Things I Like
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In general, I don’t think people like going to the doctor. It’s more of an informational question than it is: If you make it free, people are going to overutilize it. It’s not like chocolate cake or something.
I read a lot about the health care proposals that are out there because I'm keenly interested in the US doing something to change it's system to work better for everyone rather than being a profit making machine for insurers, hospitals, and others. This interview is by far one of the most interesting things I've read in a long time. Super interesting ideas on how to pay for universal coverage and also interesting ideas that combat the need for cost sharing and over utilization.
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In one of our conversations, I asked Catherine if she worried that I would relapse. She said it was possible, given the addictive properties of phones and the likelihood that they’ll only keep getting more essential. But she said that as long as I remained aware of my relationship with my phone, and continued to notice when and how I used it, I’d have gotten something valuable.
The woman he worked with to curb his phone usage goes on to say that "life is about what you pay attention to" and I love that sentiment. There is a lot of writing these days about one should or shouldn't be using her device, and to balance this Kara Swisher tweeted about using hers to read (with her stats to prove it). I don't think this can be prescriptive at all, but I like being pushed to think about how I'm using my device and if that's how I want to be using it.
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Unlike the access ramps that enable wheelchair users to avoid stairs, this ramp is beautiful. It is visually inviting; pushing up its surfaces is a pleasure-filled challenge. When we roll down with our hands off our wheels, we and our chairs turn automatically, spinning either out of control into the ground or if we and they are perfectly balanced, turning almost endlessly.
A really beautiful piece that is about how much more we can do to make things enjoyable and usable rather than just accessible. Gonna be thinking about how I can do that in my own work on the web.
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Despite my hatred of business speak there is one awful business term that is the most useful phrase I have ever discovered. It is my most treasured possession.
This piece made me laugh out loud because I too hate business speak, but there are certain phrases I find helpful, including the one highlighted in his piece. I feel extremely fortunate to work for a company where I don't need to use these terms very often because people get it.
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I’m not saying this to dunk on the field – I love my career whole heartedly – but design systems requires a love of all those unsexy things. And I want to ensure that folks aren’t turned away by all the dudes with nice hair that talk about their goddamn drop shadows.
If you aren't reading Robin's site, you really should be. His writing and ranting about design systems is always spot on, including this piece.
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Getting over it is a spiritual discipline that is in short supply in secular life. It’s what makes the paradoxical but deeply humane approach to work at the monastery possible. The Benedictines who live in the canyon keep strict watch over their time and attention. Doing so keeps their desires in order. But it also keeps labor within limits. They get over work so they can get on with something much more important to them.
This is a really interesting read about the place work has in our lives. I continue to think about the centrality we (at least in the US) place on work and career and how you earn your living. It's how we spend the vast majority of our waking hours. And I'm not sure it's always the best way to spend all our time.
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I’ve found this cycle has fomented another emotion beyond distrust, one I’ve felt most acutely in 2018: Disdain? (Feels too loaded.) Disappointment? (Too moralistic.) Wariness? (Yes!) Yes — wariness over the way social networks and the publishing platforms they provide shift and shimmy beneath our feet, how the algorithms now show posts of X quality first, or then Y quality first, or how, for example, Instagram seems to randomly show you the first image of a multi-image sequence or, no wait, the second.
I enjoyed the way Mod talks about newsletters and what's going on in that world. Right now I'm overwhelmed by the sheer number of interesting newsletters out there and I want to get the all, support them all, but my time and my pocketbook can't handle it. I'm being selective and it's hard. But I love that I can read them when I want and they come directly to me.
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I might be the “old guard” but if you think I’m incapable of learning React, or another framework, and am defending my way of working because of this, please get over yourself. However, 22 year old me would have looked at those things and run away. If we make it so that you have to understand programming to even start, then we take something open and enabling, and place it back in the hands of those who are already privileged. I have plenty of fight left in me to stand up against that.
This is such a good post by Rachel. I taught myself CSS when my HTML instructor at the community college I attended wouldn't teach us. I used books, view source, and online articles to learn and it was the start of a whole new career for me. What I've been amazed at recently is how hard it is to do that now. And how you are pushed into the land of JavaScript so quickly when you start.
