Things I Like
-
People stop taking values seriously when the public rewards (and consequences) don’t match up. We can say that our culture requires treating each other with respect, but all too often, the openly rude high performer is privately disciplined, but keeps getting more and better projects. It doesn’t matter if you docked his bonus or yelled at him in private. When your team sees unkind people get ahead, they understand that the real culture is not one of kindness.
I enjoyed this article and found it fascinating. I don't think too often about work culture, but this article hits the nail on the head about how culture actually works, not the way we want it to work. And it's given me a lot of food for thought about places I've worked and where I'm currently working. Hat tip to Rob for pointing me towards it.
-
I think about the topic of busyness and how to slow down in a life a lot. Over the years I've essentially started habits that've helped me say no, make time for myself, and given myself time with no plans so that my mind can wonder. And when I come across some links that are helpful, I usually read through them. In Vox, a professor talks about how he's become less busy and it's through really small, simple things. And in HBR, there is a list of things that can be helpful to making small changes that can slowly work into larger changes. I especially liked the part about questioning your thoughts to do away with negative thinking, something I have a hard time with much of the time.
-
What seems universally true is that we could all use a little song, a good poem, and a fine picture in our daily routine. (Speaking a few good words seems entirely optional.)
I really like the way Kleon digs into the origins of this list. But I agree with the list, taking time to appreciate is extremely important, not just trying to create.
-
Even the most persuasive argument — that compulsory voting violates free speech ideals that include the right to silence — misunderstands how compulsory voting works. Voters are not compelled to support a candidate or even to cast a valid ballot. They are obliged to turn up.
This was really interesting to me and I had a hard time picking out the right quote, because I also find the argument about fringe parties not being able to get elected since swing voters, rather than turn out, are what matter. I found a lot of this compelling since our recent elections elected a president with small fraction of the population actually voting for him.
-
The divisions are not just happening through commercialism though. School choice has led people to self-segregate from childhood on up. The structures of American work life mean that fewer people work alongside others from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Our contemporary culture of retail and service labor means that there’s a huge cultural gap between workers and customers with little opportunity to truly get to know one another. Even many religious institutions are increasingly fragmented such that people have fewer interactions across diverse lines. (Just think about how there are now “family services” and “traditional services” which age-segregate.) In so many parts of public, civic, and professional life, we are self-segregating and the opportunities for doing so are increasing every day.
This is an interesting read about how several institutions used to force more mixing of people from different backgrounds. The military is one such example, but college dorm life was something I wouldn't have thought about before reading this (even though it makes complete sense). I think about this a lot and about how to bring more influences (in real life as opposed to voices on social media) into my own life.
-
A beautiful image and short post about a book that I now want to read as it sounds amazing.
-
While healthy policy differences between the traditional right and the left will continue, they should not prevent Americans from uniting in the defense of democracy and our Constitution. There are deep differences and misunderstandings between both sides, each of which have somewhat different definitions for even words like liberty and equality. But on their most basic meaning, I believe there is broad consensus. We should celebrate this; it’s critical that we do.
Evan McMullin is extremely conservative and I think in a normal political year I wouldn't agree with him very much, but since the election, he's been a critical voice of the incoming administration. And I'm grateful he's still speaking up.
-
Like the specialists at the Graham Center, the generalists at Jamaica Plain are incrementalists. They focus on the course of a person’s health over time—even through a life. All understanding is provisional and subject to continual adjustment. For Rose, taking the long view meant thinking not just about her patient’s bouts of facial swelling, or her headaches, or her depression, but about all of it—along with her living situation, her family history, her nutrition, her stress levels, and how they interrelated—and what that picture meant a doctor could do to improve her patient’s long-term health and well-being throughout her life.
This article describes what frustrates me so much about care in the US health care system. The person who should know me the best and be able to spend time to ensure my treatment is what I really need, is the one who is paid the least and expected to rush through their days. I went to the same clinic from the time I was born until I moved out of state at 32. The history and knowledge they had about my life and my health is something that can't be replicated easily, but it can make all the difference when a crisis or chronic illness strikes.
