Awash with glitter
One afternoon this past week, the sun was shining and there was a light wind blowing across the neighborhood. It was bitterly cold outside, but after the deluge of snow we’ve been getting over the past little while, having the sun peek through the clouds was a welcome respite from the greyness of the season.
I was inside, making a cup of tea in the kitchen, when something caught my eye outside the window at the back of the house.
The wind was slowly blowing across the snow on our rooftop, releasing small, delicate, fragile flakes into the air, fluttering as they danced in the breeze and slowly made their way to the ground. As they fell, they caught the sunlight, each flake reflecting the brightness like a sequin.
There, at the window, it felt like the world outside was being showered with glitter, that nature was having a celebration and I was lucky enough to catch the show of sparkles as it passed by.
I read a lot of articles about how to make it through a cold and dreary winter. All the advice is good: getting good light exposure, getting outside in nature, ensuring social connection, engaging in hobbies, etc. What really gets me through the winter, however, is noticing the small wonders around me. When the world is showering you with glitter, you enjoy the small delight.
Enough of those small delights make for a season of warmth, even when the world is cold outside.
A poem
Early Capitalism
Joe Wenderoth
they are perfecting the pillow
with which
you are being suffocated
now it sings to you
and shows you pictures
Some links
“A habit is built on the movement of return” Mandy Brown once again says it so well when she writes about habits, particularly poignant at this time of the year.
This article starts off questioning why RSS readers are designed to look like email clients, but then dives into something much more important and salient for anyone using basically any tool or service on a computer or a phone: the sites and apps we use have us accruing “debt” by giving us phantom obligations. We feel beholden to the unread count, and that’s making the web a worse experience for all of us. Nobody is waiting.
When people say government doesn’t do anything to help citizens, I get mildly infuriated. This piece in the Atlantic is a small glimpse into what government actually does for all of us.
Everything Jenny writes is excellent, and this passage in her latest Show Up Toronto newsletter was particularly resonant:
Canada is not the United States, for good reason, but the logic of authoritarianism always rhymes. Increases in policing, militarization, surveillance, and repression of speech while at the same time a marginalized group is scapegoated as the hated Other - we are not immune to any of the forces that have led to American fascism. Every day, every hour, ordinary people in America are showing up with incredible courage to defend their neighbours at great personal risk. If we can honour their bravery in any way, it would be by making sure we don't allow the same hatred to dig its roots even deeper in our own country.
I’ve been an unabashed fan of Markdown for several years—I do all my writing in Markdown before converting it to other formats—so this history of Markdown and its importance to how we experience the web by Anil Dash is just excellent.
This important piece by the always-amazing Bianca Wylie on digital infrastructure and sovereignty is right on the mark:
The real world of digital sovereignty should be about investing in people over products. Digital anything is secondary to primary responsibilities of reconciliation, repair, and equity in service delivery and procurement.
The path we’re on instead is techno-solutionism: the cheapest, straightest line governments can choose towards efficiency and savings, and the most impoverished innovation strategy possible for a young country with every opportunity to do differently.
The Pitt was one of my favorite shows of last year and this season is already shaping up to be great. I love this profile of Noah Wylie and inside look at the making of the show.
Somebody is visiting all 100 public library branches in Toronto (a project I considered when I lived there), and this Reddit thread is capturing a list of all kinds of great places to eat near the branches.
Another gem by Mike Monteiro, this time on whether houses can be haunted:
To answer your question, yes, houses can be haunted. But not all haunting is bad. Sometimes houses are haunted by the smell of caldo verde, and the laughter of a grandmother as she tickles her granddaughter, the smiles of a couple of idiot kids as she asks them if they want a treat, the memory of a grandmother waiting at a window.
Elizabeth Tsurkov was kidnapped and held in Iraqi prison for three years, and her captors were, well, not very smart.
Cory Doctorow on the inevitability that AI companies will fail, and how we can salvage some good from when they do.
Interesting viewpoint on how our changing writing norms involving spelling and punctuation are because of a lack of context—we don’t know the people for whom we are writing. (I still use periods at the end of my text messages, and will until I die.)
A fascinating way to think about money and the accumulation of stuff: reframing it all as a function of net fulfillment, and not net worth.
This cheeky “obituary” for the 90-minute movie is actually spot on: the perfect sweet spot for a film is an hour and a half, and we barely get those anymore, sadly.
