Things I Like
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The effect of all that planning was more felt than seen. In the kitchen and the bathrooms, for instance, the walls and floors were both unremarkable and somehow perfect. It was only after you stared at them for a while that you noticed the reason: every tile in every row was complete; there were no awkward joints or truncated borders. Ellison had built the room with these exact final dimensions in mind. Not a single tile had to be cut.
An older profile of a man who is a master craftsman and works in the high end world of New York real estate. I laughed out loud several times while reading this and I also found it fascinating. I don't really want to live in any of the places talked about, but the work to get everything right and to see someone doing it so well, it's worth the read.
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The only way that technology can boost the standard of living is if there are economic policies in place to distribute the benefits of technology appropriately. We haven’t had those policies for the past forty years, and, unless we get them, there is no reason to think that forthcoming advances in A.I. will raise the median income, even if we’re able to devise ways for it to augment individual workers. A.I. will certainly reduce labor costs and increase profits for corporations, but that is entirely different from improving our standard of living.
This article has been making the rounds and I've seen it linked by several people and they are all correct, it's really good. The bit about the Luddites especially was helpful, but also thinking about how we want to live and what we want when it comes to some sort of equality when it comes to the economics of technology. We haven't gotten this right yet, so I'm not optimistic that AI will change things drastically, but everyone should read and think about what Chiang is pointing out.
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A really great list of quotes by various artists about style. Posting this mainly because I want to remember it exists, but maybe you find some of them interesting as well.
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For Nathalie, that has meant getting clear on what enough looks like. “You see all these numbers,” she says, “how much money people are making with their business or their launch or have stashed away in their retirement accounts—and I realized like, ‘What do I really need?’”
I enjoyed this piece so much because it really accurately reflects the way in which I've looked at working and at life. I didn't buy a farm, but I have lived below my means for quite some time in order to get to the point where I can work a lot less and then eventually not need to work for money at all. Figuring out your answer to the question of what you really need is freeing, letting you take time to do life things and things you enjoy so much more.
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Together, Odell’s books point to the expansive possibilities of understanding both time and attention not as individual goods to be spent and sold and saved and wasted—but as collective goods, to be shared and cultivated and practiced in community. Instead of paying attention, we can practice it. Instead of managing time, we can garden it. And think about all the art we might grow, if we practice our creative work that way instead.
I have yet to read Jenny Odell's latest book, but I really liked this piece and how it took the concepts Odell talks about and puts them into ideas for things you can do to cultivate seeing time differently along with some great ways to do some art at the same time.
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These ways of thinking are all self-evidently silly, when you reflect on it for a moment. There’s nothing inherently worthwhile about an activity just because most people happen to struggle with it. And the evidence suggests that, in all of these cases, the harder thing isn’t actually vital, or even better at all, most likely.
It's taken me a long time to let go of the harder-better fallacy but this piece sums up just why it's such a good thing to do. Easier, much of the time, is better and we should embrace that way more than we do as a socity. Side note: this piece is about weight loss, but I think it applies to so much more, and I'm grateful to Mandy for posting it.
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But our truly quirky dimensions are never really grasped by these recommendation algorithms. They have all the dullness of a Demographics 101 curriculum; they sketch our personalities with the crudity of crime-scene chalk-outlines. They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete.
A piece arguing for curating your own feed using RSS and for seeking out the different and unusual on the internet. I'm grateful not only for the feeds I subscribe to, but also to the newsletters which almost always link me to something unexpected, like this piece.
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Ultimately, my Instagram and Pinterest presence did far less to boost sales of my latest book than a single essay I wrote for The New York Times or a single message I sent out to my mailing list. But my publisher’s marketing and publicity team was so busy ordering interns to craft tiny squares of digital clip art for both platforms that they neither leveraged that mailing list nor helped place that essay. I did both on my own. Because for me, succeeding as a writer has had nothing to do with Instagram or Pinterest and everything to do with, well, writing.
There were a lot of different bits that I could've pulled out of this piece to use for the quote, but this is the one I keep coming back to and thinking about since it echoes something I hear others saying a lot: social media is not helping them sell whatever it is they're selling. It doesn't matter if they are trying to get subscriptions to a newsletter, sell knitting patterns they've designed, or sell artwork they're creating. This piece also reminded me a lot of the book The Quiet Before by Gal Beckerman, since the author here points out that social media isn't helping causes as much as we might like to think.
