Just as you enter Chatham-Kent, they rise into the sky. They are majestic.

The first part of the drive to Essex County from London along the 401 is soporific. In most cases, the highway is empty, the road has no curves or bends and just continues straight, and the scenery (though lush and green after a good rainfall) gets to be repetitive. We head to Essex County and Windsor a couple of times a year to see family, and I rely on podcasts and music to keep me entertained and alert as we go through this boring stretch.

The second part, however, is much more inspirational. The road continues to be straight and the traffic non-existent, but something changes in what you can see from your window. Out of the ground, reaching into the sky like earthly giants stretching to reach the heavens, stand white pillars with arms spinning around them.

Wind turbines.

On windy days, their blades all spin quickly, cutting through the air with ease. On still days, they are more languid—but often, still spin as they catch errant breezes—and look like canoe paddles through the water: deliberate, cautious, but still determined.

There are hundreds of them, stretching across the landscape to the horizon. The field of turbines is seemingly unending; the farmland is dotted with these beautiful structures. There are more than 2,700 wind turbines in Ontario, and it feels like they are all here, showing off their majesty.

I don’t have to say much about the benefits of wind power and alternative forms of energy production outside of oil and liquid natural gas; you all already know that we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and invest more in technologies like wind and solar. These turbines are more than just impressive sights along the landscape—they are answers to the question of sustainability and how we shape our future.

But for now, I want to bask in not just their usefulness and importance, but their majesty. They emerge from the ground and reach to the sky with a gracefulness that isn’t always found in the built environment. They are my favorite part of the drive to Essex County, and I look forward to seeing them again, soon.

For most of my adult life, my fridge had been pristine, with nothing adorning the front doors or the side panel. I was used to having clean sheets of metal, reflecting my face back at me whenever I approached the appliance.

These days, our fridge door is covered with arts and crafts made by our daughter, and it gives so much character to our kitchen. The art is a source of joy when I approach the refrigerator, and I often find myself smiling as I open the door to reach whatever I need from inside.

Holding up all those pieces of art are magnets; not just any magnets, but fridge magnets that we’ve collected throughout our travels over the years. (We have so many that they run down the side of the fridge too.) These magnets are not just functional: they mean something to us, they remind us of the places we’ve been and who we were when we went there. Some of the magnets are classy, others kitschy, but they all hold stories and memories of the past. Each one means something, and for that, they are just like the art on the walls; they are reminders of a life well lived, of adventures gone by and many more to come.

Faine Greenwood has a delightful two-part series on fridge magnets that was posted in 2021, but that I only discovered this past month. In the first part of the series, they outline the origin of the decorative fridge magnet — including a fascinating hunt for William Zimmerman and his role in the origin story — and the confluence of events that led to their popularity:

Magnets-as-souvenirs were even better than spoons or shot glasses or postcards, though. They were dual purpose-objects that stuck to the fridge and could hold up take-out menus and photographs, and you could place them right at the level of your nose where you could see them every day as you fumbled around for milk in the morning. Most importantly, they were cheap.

During the 1970s, refrigerator magnets shifted from somewhat-novel to totally ubiquitous, the kind of thing that everybody owns and that nobody actually notices without conscious effort. In the process, the American refrigerator its transition from smooth-surfaced kitchen appliance to an early form of social media, a collective family bulletin board.

The second part of the series dives deeper into what makes fridge magnets special, and why we hold so much fondness for them. It is our relationship to the object that makes it hold significance, not the object itself:

In"On Longing," Susan Stewart writes that the souvenir exemplifies object's capacity "to serve as traces of authentic experience." Souvenirs are objects that represent not the experience of whoever made it, but the 'secondhand' experience of the person who bought it. A souvenir is, by definition, always somewhat incomplete. It is an imperfect remnant of an experience in the past, a reminder in the form of a plastic sparkly lobster.

Per Stewart, the souvenir "displaces the point of authenticity as it itself becomes the point of origin for narrative."

Thus, souvenirs are intrinsically linked to a specific place, a specific location because of your memory of buying it in that particular place - even though almost all fridge magnets and similar souvenirs are mass-produced, non-unique objects. The souvenir, Stewart writes, only acquires value "by means of its material relation" to the location in which we bought it.