-
As we move our code to CodePen, our writing to Medium, our photographs to Instagram we don’t just run the risk of losing that content and the associated metadata if those services vanish. We also lose our own place to experiment and add personality to that content, in the context of our own home on the web.
I'm so with Rachel on this, this space is my home, and I'm increasingly all in on it with syndication to other places. And it's why I care less about Twitter and other social media.
-
So back to fundamentals. My first duties are to my family and close friends, to my communities of work and care, and to myself, though that last has taken me a very long time to understand. The panicky rhythm of Twitter is no longer compatible with those duties, so I’m off it. I was genuinely sad about its decline for a couple of years, but I don’t have any sadness to spare anymore.
One of the benefits of the decline of Twitter is that more people that I've followed on RSS for years are blogging again and also writing Tiny Letters. I'm excited as I like reading long form thoughts from great writers and I'm seeing more of it in my feed.
-
One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time “productively”, too – an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough. And so we find ourselves, for example, travelling to unfamiliar places not for the sheer experience of travel, but in order to add to our mental storehouse of experiences, or to our Instagram feeds. We go walking or running to improve our health, not for the pleasure of movement; we approach the tasks of parenthood with a fixation on the successful future adults we hope to create.
I don't really do much for time management. I have routines, because they help me be healthy; things like take work breaks, getting up for breakfast, and leaving my desk periodically to move around. But I've found lately that there are people who think you need to be productive with every second of your day. I'm not, I like leisure, and sometimes that may mean a nap or taking an aimless walk slowly through the neighborhood.
-
There are, it should be noted, heartening attempts to correct this consolidation, and many voices are still speaking up for the future of media. (Also, Teen Vogue is likely going to save us all.) But in the meantime, I suppose it’s on me. I need to figure out how to translate what I read online into action, even if it means using Twitter a little less. Heck, I’d be lying if this wasn’t a goal of getting this little blog online: to place words next to each other, and write a few paragraphs of my own.
An incredibly timely post from Ethan and it quotes heavily one of my favorite talks by Mandy. I recommend reading them both. And I agree with Ethan, figuring out how to take in what's happening online and turn that into meaningful action is something we all need to do for ourselves and as I'm finding, it's not always easy.
-
As a result, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, women are more prone to suffer brain atrophy, heart disease and liver damage. Even if a woman stops drinking, liver disease continues to progress in ways it does not in men, said Gyongyi Szabo, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. And research definitively shows that women who drink have an increased risk of breast cancer.
I've written about this before, but I've been thinking a lot about alcohol and how I consume it, what triggers me wanting it, and lately I've been ensuring I'm staying within healthy limits. This article is hard to read, but I believe it's important. We've normalized excessive drinking for women and it's a serious health risk. And now I can't help but notice all the ways we talk about drinking as if it is normal and OK to drink too much. And as the article talks about, smoking used to be considered normal and that's changed, maybe we need to do the same thing for drinking.
-
Memories are a starting point for hope. Where they lead is up to us.
A short post, but it's words are just what I needed this week.
-
But neither do I believe in time travel. I believe in human limitation, not out of any sense of fatalism but out of a learned caution, gleaned from both recent and distant history. We will never be perfect: that is our limitation. But we can have, and have had, moments in which we can take genuine pride. I took pride in my neighborhood, in my childhood, back in 1999. It was not perfect but it was filled with possibility. If the clouds have rolled in over my fiction it is not because what was perfect has been proved empty but because what was becoming possible—and is still experienced as possible by millions—is now denied as if it never did and never could exist.
I have Zadie Smith's latest book on my list to read, but in the interim I've been reading a lot of articles by her and they are wonderful. This in particular, dealing with both how aging changes us and how the world events play into what we do and focus on as we age, is really interesting. More good words that I need to hear in these times.