Things I Like
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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.
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One of the points I’m trying to make in that essay is that, where there’s money to be made from intermediaries establishing themselves, intermediaries will appear. If there’s money to be made by controlling a DAO and the DeFi protocols it administers, then somebody will be in there making a majority of that money. And those will be the people who’ve been in the ecosystem from the beginning. That means those in the venture-capital firms. They’ll make a ton off this. To suggest that what I’m describing is democratizing the ability to control how our financial system works is totally disingenuous. Because we haven’t changed the underlying incentives of the financial system. We haven’t changed any of the structural or political issues…
I learned a lot reading this interview and found it fascinating. I'm a complete Web3 and crypto skeptic and this interview points to a lot of the reasons why and explains them well.
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I’m going to go about my business, thinking some things, and some of those things I will want to write about and share. I enjoy having this space where I can do that without deadlines, word count, or pay.
I really enjoyed this piece on newsletters (and I'm not even a subscriber to this one!) and I think the reason is because so many of them have now become revenue sources it was refreshing to see someone who talking about it being the opposite of that. I'm definitely not against folks getting paid for their work, we all deserve that, but I've been wondering a lot lately how this will all play out. As communities created by various newsletters become echo chambers and as people realize they may not be able to afford to pay everyone for their work much less have time to read it all, what will become of all these newsletters?
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The advice from my publishers was just to move on. It was not worth the effort required to get these kinds of account taken down. But I was already in too deep. I started up another, different, fake Instagram account and, again, began the humiliating rigmarole of trying to seduce myself.
This made me laugh but also made me sad, why oh why is crypto the thing that is capturing everything these days.
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So the numbers are bad enough. But then there’s the way the hard facts of the economy interact with our emotions. Consider this theory: that the current office ennui was simply the inevitable backlash to the punishing culture of the previous decade’s #ThankGodItsMonday culture. And furthermore, sometime around the rise of #MeToo (and after Donald Trump’s election), ambition began to seem like a mug’s game. The enormous personal costs of getting to the top became clear, and the potential warping effects of being in charge also did.
I could've pulled a lot of different quotes from this article because I found it all really interesting and was nodding along a lot. But what I find the most interesting about it was both how complicated what's going on in the labor market right now is and how difficult that is to put into words. So many folks are unhappy with work right now and I can't help but wonder if maybe it's because work has never been that great. The disruption of a stressful, global event has been the catalyst for many folks to figure out what is important to them and work has fallen way down the list.
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Why are we committed to requiring people be physically present in the office if many workers report being more productive while working from home? Why do we insist on keeping video on during Zoom meetings, which causes fatigue? Why do we make people sit at desks all day when the human body simply was not biologically engineered to sit for eight-plus hours at a time?
So much this. The 40 hour work week, where you go to an office and sit for five days in a row with two days off is, in the grand scheme of human history, a relatively new thing. It also assumes a lot about people and how they must shape themselves into that mold. I think a lot of companies have learned over the past two years (and just as many have turned a blind eye) to how productive and how well folks can work when you trust them and let them make their own schedule. This of course is thinking primarily about knowledge work and there are lots of folks who aren't working in that type of field.