Things I Like
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I read Bowling Alone two decades ago: I'm tired of trend articles about loneliness. I am bored of talking about the busy-busy-busy nature of modern adult life when there is no structural reprieve in sight. And I really hate it when experts make social connection seem like a trick or a fluke. We have managed to socialize generations of women into this role on a family level, and some people on a community level, too. Imagine if we tried to expand the number of kinkeepers, even a little bit, by respecting this work as work. As vocation.
I'm still thinking about this and, quite honestly, the idea of happiness via relationships is true, but who keeps them going? How do we get both sides to want to do that? I think about that a lot, because too often I've been the one who's doing all the work and it's exhausting and I think Friedman hits the nail on the head here.
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What happens when engineers stop thinking of their interests as fundamentally aligned with the companies' owners and management, and develop their own class consciousness? Tech companies are not pursuing automation purely out of intellectual interest; they are trying to solve looming labor problems that can no longer be ignored.
There's a lot of really great stuff in this piece of the decline of tech, but I'd argue that the labor issue is one of the reasons why we're seeing all the of the layoffs. Layoffs don't make sense financially, but they do put fear into the tech workers who remain and there is a distinct feeling that the bosses want to put these same workers in their place. Tech workers have had a lot of leverage for a long time and now the people at the top want to claw some of that back. Unionization would help workers to retain those things that are most important.
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We’re not making a case for despair. Just the opposite. We need the facts so that individuals and policy makers can take concrete action. Proven solutions to the U.S.’s plastic-waste and pollution problems exist and can be quickly replicated across the country. These solutions include enacting bans on single-use plastic bags and unrecyclable single-use plastic food-service products, ensuring widespread access to water-refilling stations, installing dishwashing equipment in schools to allow students to eat food on real dishes rather than single-use plastics, and switching Meals on Wheels and other meal-delivery programs from disposables to reusable dishware.
I find the situation with plastic a bit depressing, to be honest. As a consumer it's impossible to avoid it and it also feels like a sisyphean task. It'd be great if some regulations came into play so that we aren't using as much because the product makers can't use it, because I'm so tired of making recylcing the problem of individuals when it needs to be a systemic change to have a real impact.
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Accommodating change and uncertainty requires a looser sense of self, an ability to respond in various ways. This is perhaps why qualified success unsettles those who are locked into fixed positions. The shift back to failure is a defensive measure. It is, in the end, a technique for turning away from the always imperfect, often important victories that life on earth provides — and for lumping things together regardless of scale. If corruption is evenly distributed and ubiquitous, then there is no adequate response — or, rather, no response is required.
Solnit's writing, and this piece is no exception, has helped me to see the small victories and to look for them around me. Small victories and incremental progress isn't sexy, it isn't what large media organizations want to write about, but it's what brings about the larger victories and the change that is so desperately needed.
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This shift toward ever-larger trucks and SUVs has endangered everyone not inside of one, especially those unprotected by tons of metal. A recent study linked the growing popularity of SUVs in the United States to the surging number of pedestrian deaths, which reached a 40-year high in 2021. A particular problem is that the height of these vehicles expands their blind spots. In a segment this summer, a Washington, D.C., television news channel sat nine children in a line in front of an SUV; the driver could see none of them, because nothing within 16 feet of the front of the vehicle was visible to her.
I'll admit that I don't understand the obsession with large vehicles and as someone who walks a lot and who drives a smaller car, it's frightening how large many of these vehicles are. And now, as we go electric, we are just continuing that trend, even if it's unsafe for those not in the cars and means larger and heavier cars because of the batteries. This feels very typical of our country, that this is the way we'd go.
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...[W]e live in a world full of distractions but short on breaks. The time between activities is consumed by other activities—the scrolling, swiping, tapping of managing a never-ending stream of notifications, of things coming at us that need doing. All that stuff means moments of absolutely nothing—of a gap, of an interval, of a beautiful absence—are themselves absent, missing, abolished.
As I've put down my device more, started reading paper books more, and left what was left of the social media that I did consume, time feels different. And a lot of it is because it's slowing down in ways. I'm taking breaks, I'm not allowing everything that demands my attention to get it, and I'm actively seeking boredom.
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Some books should be savored — read slowly, meditated on, returned to — but if I’ve made it my goal to read X number of books or watch Z number of movies, then I won’t give such works the time they ask of me. I’ll rush through them so I can mark them off my list and move on to The Next Thing.
