Things I Like
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Exactly that: at each turn, fresh problems to be solved, fresh insights and flourishes of invention. And all along, at every step, was Jane, recalling the first moment of inspiration to refresh a tired passage, or asking whether a given phrase really reflected the intent she knew was behind it. She was never dramatic; she was ubiquitous and persisting throughout the body of work.
A beautiful piece about an amazing collaboration and relationship. But when I read pieces like this, I can't help but wonder what would've happened if it had been a different time or era, so many of these types of stories of wives who do so much (and it was usually wives) make me wonder what would've happened if they'd gotten together 30 years later? Would she still have performed her invisibility trick? Would he have allowed it?
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Speaking of his comparatively small output, Ishiguro said: “I don’t have any regrets about it. In some ways, I suppose, I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it’s because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn’t make it as a singer-songwriter. It’s not something I’ve wanted to do every minute of my life. It’s what I was permitted to do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don’t.”
I've not read much of Ishiguro's work, but this profile made me want to read more, especially some of his later novels. It's also amazing to me when someone is so good at something but could take it or leave it as an activity.
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My family members don’t just sleep in those hills, they bled and made other people bleed there too. A story about a crate of oranges and a radio flyer adds texture to my experience but it isn’t my experience, and it isn’t the full story either.
A story about family history and what you can and can't find out when you go looking for it.
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It is hard being broken open. I am flailing in other ways lately, like so many others. It feels like living through an unresolved nervous breakdown. Is it the pandemic? Is it our awful Montana legislature and the daily hate we must fight back against? Is it feeling intensely at odds with the world at every turn? Is it the relentless tide of shootings and beatings and murders? Or is it merely the steady slog of hurt and angst and despair that I slowly drag behind myself to varying degree every moment of my life?
La Tray's newsletter has become a favorite lately, he writes with raw honesty about life in ways that even though my life is different, always makes me think about what's going on around me.
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This is long but worth taking some time to really scroll and look at the art, read the responses, there are some gems in there that made me laugh out loud and others that had me scribbling in my journal. So much about the last year has been difficult to talk about but so many of these folks found a way, many of them through images rather than words.
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The other possibility is one in which workers own their own platform. That might be set up as a platform cooperative. But we need to think about "platform" as something that can be as small as one worker's self-owned shop, and that can be used in ways that prevent value extraction and alienation.
Lots of good thinking in this about passion, work, platforms, and more. I especially like the way in which the emphasis was on worker ownership and a broadening definition of platform.
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In 2007, when we started the company, streaming didn't exist in the United States and our competition essentially was piracy. And the idea in 2007 primarily was that nobody was going to pay for music anymore. And it just seemed very obvious to me that if you like some music from one of your favorite artists, you should be able to support them directly. And so we built the platform to do that. My reference point for this was blogging services. In 2007, you had Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, services that were essentially like white label services for writers – you could set up a site within minutes and tap this direct relationship with your readers. And it seemed crazy to me that if your artistic output happened to be music instead of words, you were just out of luck.
I'm not a music person, I don't listen to it a lot or buy a lot of it, but I found the comparison between these two companies really fascinating. To hear the founder of Bandcamp talk about their goals and what they're trying to do was really refreshing and it makes me want to buy more music from artists on that platform.
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Multitasking is a myth. There have been some bold claims that multitasking costs the economy $450 million per year. But its cousin context switching — the experience of jumping between tasks, tools, or projects — is growing in line with the growth of available knowledge work tools. In 2018, Okta found that employees of large companies interacted with an average of 129 different business apps - up almost 70% from 2015.
There's a lot in this piece that I liked, but I was blown away by that stat. And I'm increasingly aware as more and more tools become available how much I don't use them and I shy away from even thinking about it. The way I work works for me and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Also I've round changing my routines and habits causes more disruption than it's worth in time savings.
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Given these stakes, it’s all the more surprising that we spend so little time trying to understand the source of this discontent. Many in the business community tend to dismiss the psychological toll from e-mail as an incidental side effect caused by bad in-box habits or a weak constitution. I’ve come to believe, however, that much deeper forces are at play in generating our mismatch with this tool, including some that get at the very core of what drives us as humans.
I've never had a real issue with email, in fact in this day and age I much prefer it to Slack. But I found a lot of the studies done in this piece super interesting.
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But so much of Mr. Caro’s research never made the page. For example, he interviewed all the key aides to Fiorello La Guardia, who served as New York’s mayor from 1934 to 1945. Yet only a minuscule fraction of that research appeared in “The Power Broker.”
I'm a huge fan of Caro's writing and his thoughts on research and process, so I'm really glad to see that people will be able to use his notes and research in the future.
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What about knitting I hear you wonder? It is a uniquely soothing and meditative pastime, but I had nothing but a sock on my needles and starting anything new seemed unusually daunting. With low making mojo, I turned to my mending basket to find things I could potentially finish in one sitting. Darning holes provided the crafting fix I needed to refocus my eyes and spend time away from the news. By using bright bits of leftover yarn, I can smile down at the colorful addition to my socks when I put them on.
I recently discovered Sonya Philip via her sewing patterns, but I really liked the sentiment in this post as well as the way she views sewing and making. Excited to sew some of her patterns and think about making and clothes and such more in the coming months.
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To labor under capitalism is to enter negotiations between the arbitrary constructions of money and time. It is to be asked: How much is 60 minutes of survival worth to you? And to answer, For how long must I labor to earn the right to survive?
I'll be thinking about this one for a long while.
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Why now do we expect our whole selves to be mitigated through a screen—no, through one app? Friends with far fewer followers than I have tell me they feel hesitation about posting because they don’t know if they’ve ticked all the boxes, if the comments will be hostile or demand further information (even simply “Recipe?” can cause anxiety). There seems to be an informal decree to no longer let people exist on social media as they want to exist: Instead, constant explanation and information is demanded.
Related to my post about how I view posting on here, I've gotta say I'm so much more hesitant to put anything on social media these days. I think, probably too much, before I do it.
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The thrill of heist stories has always come from both a willing suspension of morality and an internal reorientation of what it means to be a hero or a villain. Crime dramas are escapist; few Netflix viewers are going to be plundering the Louvre anytime soon. But Lupin’s trick is that the confrontation it forces isn’t just between cops and robbers. It’s between an orphan and a social hierarchy built on dirty money and immaculate manners, in which a diamond necklace can be a work of art but also a symbol of European aristocratic corruption through the ages.
I really enjoyed Lupin on Netflix, we devoured the first season and I was upset at how much I was left hanging at the end. This piece is a great thinking through of the themes of the show and I find that added depth makes it even better.
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Given this, perhaps the rare and strange idle time that some of us have found during the pandemic is an opportunity not to “get your life back on track,” as Redditor Polartm put it, but to experiment with nothingness, with a failure of productivity. We might instead use the time to try and find this humanity that Kierkegaard talks of, to tell and listen to stories, to “raise ourselves” in this other, nebulous way. Rather than eradicate this idle time, why not embrace it and expand its boundaries so that others, the workers excluded from this moment of relative stillness, might know it, too?
A bit of a theme in the things I've been thinking about lately and I will be revisiting Jenny Odell's book soon, but I'm moving into a phase in life where I will be very much no busy. And it's honestly hard, in this culture, to admit that to people because of the judgement that comes. But that's OK, I'm gonna quietly do my thing and see how I go.