Humans do. It’s how we operate; a fundamental part of what makes us. We shape the world around us. We observe. We try to be interesting. We act. Every action is a protest against what was there before. Every creation is a moment of optimism. Doing is how we are built. Sometimes we do with our bodies. Remember covid lockdowns? Remember when a new and potentially deadly disease stalked the planet, when nobody was even […]
What to think about Ukraine? What to do about Ukraine? Timothy Snyder is building a list of ways to help. Lots of great, often worrying, information in this story on IKEA’s insatiable appetites. It’s the world’s largest consumer of wood; it’s the largest private landholder in Romania. I also learned the word “edacity”. (trees, passim) The NYT’s David Leonhardt, who has consistently argued for a kind of liberal’s relaxation of covid restrictions, has been a […]
What are animals to us? They are our friends, our families: they are threats, they are resources.
Beyond “this thing is long.” Even though things have been shit, we got really, really lucky.The story doesn’t just detail the many things that went wrong as the virus emerged and various countries struggled to deal with it—including China’s reticence to admit anything was wrong, the WHO’s complete miss, the CDC’s testing debacle, failed leadership from the White House and so on. What came through to me was how there have also been a set […]
“At roughly 31,000 words, the article is as long as a novella, roughly five times the length of a typical major magazine article.” “Mr. Wright, a staff writer at The New Yorker for nearly three decades, initially turned in 76,000 words. “I have an appetite to go into depth,” he said in an interview. (He added, with a laugh: “I get paid by the word.”)” —From the New York Times’ short note about the Lawrence […]
Only just found this extremely salient piece from April: Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can […]
Anne Helen Petersen’s latest words resonated with me: I am not a parent. I am, however, a person who hears and sympathizes with so many of the struggles of managing to work and parent right now, and as Chloe Cooney put it all the way back in April, “the parents are not okay.” Not the parents who are essential workers. Not the parents who are taking care of infants, or toddlers, or elementary school age […]
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