Things I Like
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But here’s the big difference I’ve seen over the last few years in the people I work with: They don’t have a big relationship to their hands. I’ve had to show them how to cut a circle out of paper.
I really like Barry's books and this interview once again made me wish I could take her course at Madison.
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It may be the case that many personal infirmities can only be fully repaired in a repaired world, but this does not obviate the need to pull ourselves together as best we can in this broken one. Any serious attempt to topple capitalism would require more discipline, more courage, more endurance, more capability, not less.
I enjoyed this counter argument to a lot of the writing I've read about burn out and the way in which the world is difficult to live in right now. But I do agree with the author that change will only come by folks working towards it and that for many of us (I realize not all of us) we have some power and control over how we organize our lives.
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Really what I was pointing out was that we have to stop playing the short-term game of just cheerleading on our firefighters as they fight these impossible battles, and die, while not addressing the root cause which is, we need to be proactive about managing fuels on the landscape. So, my plea to Rachel was to be truthful with the public, to be honest about these trade-offs, to not treat every fire suppressed as this major victory, and to really start to be culpable. That fuel accumulation that we have out there on the ground is the responsibility of the state and federal fire management agencies who strictly focus their efforts on fire suppression and fire exclusion, and they don't get their offense on the field in off-season to any meaningful degree to deal with the fuels problem.
I've been reading and listening to a lot of podcasts over the past few years about fire and our forrests and the point above is one that keeps coming up over and over again. We aren't approaching managing our forrests correctly or telling the truth to the people who live near or in them and until we do, the fires will keep burning hotter and more out of control.
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But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work of economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that thrives by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends, and it has not mattered whether the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist or whatever; the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional agricultures, local economies has been constant. The bad news is coming in, literally, from all over the world. Can such an economy be fixed without being radically changed? I don’t think it can.
More Wendell Berry, but this is one of his non fiction rants (at least I think of certain pieces of his that way) and even if I don't agree with everything he says, he always makes me think about things. I do believe we need radical change in many areas to care for the planet and ourselves.
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We live in an era that has been profoundly warped by the headstrong impulses of men who are technically sophisticated but emotionally immature. From the whoopie-cushion antics of Elon Musk to the Panglossian implacability of Mark Zuckerberg, a particular personality profile dominates these times: the boy emperor. While reporting this article, I often wondered how the C.I.A. could have missed the obvious combustibility of this profile when it hired Schulte and gave him a security clearance.
This is a bizarre story that is told so well and written so well, Patrick Radden Keefe is one of my favorite non fiction writers at the moment.
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When a ritual is written out or explained, the activity can seem overly simplistic or fruitless to outsiders. The best way to understand a ritual, according to practitioners, is to engage with it, even if that participation is limited to empathy.
I'm a huge fan of Mason Curry and was glad to see him included in this article, but I also really enjoyed the other perspectives and I love the idea of ritual over routine.
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It is this space that I want. The space to move on, to tinker, to discover things I haven’t even thought of before. To be capable of giving up, letting go, quitting. I don’t wish to be fixed to something. It may give me more anxiety, but it gives me the freedom to explore and experiment.
I really liked this take on purpose and life and if having a well defined purpose leaves us closed off to change and new things.
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Despite Berry’s veneration of his ancestors, he can be unsparing about their sins. “I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth,” he wrote in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.” He saw the rapacious practices of modern agribusiness, Big Coal, the military-industrial complex, and Wall Street as the perpetuation of “some intransigent destructiveness” that drove the European settlers in America.
I've read a lot of Wendell Berry's work and I don't love all of it, but I do find his voice valuable, especially as we think about how we live in places, how we treat the earth, and how we think about our place in history. I'm fascinated by where he's going now in old age and I'll be adding his latest book to my list.
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This is anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken, for recognizing, as McLuhan’s friend and colleague John M. Culkin put it, “we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.”
Klein is asking all the right questions about technology and what it's doing to our minds and our society.