I am glad that my days of the austere refrigerator door have been replaced by a bevy of memories. Some days, I find myself staring at the fridge, admiring the creations of my daughter and also reminiscing on days and experiences gone by. It is at once an art gallery and history museum, and I am wowed by it all the time.

To some, the appliance may feel covered in clutter. To me, the door is covered in reminders of what I’ve done, where I’ve been, and all that has shaped me into who I am.

A poem

The Noisiness of Sleep
Ada Limón

Careful of what I carry
in my head and in my hollow,

I've been a long time worried
about grasping infinity

and coaxing some calm
out of the softest part

of the pins and needles
of me. I'd like to take a nap.

But not a nap that's eternal,
a nap where you wake up

having dreamt of falling, but
you've only fallen into

an ease so unknown to you
it looks like a new country.

Let me slip into a life less messy.
Let me slip into your sleeve.

Be very brave about my
trespass, the plan is simple--

the plan is the clock tower
and the lost crow. It'll be rich.

We'll live forever. Every moon
will be a moon of surrender

and lemon seeds. You there,
standing up in the crowd,

I'm not proud. The stove
can't boast of the meal.

All this to say--consider this,
with your combination of firefly

and train whistle, consider this,
with your maze and steel,

I want to be the rough clothes
you can't sleep in.

Some links

The premise of this article in the Guardian on why everything feels so joyless is a poignant one: in a time of abundance and decadence, we’re not enjoying what we have, but demanding more, faster. We are consuming because we can, not because it brings us joy:

The problem with contemporary culture isn’t that we’re too decadent. We have inherited the surfaces of decadence – luxury, excess, artifice, bodily display – but have surrendered the fin de siècle’s commitment to pleasure. The result is a culture in which pleasure is subordinated to programs of optimisation and replaced at scale by numbing algorithmic stimulation and promises of instant gratification. Whether you’re after goods, food, art or ideas, you can get more, faster, now.

As someone who used to work in civic technology (I’m not sure how I’ve actually drifted so far from that field in my career the past 3-4 years, but that’s a reflection for another time), I always inspired by the idea that my work could help make the lives of people better, that tech could solve problems if we just focused on the humans that used it first and foremost. These days, it seems as though Silicon Valley has lost its way, and that the focus isn’t on people, or even on the promise of making things better. The market has taken over:

In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich.

Related: a fierce anti-intellectual spirit has long animated American culture, but is now coming from the elite of Silicon Valley. It stems from “the bedrock conviction among tech oligarchs that they have mastered everything and have nothing left to learn”:

The anti-intellectual Yarvinites of the tech world value order over change--specifically, an order where they are in control and do not have to worry about nettlesome things like changing demographics, competition, or being wrong about anything at all. They pay lip service to innovation but hate the deep mental work and creativity that produces novelty and original thought. They care about such things only if they can be turned into a $20-a-month subscription service and then parlayed into mission-critical enterprise software.

I live an ordinary life. I am okay with that. I strive to be the best father and partner I can be, but in all aspects of life outside those, I am completely happy not being exceptional. It has taken years to come to that place (especially as a child and teenager who was constantly told I was destined to be great) but knowing that there is peace in being ordinary has changed my life for the better. It’s not always so easy for people to come to that realization in a world focused on the relentless pursuit of excellence:

In some contexts, at some times, we strive for excellence, pushing ourselves. Elsewhere, we shrug, accepting our own ordinariness or mediocrity. The excellent and the ordinary coexist, but have an uneasy relationship. With phrases like "you win some, you lose some," we acknowledge how, on an ordinary day, in an ordinary life, events cluster around a medium level of quality; in theory, we could be happy in the range between not-so-bad and pretty-good. Yet, for many people, it becomes difficult to find satisfaction in what's regular. The excellent starts to shame the ordinary, leaving it worse off. We want to play winning seasons, not average ones. Having dunked once, we'd like to keep doing it. We'd prefer "great" weekends and vacations. On the largest scales, we oscillate between wanting to lead extraordinary lives and embracing the "merely" ordinary.