I'm with Jacobs here, I do keep track of my reading, but I've never had a goal. I also realize that there are way more books, podcasts, online articles, and content than I'll ever be able to consume. (I realized this in college with all the classics that were out there as new books keep getting published.) So instead of trying to consume as much as possible, I too have been in the mode of being thoughtful about what I consume and why. I've cut my feeds down (only people for the most part) and I've cut back on podcasts as well.
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My question about all this is: And then? You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing. For the main thing.
Prior to this post Jacobs posted several quotes of people using AI to write their articles or do their work and then he asks this and I think it's a wonderful question. Why are we racing through all the things? Why do we think that doing more is necessarily better or will lead to a better life? I've been slowing down, in many ways, over the last month and I gotta say, it's led to a lot more enjoyment of what I'm doing in any given moment.
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At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight: Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.
Demsas is doing some of the best writing about the housing situation of anyone around. I came to the realization long ago that you can't house everyone and treat housing as a wealth generating asset, it will never work. On top of that, as Demsas mentions in a different section of the article, luck plays a huge role in whether you make money off of your house or not, so maybe, just maybe, it's time for real change in how we handle housing.
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For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager without an iPhone. She borrowed novels from the library and read them alone in the park. She started admiring graffiti when she rode the subway, then fell in with some teens who taught her how to spray-paint in a freight train yard in Queens. And she began waking up without an alarm clock at 7 a.m., no longer falling asleep to the glow of her phone at midnight.
I love that kids are finding a different way, at least a small group of them, but I found it really odd how worried the parents were about this change. How in the world did previous generations survive and thrive when our parents couldn't track our every move?
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The wiggly line in the centre is the equatorial line, and the grey cloud represents the plane of the Milky Way. The Sun, Moon and planets also make an appearance - dating the sky depicted precisely to Friday, August 31 at 6 pm British Summer Time.
Filed under: really cool. Also I've put at least one of the smaller knitting projects in my queue.
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What’s surprised me most as Twitter has convulsed in recent weeks is how threadbare the social media cupboard really is. So many are open to trying something new, but as of yet, there’s nothing that feels all that new to try. Everything feels like a take on Twitter. It may be faster or slower, more decentralized or more moderated, but they’re all variations on the same theme: experiments in how to capture attention rather than deepen it, platforms built to encourage us to speak rather than to help us listen or think.
Klein makes some really great points throughout this piece and he quotes a piece by Robin Sloan that I've seen quoted a lot in recent weeks, but I think the above is what I've been thinking about the most. How do you have a way to listen, really listen? Is that possible online or is that easier when together with people in real life? I'm not sure another platform is what we need, but I definitely think reaching out and trying things that haven't been done before and looking to other models may be helpful in how we move forward.
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For ambition to be sustainable, it has to be personal and complex, not just about rising through the ranks. For every woman who is burned out after placing too much value on work as a key component of her identity, the task isn’t letting go of ambition altogether. It’s relocating those ambitions beyond the traditional markers of money, title, and professional recognition. Ambition does not have to be limited to a quest for power at the expense of yourself and others. It can also be a drive for a more just world, a healthier self, a stronger community. And it’s definitely achievable in soft pants.
I lost ambition to climb the ladder in my career quite early and recognized that it was OK for my job to be the thing that made it possible for me to be able to do the things I loved and kept me going. The hard part is dealing with both family and a culture that expects so much more and being OK with disappointing both.
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In this way, smartphones consume rest. I mean to defy the usual consumption metaphor—in which we (the users) consume whatever the device makes available. Instead, I think the devices (and their attendant systems and modes, the apps and news feeds and platforms and whatnot) consume us. We are consumed: our rest, our ease, our leisure, our breath—all are eaten up by the flickering and frittering and jittering of inconstant screens.
There's a lot in this piece Mandy wrote that I love and it was hard to pick a quote, but with all that's been going on lately, I think this is what I'm thinking about the most. How does being online and using all of the devices make us feel and what has it done to us? As I've stepped away from them more and more, I feel more like myself in many ways. I'm not sure if it's all about being online less and less, but I do think it's playing a significant role.
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Should life give me the opportunity to have another story, then I’m hoping for space and time to be able to explore and do the same kind of work I’m doing now but with more intention, more time for it to unfold, more thoughtfulness, more walks, more photography, more words.
Really interesting interview with a woman who I knew nothing about, but she's done amazing work. Hand sewing isn't currently my thing right now, but maybe in the future. I definitely want to read some of her books.