Endless expanse
The thing about being among the mountains is that your gaze is constantly drawn upwards.
At first, it is the snow-capped peaks that catch your attention. Eventually, your sightline extends past the peaks and to the clouds, floating among and above the snow caps, like delicate sculptures floating in the air. And then, past the clouds, the empty expanse of the sky, blue and grey—the color depending on the day—and seemingly endless.
It is this sense of endlessness that makes me love being in the mountains: that among the majesty there is boundless room for expanding, for growing into the metaphorical space around you. My eyes are drawn up, constantly, and my spirits rise too.
A poem
If You Want to Leave
Taslima Nasrin
If you want to leave, leave exactly the way you stayed--
So smoothly that I don't even get a hint
Go with the door half ajar, knowing
I never bolt it from inside.
Go, if you have to--with two, four pieces of clothing
Forgotten on the stand. In the bathroom leave behind
Your towel, a pair
Of slippers--this way.
The sudden wind also knocks on the door, at times
On certain nights. I will take it that you had come
And gone because I was sleeping, because I was, to
you, dead.
Some links
A new goal of mine: to be a person who has many temporary obsessions. There is a joy in being infinitely curious and diving into those curiosities with gusto:
Yet, my argument is that every temporary obsession is not some certificate of disloyalty. Some are reminders of our troubled relationship with failure. But all are imprints of our curiosity, evidence that we once let ourselves fall in love deeply with something new and wildly outside of our comfort zone.
In a world where simple, accessible writing is oft-expected from our best thinkers, Brian Connolly posits a defense of academic writing:
Knowledge is not the product of individuals who then immediately disseminate it to the masses with nominally beautiful and easily digestible prose. Such a vision -- common enough to be a mostly uninterrogated norm of much writing and writing advice -- is the product of a still regnant liberal individualism. It is better to think of knowledge as a collective, iterative project that requires deep learning and a significant amount of time. What academe and its peculiar modes of writing do is sustain work that is not primarily oriented toward that general reader nor towards the metrics of market success. It can be obscure, dilating obsessively on some minor point in order to effect the subtlest shift in perception. It can sustain a series of internecine arguments that are often neither legible nor interesting to those outside of the field. The effects, though, are felt collectively, inside and outside of academe, not as the effect of one well-written, lucid, jargon- and theory-free text.
LitHub turned ten years old recently, and it’s amazing to think that I’ve been reading, and regularly linking to, that site for over nine years now.
A recent fun and ridiculous piece I found on LitHub: On the Best (Worst) Best Man Speech Ever (at My Super Mario-Themed Wedding)
Anne Helen Petersen captures the malaise of customer service well: it’s not that people are getting worse at their jobs, but the jobs themselves are getting worse. This explains why every service interaction feels worse and worse these days.
“In the spring of 2019, the budding anthropologists of Dobrin’s Literacy and Orality course began to document the graffiti that had collected on the 176 study carrels in the nine-story Alderman Library “New Stacks” since the building’s construction in 1967.” This is a fantastic anthropological study at the way we leave our marks on the world and what it says about us.
We’ve long heard that porn has shaped media technology for decades, but it’s not just tech: porn has shaped many parts of our popular culture over the years.
An important question: why do all AI company logos looks like buttholes? (And why do so many logos these days lack defining character?)
I spent hours perfecting my college application essays when I was in high school; I credit them, along with my decent SAT scores, for helping me get into the schools I wanted. This is a good case for why getting rid of them is for the best, and could possibly lead to a more equal playing field for everyone.
Years ago, I had a mild obsession with shipping goods and global supply chains. This article on silica gel packets (the ones that pop up everywhere these days) brought back some of that obsession, briefly:
Silica gel sits alongside containerized shipping, and stretch wrap, and bills of lading: It is a technology without which we’d have a much harder time maintaining global supply chains.
When I was young and we’d go on road trips, my dad and I would get a TripTik from CAA and plan out our route based on all the neat stuff we’d see along the way. I was always excited to be the navigator, and was happy when my dad indulged me with stopping at the many roadside attractions along the way. This piece asks: in a world with Google Maps and trying to get somewhere the most efficient way, rather than the most scenic, are we seeing the end of roadside attractions?
A fascinating thought exercise that I still have trouble imagining: what if we made all advertising illegal?
Another thought exercise that I’m grappling with now as I actively search for new work: make work seasonal again.
Good advice for anyone caught in a demanding workplace: work like it’s the 90s again, and protect your weekends and evenings from the encroachment of the job.
My feed on Bluesky is curated enough that I don’t notice this much (I also have minimal to no reach on there), but apparently users on Bluesky can’t seem to take a joke.
Whether we’re hosting a “formal” dinner party or just having people over for dinner (which happens dozens of times a year), we’ve realized what Somika Basu did: the perfect dinner party is not found in its perfection, but instead in the messy bits that bring everyone together and get everyone involved.
A rumination on friendship and the perils of not noticing the virtue in the people around you and missing out on what could be delightful companionship:
If someone seems boring to you, or a bad fit, it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them, that you haven’t seen them react to the context that brings out their full being. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you.
From the blog: my media diet for the past month.