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“It’s very strange in prison,” Sebastian says, as he sips tea at FCW’s London community hub – a safe space, beneath railway arches, that provides work experience and employment training to ex-prisoners, with the aim of getting them back into work. “Everyone thinks it’s going to be terrible and scary but, in fact, it’s mostly very boring. Nobody tells you how dull prison is going to be. Having that kind of structure, having something to do with my hands, something to work on, something to take pride in – it really changed everything.”
I've been reading a lot about knitting and I enjoyed this article about sewing, it's so amazing how much learning a craft and working your way through it can be helpful in other areas of life and give meaning to someone's life.
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It’s a world of the rich, by the rich, that’s divorced now from the comparatively normal. “You work in newspapers,” he said. “It’s similar to that, in the way that private equity has profited off of the media industry and left journalists and editors holding the bag. That’s the case in the art world. A small amount of people has gotten very, very rich off it and everyone else has suffered greatly. And there’s no turning back once you get there.”
This is an incredibly long piece but I found the first two parts fascinating. I studied color in college and I fell in love with Rothko's work then. But I didn't know anything about what happened with his works after he died. I also found the more modern scandal really interesting. But the part that moved into the Trump years wasn't as interesting to me, maybe because I lived through it.
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I think people are enervated not just by the Sisyphean pointlessness of their individual labors but also by the fact that they’re working in and for a society in which, increasingly, they have zero faith or investment.
The pandemic showed people what their work truly was and wasn't and what it was worth and wasn't worth. It's shifted things, we'll see if it lasts or not, but I do think many people have seen through capitalism and realized maybe we need to think about a different way forward together, rather than each person out for only themselves and those they love.
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When wealthy homeowners oppose new development in their neighborhoods—and when elected officials let them get their way—fewer homes are built overall, contributing to America’s undersupply crisis and raising prices for everyone. Their opposition also pushes what housing does get built into a handful of places where dissent is weaker.
I find the housing market incredibly depressing. I'm watching neighbors in their 30s who are shut out of the market, even as they're working good jobs and doing fairly well. I've said this a lot lately, but we can't house everyone and treat housing a wealth generating asset. Those two things are antithetical, because homeowners want their investment to increase and are doing all they can to make sure that happens, which means they don't want more housing built, especially not near them.
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What’s left is a constantly mutating product that copies features from whatever popular service — Snapchat, TikTok, or whatever. It is all about marketing and selling substandard products and mediocre services by influencers with less depth than a sheet of paper.
I use Instagram, mostly via the web where there aren't the ads, it's a cleaner interface, and there is absolutely no auto playing video. And when I go on the website, I'm usually searching for a hashtag related to a sewing or knitting pattern, to see what people have done when they've made it. I do glance at some of the photos in my feed, but that isn't my main use. If these folks posted somewhere else, like a blog, I'd subscribe in an instant. I do subscribe to several sewing and making blogs and I love them!!
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Whether or not you believe in a soul, I think there’s something here about the shallowness of much of the prevalent discussion about burnout. It’s often talked of as if it is primarily a matter of overwork or undercompensation, a byproduct of economic precarity (or, perhaps the intention of it, inasmuch as burnout serves corporate means by creating a populace too exhausted to advocate for change). And while too much work and too few social systems are obvious underpinnings for burnout, I tend to think they are useful but inadequate descriptors. There’s something especially crushing about the feeling of burnout that can’t be explained by economics and labor relations, and can’t be solved by unions and four-day workweeks (though those would help a great many things). I don’t know that I can fully get behind Estés’ spiritual framework, but I am prepared to say that until or if the discourse around burnout evolves to consider the meaning of work and not only the conditions of it, we will continue to drift among the ashes.
I read this a while back and have kept coming back to this paragraph. The way we talk about burnout, after having read a book and a lot of articles about it, isn't really getting at the real problem. I think Mandy is on to something with how she points that out and especially in her allusion to the meaning of work.