Things I Like
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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.
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This is a deep matter, and I won’t try to unlock all the nuances here. I will now simply share 14 tweets that capture the stale taste of life without a counterculture. Some of these tweets are my own, others from total strangers—but they all paint the same overall picture.
I don't subscribe to this newsletter, but came across this via a blog post and found it interesting.
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Noise pollution is an invisible threat: according to research by the World Health Organization, we have become adept at tuning out these background irritations, but the impacts of long-term exposure to environmental noise pollution are so severe that in Western Europe alone at least one million years of healthy life are lost every year from traffic-related noise.
I live as quiet a life as I can, but the noise of the world is never far away, especially the noise of the appliances in our home. I'm glad to read that there are people trying to protect the quiet places.
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Bolin had diagnosed in some detail “the sorting” within evangelicalism—the scramble of Christians switching congregations, churches rising and falling, pastors adapting or heading for the exits. It occurs to me, while he discusses these potential changes, that no church is guaranteed anything. The moment Bolin stops lighting fires from the pulpit at FloodGate, how many of its members—who are now accustomed to that sort of inferno, who came to FloodGate precisely because they wanted the heat—will go looking for them elsewhere?
This piece made me quite sad to read, but I also wonder about this, for those who are used to a stance of both anger and victimhood, what happens when they stop hearing that at church? And how in the world do these pastors reconcile what they're doing with so much of the bible? A question that no one seems to ask them too much.
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But population growth is not the problem that so many people seem to think it is, not least because of the global decline in fertility; arguably, declining population growth is the real population-related concern of the century. And even if it were a concern, the policies that NIMBYs support not only fail to create a climate-conscious built environment but actually make fighting climate change more difficult.
The New York Times had an article on NIMBYs as well that profiled one woman in particular. What I find fascinating about all of this is that these folks learned something when they were young or coming of age (population growth is the ultimate bad thing for the planet) and they've taken that through all these ensuing years to fight housing. Growth is gonna happen one way or another and the way in which these folks fight it only makes it that much harder for the generations behind them to own a home and live their lives.
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One of the victories of climate activism – and consequences of dire climate events – is that a lot more people are concerned about climate than they were even a few years years ago, from ordinary citizens to powerful politicians. The climate movement – which is really thousands of movements with thousands of campaigns around the world – has had enormous impact.
I needed to read this, I needed to be reminded of the good things.
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Not only does sewing guarantee that one’s clothing is ethically made (you made it yourself!), it offers the thrilling autonomy to manifest the clothing one envisions and execute it according to one’s exact specifications. Considering the abysmal fabric quality and lifespan of mass market clothing, learning how to sew can be viewed as less of a niche hobby and more of a necessary form of resistance.
As someone who's learned to sew her own cloths over the last year, I found this article interesting, but the above quote is both true and also not totally true. I have no illusions that the fabric I buy is perfectly made and doesn't have any issues with labor and such. As a podcaster once said (I'm sorry I forget who it was), there is no ethical consumption, the supply chains are way too long and complex to know where absolutely every piece of every item you buy was made and how it was made and if it was made using good or bad labor practices.
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I first heard it played to me over the phone from a copy that hadn’t yet ceased to function. It was a voice unlike any I’d ever heard: not human but made by humans, generated by a piece of computer code dating to the 1980s, singing words of a text from the Bronze Age in a cadence handed down, from one singer to another, over thousands of years.
A beautifully told story about a piece of software, but it's not really about the software at all.
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But first we have to have the relationships with one another and with the natural world that build the will to dream about and work for a better world. No expert can do this for us — it’s a matter of the heart.
I keep coming back to this piece, so decided to post it, it's short, but hope is hard for me these days and remembering these things is helping me hang on to it.
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The unhappy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade, even under the best of circumstances. The real aberration is keeping them.
I've been reading a lot about friendship lately, how to make them in middle age, how to keep them, how to find people in this age of everyone being online rather than at in real life events. Nothing I've read has been as interesting and comforting as this article.
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Two years later, grief has become the air itself. We are simultaneously grieving the former sturdiness of friendships, old relationships to government, and the familiar rules that governed the world.
Having spent my childhood in the 1980s with things like "The Day After", I've found it interesting to see how the generation below me is reacting to not only the war in Ukraine, but a real upending of life and feeling of uncertainty. I would agree with the author here, I think there is a change in the world, not one for the better, that could stick around for quite a long while.