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That’s not to say that this is the best approach, but it’s a good reminder that the web works by default without all of our additional layers. When we add those additional layers, things break. Or, if we neglect good markup and CSS to begin with, we start out with something that’s already broken and then spend time trying to make it work again.
On the heels of Rachel's article, Garett makes some wonderful points about how we build things and what the result is. He too talks about how HTML and CSS are entry points, there isn't anything to install, a text file and a browser and you can begin learning.
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...[U]nder this definition, you can find solitude in a busy train car or a coffee shop, or wherever. I am slightly nervous about this re-definition (it seems to me that being truly alone has a ton of value), but I am also attracted to this idea that you don’t necessarily have to be alone to be with your thoughts, you just have to be free from input.
I like the idea of solitude as being free from thoughts, of being free from input, of being able to be alone in your mind. It relates to what Anne Helen Peterson talked about in her newsletter last week. I'm thinking I need to read Newport's book as I've been reading so much about it from others lately.
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My gut feeling was that there was clearly a reduced amount of work in the team for the UI engineers (I am one of them), and that this was caused by the fact that we were not continuously writing new CSS at every new feature, but we were able to re-use and simply combine (“like Lego”) the existing UI components provided by Cosmos. And that this was also caused by the fact that also the mockups provided by the designers were more consistent, and followed a set of pre-defined patterns, so building UIs for us had become increasingly simple and straightforward.
Really interesting look at a way to measure the reduced work load that comes when you have a well functioning design system in place. This wasn't the easiest thing to chart, but the results are stunning and amazing.
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And yet even today I rarely volunteer how utterly happy I am with the decision I made more than 20 years ago. Because I never had a child, I don’t really know how to miss the experience of having one. But I do recognize all the things that have come my way as the result of not having kids–and, by extension, being a woman on my own after my marriage broke up: not having children certainly made it less difficult to end the marriage when it became clear that my husband and I had to do so. In some ways, the baby I never had is a part of me. She has given me freedom.
I'm a childless adult and if you'd talked to me when I was 25 I probably would've said that I'd have kids some day. But that isn't what's happened and it's been a very conscious choice. And I'm grateful to know people who are making that choice, I don't feel alone at all. But I found this piece interesting, someone celebrating what that has brought to her life now that she's older. I fully realize that aging will be different for me than it is for people with kids, but I've let go of fear of that difference and am enjoying what it brings to my life as I age.
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Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered. American history is told as a tale of progress, always forward and upward, with the Civil War as a kind of blip in the middle, an obstacle that was overcome. In Greece, history feels not linear but circular. There is liberal democracy and then there is oligarchy. Then there is liberal democracy again. Then there is foreign subversion, then there is an attempted Communist coup, then there is civil war, and then there is dictatorship. And so on, since the time of the Athenian republic.
I've found Anne Appelbaum's writing in this time of craziness in the world to be really helpful in how to think about it all. In this article she talks about the ebb and flow of how governments have functioned in Europe and how different the history has been in the past 200 or so years than what American has experienced. Well worth the read.
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Dystopia is one of those parts of speculative fiction that function as early-warning systems for bad sociocultural weather, a function I’ve talked about at length elsewhere. Dystopia is also about the fight for a better world. Every well-written dystopia is, unlike most other forms of drama, already always about hope.”
Ellis succinctly sums up why I read so much dystopian fiction, it's about hope.
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It is often regretted that children can no longer play or move freely outside because of the dangers of traffic; inevitably, many of the people who voice these regrets are also the drivers of cars, as those same restricted children will come to be in their time. What is being mourned, it seems, is not so much the decline of an old world of freedom as the existence of comforts and conveniences the individual feels powerless to resist, and which in any case he or she could not truthfully say they wished would be abolished. There is a feeling, nonetheless, of loss, and it may be that the increasing luxury of the world inside the car is a kind of consolation for the degradation of the world outside it.
I hate driving, to be honest, but I really enjoyed this piece.