• Loved this Mia Sato report from Gary Vaynerchuck’s VeeCon. Internet-driven fandoms are such fertile (and often terrifying) territory. • The rise of the internet’s creative middle class. • Robots building offshore wind turbines. • How Houston moved 25,000 people from the streets into homes of their own. • Megan Tatum on queer campaigners using the net to organize in a conservative Muslim country.
Learned a new word: diegetic sound. Read this: Jia Tolentino on writing for the sake of writing. Was calmed by this: Making moktak, wooden temple bells. Entranced by this: How mechanical watches work. And found this along the way: Jack Cousteau from 1969, writing about his underwater filming techniques.
The heart of a new kind of information ambience is a lop-sided shift in power.
There are so many trees, and not enough. We need a billion trees, a trillion.
They make no sense, deserts. They are an affront to comprehension. I’ve never been anywhere so empty than these alien landscapes, scarred and parched, impossible for me to comprehend. And then you have the preposterous oasis, the cities carved out of rubble, the green valleys hidden between folds in the mountains. They are inventions. Deserts make no sense, unless you are a snake or tumbleweed or a cactus. We escaped for a change of scenery, […]
Silence, as usual, means a heavy workload. Closing an upcoming issue of the magazine, pushing along another large project with lots of moving parts, and helping corral our election coverage has been intense—that’s on top of the day to day business. Next up the election, which I suppose is my third or fourth time around, depending on how you count it. We moved to America shortly before the 2008 Obama victory, which I think skewed […]
I have nothing more to say.
SIX MONTHS OF LOCKDOWN. We passed the milestone without even realizing, it just kind of came and went. (It was the same when we hit 100 days back in week 26.) Of course, “lockdown” is not exactly lockdown. Sometimes when the word crosses my lips, I feel like a character from this McSweeney’s jab: “Another dull quarantine weekend at home, Target, Chipotle, Home Depot, and our niece’s graduation party.” Your lockdown might not look the […]
TOUGH WEEK. Almost six months into lockdown, the wildfires encircle San Francisco and fill the skies with smoke. Suddenly even the limited ways we are able to go out into the world have become a bad idea. Some days are better than others, but the mornings are nearly always the worst; the smell of smoke invades everything, a blanket of smog sits in the sky and my chest stretches to grasp at the air. Combine […]
A WEEK OF SMALL VICTORIES, none of which I can really talk about yet—but some projects pushed forward and some assignments came together that I’m excited about. There were some frustrations, too, mainly about trusting my instincts. On a personal front, things have gone very quiet: we’re holding it together, just about, but the summers in San Francisco are the greyest time of the year. In the meantime, reading list ticked up another two. Finished […]
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