Spring
The spring has been filled with rain and a pervasive chill; the winter refuses to release its grasp on us this year.
Through it all, we’ve had moments of joy:
Getting a few cases of Indian mangoes (kesar, alphonso, badami) to enjoy and rushing to eat them as they all ripened within days of each other.
Spending a few minutes enjoying the cherry trees in full bloom in front of the Civic Garden Complex.
Visiting the easternmost point in North America on a recent short trip to Newfoundland.
Seeing hundreds of tundra swans all congregate in one park on their annual migration.
Watching our magnolia tree in the front yard erupt in blossoms and then slowly leave pink and white leaves all over the grass as they fell off the branches.
Innumerable brunches, lunches, dinners out and in with delicious food and wonderful friends and family.
So much more, of course: there are moments of joy in every day. It is a life full of delight, despite the rain and cold. But now, I’m ready for the warmth to arrive.
A poem
The Trees
Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Some links
One of the best things I’ve read in a long time: on finding the best free restaurant bread in America. (I’ll always be a fan of the bread at Le Bernardin, but I can’t argue with the process of finding the top spot here.)
Thinking about not just screen time, but screen space:
The big change in the early 2000s wasn’t simply that more people started going on the internet. It was that the internet stopped being somewhere you went and became something you lived inside. The internet became an environment.
Mandy Brown on refusing to work in the service of war:
To refuse is a creative act. What is created in a refusal is a gap, a space, a moment in which something else makes ready to emerge, something that waits upon our invitation and a bit of water or sunlight to pop itself out and set down roots. To refuse is to create that which can only exist in the shade of that refusal, the refusal giving shelter to the choice that appears behind it. To refuse is to choose.
More Mandy Brown, on taking big steps, transition, and moving into the light:
I think this is important to remember: we aren't faced with an absence of imagination. We're faced with the constraints of a system that does not have our best interests at heart.
Noah Hawley on experiencing the lives of the ultra-rich, by being Jeff Bezos’ guest for the weekend:
Although today's billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening--a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.
How to stay friends when life is making it hard to do just that, like after having kids:
In a capitalist society obsessed with productivity, if you don’t have money, time, or energy, you can start to internalize those feelings as worthlessness. Parenthood is a common trigger, but there are all sorts of reasons you might suddenly feel you have nothing to offer in a friendship.
Mike Monteiro on the joy of making things, like donuts:
Human beings crave making things. We make things out of wood. We make things out of wool. We make things out of steel. We make things out of folded paper. We make things out of flour, salt, and sugar. We make zines. We 3D-print whistles. We draw. We paint. We make instruments out of brass so we can make sounds. There is no more flexible word in the English language than “make.” We can make donuts, we can make plans, we can make someone dinner. We can make our cities more walkable. We can make bike lanes. We can make it around the moon. We can even make up our minds. Making is an act of sharing, it’s an act of using our joy, our labor, or expertise, in the service of adding to what’s here. Hopefully, in the service of improving what’s there. We make things so that we can bond with others.
What kids want from picture books is often at odds with what adults expect them to have:
A good picture book does not just perform at a child. It makes room for the child to do something. Notice. Predict. Repeat. Interrupt. Anticipate. Laugh. Participate. It treats the child not as a passive recipient of a lesson, but as a co-conspirator.
Rebecca Solnit on feminism and social change:
Things change. They change for the better because we make them change, or for the worse because we don’t show up or lose the battle.
Raising “difficult” kids can be tricky, but they can grow up to be great adults:
The goal is to raise and educate young people who have internalized the difference between stubborn, reactive defiance and thoughtful disagreement. Properly guided, a child doesn't just push back. They push forward.
A thread on feeling like you’re not doing as well as you could be: “everyone—including those who are doing fine in material terms—has a lot more visibility into how well the rich are doing than in the past.”
Your backpack got worse on purpose: “The brands your parents trusted went from independent companies to conglomerate assets to margin optimization targets to potential fire-sale candidates. All in under forty years.“
I’m convinced that legal online gambling has done more to ruin society than many other things in the past decade, and this deep look into how someone gets addicted to gambling and the repercussions of that addiction is sobering.
Lots to debate about in the NYTimes Magazine list of thirty greatest living songwriters. I’m a fan of so many people on this list, but I’m especially glad Mariah Carey made it on.
If you need to take a painkiller, you likely should be taking acetaminophen. (I’m allergic to it, so I’m stuck with ibuprofen.)
As I mentioned in my recent media diet post, I’m really enjoying Robyn’s new album, and I really enjoyed this profile of her in The New Yorker recently.
If you like baseball, you’ll love this networked chart of every home run in the history of baseball and the intricacies and anomalies you discover when they are all charted visually.
I’ve gone to a handful of movie screenings where I (and my companions) were the only people in the theatre. Now, if you’re in the US, there’s a way to find out what showings will guarantee you a private screening.
I always appreciate when recipe creators cite their references and inspirations when they share a recipe; since you can’t copyright a recipe, often that citation is crucial to help people build their careers.
Ella Freire recreated vintage Pan Am luggage tags, and I’m transfixed.
Barbara Iweins took a photo of every item in her house and is now displaying all of them (more than 12,000 photos) as part of an immersive exhibit.
Perhaps only relevant to people who live in London, Ontario and care about its transit system: how can one of the country’s strongest-performing transit agencies also be one of its least municipally supported?
Like everyone, I was transfixed by the Artemis II mission. I loved this podcast where kids asked the crew questions about space, and have really enjoyed seeing all the photos coming from the mission. (Related: Anil Dash on why all the photos are hosted on Flickr.)
My media diet from the past few months; things I learned these past few months.
