Ten years in London
As of this week, we have been living in London for ten years.
The passage of time is strange: it feels like we just moved here and yet it also feels like we’ve been here forever. In some moments, I feel like I’m still a displaced resident of Toronto, and in many others, I feel like settled here, like this is where I’m supposed to be.
Life has changed a lot in the past ten years: we bought a house, we had a child, we lived through a pandemic, we survived and thrived through ups and downs. In some ways, we are different people from who we were when we first moved here; in many ways, we are still the same.
The city has changed a lot in the decade since we’ve been here. It has grown in size (population and surface area), its dining options have (slightly) improved, and the city as a whole is getting more visibly diverse. Certain problems remain or have even gotten worse, but there seems to be at least a cursory interest in tackling those issues.
There are still lots of things I want to do in this city that will make me feel connected to it—I made a list years ago that I should revisit— and I still want to get more involved in civic advocacy after taking a break from it 2020. After ten years, I’m realizing that just because I’m getting used to this place as it is doesn’t mean I can’t work hard to make it an even better place to live.
We’re going to celebrate our ten-year anniversary here by going out for pizza at one of our favorite restaurants in town. Who knows where we’ll be ten years from today, but this week, we’re celebrating where we are now.
A poem
Personalia
Mary Ruefle
When I was young, a fortune-teller told me that an old woman who wanted to die had accidentally become lodged in my body. Slowly, over time, and taking great care in following esoteric instructions, including lavender baths and the ritual burial of keys in the backyard, I rid myself of her presence. Now I am an old woman who wants to die and lodged inside me is a young woman dying to live; I work on her.
Some links
In an 8-month study, the Harvard Business Review found that “AI tools didn't reduce work, they consistently intensified it.” Ethan Marcotte sums it up well:
Whatever the lofty output gains promised by LLMs, their initial productivity surge is erased over time, and replaced by heavier workloads--and that leads to workers experiencing "cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making.”
These platforms were not built for you and I--and never were.
A great Bluesky thread about the Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance.
Really interesting examination of “positional goods” and how even a perfect world would lead to unhappiness due to the need to matter.
Between operating rewards schemes and storing money on store cards, every business these days seems to be turning into a bank.
Ruby Tandoh’s book seems to be referenced everywhere these days (it’s on my to-read list!) and it’s well used here in Alicia Kennedy’s essay about the foodie—not just the word “foodie”, but the nature of the foodie as personality as well:
There’s a fundamental tension at the heart of foodie culture: everyone must eat, making food more universal than music or theater—yet class inequities shape how we do it, turning appetite into a marker of status. This is precisely why the term matters. Unlike other cultural identities, the foodie sits at the intersection of necessity and privilege, with the potential to bridge this divide—or to further entrench it.
Forgetting and memory fickleness is what allows us to grow and process our life experiences; AI doesn’t forget, and that’s a major flaw in its design:
“Infinite memory” runs against the very grain of what it means to be human. Cognitive science and evolutionary biology tell us that forgetting isn’t a design flaw, but a survival advantage. Our brains are not built to store everything. They’re built to let go: to blur the past, to misremember just enough to move forward.
Clichés or variations on them are a way to immediately connect with an average, non-literary audience in an evocative way, almost with the warmth of an in-joke. Clichés are democratised wordplay, metaphor for the masses.
Sam Bleckley outlines an interesting way to frame how we hold conversations and why some of us can’t seem to connect with others. I’m definitely a member of the Church of Interruption.
I’ve been reading a lot about the nuclear family and how it’s an extremely flawed model for how we structure society (and growing up in a multi-generational household makes it clear how flawed the model is), but I had never heard it being compared to diet culture before. Lisa Sibbett draws the comparison and dives deep into the origins and flaws of the nuclear family in this great essay.
“We all look stupid as hell when we’re looking at our phones.” Let’s bring back the chimes.
It’s normal for our apps and phones to interrupt us multiple times a day, often while in the process of doing something important. How do we build an interruption-free model of software?
Interviews with certain vegetables. A lovely piece of creative writing by Anelise Chen.
There has been increased attention placed on Mira Nair and her work after the election of her son, Zohran Mamdani, as the mayor of NYC. I loved this interview with her in Harper’s Bazaar, and this profile of her in Vulture. From the profile:
"I believe you have one chance to raise a child," Nair told me, "and if you can marinate them in love like we have, with the notion that they will be secure and protected in that embrace of love, which is not a small one but a larger one, that gives a lot of strength for the life ahead."
The dismantling of public health services is directly related to the health of a nation.
This is a scathing essay, written from the perspective of an aging history professor, on how universities have squandered their mission to educate in the name of chasing rankings and brand recognition and reliance on private equity.
