Things I Like
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We’d felt a connection to a pair of siblings—a hyperactive six-year-old and a non-talkative four-year-old—named Star and Devlon. But we didn’t reach out for them. And when I knew I was ovulating, we didn’t have sex. And my husband never pushed me. Because it turns out, “If it happens, it happens” is Southern Lady Code for we don’t want kids.
I really relate to this piece a lot. If you asked me in my twenties if I was going to have kids I would've said yes. But then it never happened and I'm very much OK with that. I married someone and we lived life and we liked our life the way it was and the way it is. It's nice to see more people talking about being childfree, to be honest.
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During all these years I did come to understand stuff about power that I wanted people to know. You read in every textbook that cliché: Power corrupts. In my opinion, I’ve learned that power does not always corrupt. Power can cleanse. When you’re climbing to get power, you have to use whatever methods are necessary, and you have to conceal your aims. Because if people knew your aims, it might make them not want to give you power. Prime example: the southern senators who raised Lyndon Johnson up in the Senate. They did that because he had made them believe that he felt the same way they did about black people and segregation. But then when you get power, you can do what you want. So power reveals. Do I want people to know that? Yes.
Caro has a new book out about how he's worked over the years and so there are a barrage of interviews with him. He is a fascinating person and I love reading the interviews and will be reading the book as well. The New Yorker has a longer piece by him that is just as good, I highly recommend it.
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I remember this wonderful Korean lady came over for a meeting at my house, and the next day she called me and she said, “You didn’t offer me a glass of water.” And that never crossed my mind, but I have to be conscious of the fact that people who come into my home are coming into a place that feels daunting and intimidating, and I need to go to the extra mile to make them feel welcome. And I didn’t know about that until someone just came out and said it to me. Just like I watched my father increasingly surround himself with yes men, I started to deliberately surround myself with no ladies. And so they would, a lot of the time, really jerk my chain, and that was important.
I found this interview fascinating, especially since the truly crazy wealth happened after her childhood. But I also found that the way she recognized what is truly soul destroying about wealth and made changes to her own life to ensure that she's around people and isn't isolating herself.
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As I read stories like Brenda’s, and about new developments in using (I can’t believe I’m typing this) prison labor to produce training data, this is the thing I keep coming back to: our industry’s excelled at creating new classes of work, and then deciding those workers are effectively invisible. And then we often decide that work, those workers, matter less than the automated solutions they’ve helped create--and perhaps, in time, we decide they’re ideal candidates for automation themselves.
Ethan's writing and thinking about how we as an industry are treating people, both those who work in the industry and those who use and consume our work, is some of the best being done right now. And I'm so grateful he writing and thinking about this, sharing it, because we need to hear it.
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Some people love books reverently--my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s.
This is a really beautiful piece about books and family.
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But if home cooking is having a renaissance, it’s not the kind that promises 30-minute meals or sings the praises of semi-homemade. Instead it feels like a return to an even earlier era, the one where Julia Child first showed Americans how to make beef bourguignon. Today our favorite cooks are again challenging us to tackle classics—sourdough, a whole roast chicken, or the perfect vinaigrette—in a totally down-to-earth, far-from-perfect way. “The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken” could’ve been a quote from Nosrat if Child hadn’t supposedly said it first.
I love Nosrat and her cookbook and I really enjoyed this profile of her. I can’t wait for her new cookbook to come out!
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Sometimes you start out at the bottom. Sometimes you’ll trip and fall down. Sometimes you stay there for a good long time. Sometimes all the lousy luck in the world only ever seems to wash up at your door. I’m telling you from experience that sometimes you’re going to feel like giving up on your chosen path. Maybe you’re even worried that you don’t actually have a chosen path yet. There’s going to be a day when you say to yourself, the hell with it, I’m going to leave a note blaming my teachers for everything and I’m going to go and sell all my organs to medical science while I’m still alive.
Don’t.No one writes encouraging things better than Warren Ellis and I'm loving his new site, the posts are varied and wonderful.
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There is a lot that can be said about this survey, but I urge you to read it and think about it and, more importantly, meditate on it. I'll be linking to a few folks who've been writing about it and writing about it well, I'm still ruminating on what it all means and what I want to do next. BUT we are leaving people behind and shutting them out and that makes me so very sad.
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I say we quite deliberately. This is on us: on you, and on me. And, look, I realize it may sting to read that. Hell, my work is constantly done under deadline, the way I work seems to change every year month, and it can feel hard to find the time to learn more about accessibility. And maybe you feel the same way. But the fact remains that we’ve created a web that’s actively excluding people, and at a vast, terrible scale. We need to meditate on that.
Ever since I read the survey and then read this piece I've been thinking about what I can do, what more can I do? How do we get more folks to think about one thing they can do to try and help fix what we've broken? I'm still thinking, but I'm so glad for folks like Ethan who are thinking about this too.
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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.