One of the things I have been getting better at doing is embracing idleness — not for long stretches, but a few minutes at a time during the day — as a way to pass the time. There’s something freeing about not always working at something, even if that something is trying to rest up for what’s next:

The idle hour does not exist in order to improve the hours around it. It does not recharge you for anything. It is not an investment whose return is collected later at the desk. It serves nothing, points toward nothing, produces nothing, and answers to no one, and this is not a flaw to be corrected but the entire substance of the thing. To be idle is to occupy time that has been removed from the economy of usefulness altogether, time that will never be redeemed, time spent as an end in itself rather than as a means to some later, more respectable end. The rester is preparing to be useful. The idler has, for an hour, simply declined to be.

Everyone is talking about literacy and its seeming decline, so I was rapt by these three theses on the literacy crisis. This part really resonated:

Literacy has always evolved with technology. The difference today is that our informational ecosystem has outgrown our definitions and models of assessment. If we cling to a purely cognitivist view of literacy, we risk misdiagnosing the problem: blaming individual students decoding and reading fluency for much more complex and pernicious shortcomings in our educational imagination, curricular design, educational policy, political will and collective ability to design new social futures.

“An editor told me once that if you want to understand a war, interview the grave diggers. I’d add that if you want to understand a city, interview the drivers.” This is a lovely piece of writing by Saeed Jones about a Lyft driver in New Orleans.

Zoya is left-handed, which had made helping her write a bit more challenging since I can’t emulate the strokes the way she would do them. She’s gotten used to it now, but it did leave me thinking: how did she end up left-handed when both her parents are right-handed? Why are there so few left-handers out there? How did this preference of hands actually evolve? Turns out there are a lot of theories, but no real answers yet.

Somewhat related: turns out that nearly everyone, everywhere, veers left when walking. No answers for why that happens either.

My preference for places to stay when we travel is always a hotel, but traveling with a young child doesn’t always make that possible. We often rely on AirBnB to find a place where we can have two bedrooms, a kitchen; some room to play and move about. Sadly, the AirBnB experience has been getting progressively worse over the years—we’ve had a few bad experiences that make me wary of using the platform—and they’ve lost their personal touch they once had. How did AirBnB go from being a home away from home to a house of horrors?

“I think we should aspire to have cities that see the stars.” LEDs can change the way we light cities, so why aren’t we using them better to save our night skies?

Here’s a question I didn’t know I had until I read this amazing piece describing how it all works: how the heck do solar panels work?

I don’t often stop to eat when I shop at Costco, but there have been days when I have succumbed to temptation and enjoyed a hot dog. This article in The Ringer captures why those hot dogs are so popular: not only are they high quality at a low price, they are a reflection of the promise Costco is making to its customers that their experience always comes first.

So far, it’s been easy to tell when a restaurant uses AI or not, but that might get trickier in the future. There is an appeal, after all, for the analog restaurant.

An interactive map of the world’s castles and fortresses.

Somewhat related: reading maps are journeys from fiction drawn on the real world.

Did you use What.CD to pirate music back in the days before streaming? I was never a member of What.CD, but remember using Napster and Limewire to find the music I couldn’t afford on CD. Here’s an interesting look at What.CD and the general joy of music piracy.

It has been 40 years since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released in theaters. Here’s an inside look at how the iconic Ferrari car crash scene happened.

I’ve linked to the Worse on Purpose site before, but this one on why your cookware got worse on purpose is quite good and will affect my kitchen purchases from here on in.

Franco Malosso built an "Ancient Greek amphitheater" with concrete columns, plaster statues, and artificially-aged seating over what had been protected woodland. He charged for tours, duping tourists who would give him money for the chance to see a piece of history. The scam ran for two years before local police stumbled onto it in 2016.

A story about how a community came together to help a woman in need. Always nice to read about people working together to make lives better for others.

A treatise about punctuation and how it has been used throughout the generations — and how it is changing now.

“It’s impossible to be swept away by sorrow in the presence of a tuna melt.” As always, an excellent entry—this time about tuna melts—in the Notable Sandwiches series.

“The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia“ How not to forget what matters.