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Of course, the last few months have seen hundreds of thousands of tech workers lose their jobs. Frankly, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the tech industry conducted sweeping, wide-scale layoffs just as they began investing heavily in AI-driven automation. I’m still haunted by the fact that Microsoft announced a $10 billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the research organization behind ChatGPT and DALL-E — and they made that announcement not five days after laying off 10,000 workers. It’s hard not to read that as a signal about the future of work in our industry. About whose work — and whose skill — gets to matter.
I've been seeing a lot of people talking about AI lately, it's hard to avoid it when it feels like the hot topic of the moment. But recently more thoughtful pieces about what this means and how it affects us and how damaging it could be—both in taking away jobs but also in steering us onto wrong paths—and this is definintely one of them. What's been going on with tech layoffs, just as workers were feeling empowered isn't coincidental.
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The story that “artificial intelligence” tells is a smoke screen. But smoke offers only temporary cover. It fades if it isn’t replenished. We have the power to tell different stories, to counter the narrative of “artificial intelligence” with one that is rooted in democracy and equality, in a vision of a living world in which life is not ranked according to perceived value under capitalism but in which care is extended to all. But—and here’s the trick of it—in order to do that we have to let go of the notion that any one of us is worth more than any other.
Another thoughtful piece about AI.
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Seeing these contradictions harmoniously coexist is as comforting as it is challenging. In those moments when everything is too much, these paintings can remind me that understanding isn’t a zero sum game, that it’s possible to reduce a problem to manageable contours without ignoring its finer details, that merely acknowledging those finer details can be a sufficient substitute for actually making sense of them. We don’t have to know it all, and knowing how much we don’t know is its own kind of knowledge and can bring its own kind of peace.
Rob has been writing not only about his own art and process but also about art field trips and the things he's looking at and I've enjoyed all of it oh so much. This is mostly a link to say you should follow his site if you're not already, it's great.
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Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?
Solnit has a way of asking the right questions at the right time and this piece is no exception. What if changing our attitude about climate change led to stronger communities working together and, this is key to me, not striving for growth or money but striving for everyone to be fed and secure.
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In that spirit, I’d like to see knitters, perhaps led by Mrs. Obama, next aim their needles at the fashion industry, pushing for the kind of large-scale overhaul here that is beginning in the European Union: an unprecedented series of measures addressing the catastrophic environmental and social impact involved in the making and disposal of our clothing. The goal by 2030 is for all textiles sold in that market to be, among other things, reparable, recyclable, often made from recycled fibers that are free from hazardous chemicals and produced with respect for labor rights.
I just finished Orenstein's book Unraveling and it's great and in this shorter piece she highlights some of what she talks about in the book. As a knitter I find it easy to source yarn that is ethically sourced, from the sheep to the spinning, to the dyers, to the local yarn shops. I wish the same could be said of fabric, since I'm now sewing a lot. I'd love to see more done to regulate and correct the awfulness of the fashion industry.
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I know it can be difficult, with so much choice, to figure out what to focus on. But on top of everything, you can preview most anything before committing. What’s not to like? Build a library, and you can be your own algorithm.
I don't listen to a lot of music, but this is the way I feel about my RSS feed and what we I consume via streaming services. I'm rarely persuaded by the algorithms of the services and usually end up seeking things out in my own peculiar way.
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But in many instances, the real source of concern at these companies comes down to boneheaded decisions made by CEOs — whether it's Mark Zuckerberg at the company formerly known as Facebook, who authorized a hiring binge over the pandemic and invested billions of dollars into his metaverse folly before having to cut 11,000 jobs, or Tobi Lütke at Shopify, who laid off 1,000 people based on a bet on the future of e-commerce that "didn't pay off."
I've watched the increasing number of layoffs and really wondered who it is the executives are trying to make happy. Layoffs cost a lot and they usually don't help in the ways that we think, in fact, they usually hurt a company and the workers left behind, for quite some time after it happens. And yet, and yet they are happening a lot right now. It seems this isn't about what's best for the company but maybe about what's best for the investors, or possibly it's a show for the investors. Either way, it's quite sad.