantime, I suppose it’s on me. I need to figure out how to translate what I read online into action, even if it means using Twitter a little less. Heck, I’d be lying if this wasn’t a goal of getting this little blog online: to place words next to each other, and write a few paragraphs of my own.
An incredibly timely post from Ethan and it quotes heavily one of my favorite talks by Mandy. I recommend reading them both. And I agree with Ethan, figuring out how to take in what's happening online and turn that into meaningful action is something we all need to do for ourselves and as I'm finding, it's not always easy.
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As a result, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, women are more prone to suffer brain atrophy, heart disease and liver damage. Even if a woman stops drinking, liver disease continues to progress in ways it does not in men, said Gyongyi Szabo, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. And research definitively shows that women who drink have an increased risk of breast cancer.
I've written about this before, but I've been thinking a lot about alcohol and how I consume it, what triggers me wanting it, and lately I've been ensuring I'm staying within healthy limits. This article is hard to read, but I believe it's important. We've normalized excessive drinking for women and it's a serious health risk. And now I can't help but notice all the ways we talk about drinking as if it is normal and OK to drink too much. And as the article talks about, smoking used to be considered normal and that's changed, maybe we need to do the same thing for drinking.
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Memories are a starting point for hope. Where they lead is up to us.
A short post, but it's words are just what I needed this week.
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But neither do I believe in time travel. I believe in human limitation, not out of any sense of fatalism but out of a learned caution, gleaned from both recent and distant history. We will never be perfect: that is our limitation. But we can have, and have had, moments in which we can take genuine pride. I took pride in my neighborhood, in my childhood, back in 1999. It was not perfect but it was filled with possibility. If the clouds have rolled in over my fiction it is not because what was perfect has been proved empty but because what was becoming possible—and is still experienced as possible by millions—is now denied as if it never did and never could exist.
I have Zadie Smith's latest book on my list to read, but in the interim I've been reading a lot of articles by her and they are wonderful. This in particular, dealing with both how aging changes us and how the world events play into what we do and focus on as we age, is really interesting. More good words that I need to hear in these times.
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And sometime around 2017, we will change again. The new year will bring a different kind of retreat. Rather than retreating into making or craft, we will retreat into smaller and more nuanced connections. Into quality over quantity. Into the single story over collections of stories. Into the subtle over the general. Into the singular datapoint over big data. Into attention over distraction.
Another piece of comfort and thought about the world in which news lives by someone working in that field at NPR.
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Moderation does not mean truth is always found equidistant between two extreme positions, nor does it mean that bold and at times even radical steps are not necessary to advance moral ends. Moderation takes into account what is needed at any given moment; it allows circumstances to determine action in the way that weather patterns dictate which route a ship will follow.
I long for the days when compromise was not a dirty word, when moderation was how we could move forward, when the other side was not evil or unpatriotic. I have no idea if, when, or how we'll get back to that, but I hope we can or I fear for our future in the US.
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To be a digital minimalist, in other words, means you accept the idea that new communication technologies have the potential to massively improve your life, but also recognize that realizing this potential is hard work.
I'm really enjoying Newport's blog, it's leading me to think about the way I spend my time and the things that I do. In addition, this post led me to the documentary, Minimalism, which is also quite interesting.
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So I find Scott Alexander’s thrive/survive model (aka the 'zombies vs post-scarcity utopia' model) of political behaviour more useful than a left/right distinction. The model looks like this: If you are (or anticipate) living in a world where zombies are after all of humanity, it fosters a ‘circle the wagon’ mentality: protect your own at all costs, don’t waste your resources on other people, support the military and stock up on guns, control reproduction (ie sexuality, particularly women’s) to ensure the survival of your tribe, create and enforce clear lines of command (hierarchies), etc. Alternatively, if you think that you live in a post-scarcity utopia, or that we someday will, you can prioritize things like helping other people, investing in art and science, taking care of the environment, and celebrating personal freedom.
If you aren't subscribed to Deb's email newsletter, you should be, it's always good. But this issue was particularly good in the wake of the US election.
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With this election, we’ve joined the rest of the world. Think of all the other nations that live under moronic, venal leadership. There are models for honorable political lives in those circumstances, but those models are quite different from our dominant notions of citizenship in which we follow politics as a spectator sport and occasionally vote. All over the world there are people in repressive settings who find ways to live as free human beings, act in solidarity with their neighbors, and fashion strategies to resist state power. We’re going to need to get good at practicing that kind of politics.
Interesting thoughts that provided me some sense of comfort and hope amidst the difficult news of most days.
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It’s the turn from fact that makes fascism possible. If they turn away from reasoning altogether, they can turn toward feeling like part of a body following a charismatic leader.
This was really fascinating. I've been reading a lot of history lately and it's been helping me get through what is an absolutely crazy feeling time. I take comfort in it somehow and I look to history for guidance.