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Remember when people used to read the little blog posts under comics? They don't now, so I can write whole lines of gibberish, squinkle dabyougargh nunglepeep.

Growing up, I was a pretty quiet, introspective kid, at least for the first couple of years while I decided if the world was worth commenting on. This is funny to me now because I am an adult who loves to talk — I’ll talk to anyone about anything until it annoys them, and if you’re my friend, you’ve likely at least once asked if we can please ohmygod change the subject (sorry again, Ben). Enjoying conversation isn’t unique, it’s human, but I think I became a writer because I get to talk to all kinds of people about all kinds of things and most of the time they feel (or are) obliged to answer me. I spend so much of my day on the phone, asking questions then listening, then hanging up and talking through the things I’ve just heard to friends who eventually say ohmygod can we please change the subject.

One unusually complementary byproduct of being in conversation a lot is that my reflective kid-self still surfaces, almost on a daily basis, and sometimes, if I’m lucky, more often. After a long FaceTime or text exchange with a friend, I spend a long time digesting what we’ve talked about, what I’ve heard, absorbing and reflecting and thinking. There’s an apocryphal story of me as a three or four year old heading to the greenhouse in our backyard “to think.” (What was she thinking about, I’ve gotta know.) In the blank, quiet spaces in between conversation, I often visit my metaphorical greenhouse. There, I untangle and consider, letting the important pieces settle, working through it.

Once again, it’s likely you’re muttering, “So you talk and then think about what you talked about? Not sure this is worth bringing back your lapsed newsletter for.” I don’t even have a good comeback to that imaginary burn so let’s just continue.

A couple months ago, I bought myself a bread oven for this bakery I started (a different newsletter altogether), and I have been jazzed about it ever since. It is wildly different from a conventional domestic oven, though, and while you’d think an oven is an oven, it has taken me months to figure out how to properly use it. It has three shelves with square chunks of fire brick that heat to very high temperatures and stay hot for a very long time. It has heat coming from the top and from the bottom, and its ambient temperature is as important to monitor as the temperature of the stones themselves. When I bake bread in it, I have to take a massive spray bottle with a long wand and soak the oven with water quickly before closing the door, to create steam to make crunchy crusts. There are many things that can go wrong along the way and they have. Oh boy they have.

Like basically everything else in life, to the dismay of humans through history, the only way I have learned how to use this oven is to fuck everything up to an obnoxious degree. I have not been happy with the bread I’ve baked in this oven more times than not. And I try again to get it right the next time.

While I absolutely loathe being bad at something, I have come to appreciate this process of trial and error. It’s fun to see small improvements on bake day, sure, but actually the thing I like the most about it is the time I spend working through the issues in my head, thinking and reflecting. I’ll be sitting at my computer, or taking a walk, or in the shower, and I’ll almost hear my brain at work, like an old-timey clock but probably less functional. I talk to Sam, and my friends Andrew, Bryan, Greg, and Carla about their thoughts on the oven and they indulge my questions (none have yet to say can we please change the subject). Then I take all that info, squirrel it away, and save it for a time when my mind is resting, just waiting to have a good think. I realized the best thing about talking is thinking, if that makes any sense at all.

In life, it’s natural to feel envy of decisive, successful, fast-moving people with nice cars or whatever. Look how easily they move through the world, wearing that flashy business suit and making cold hard cash, climbing up that ladder and living in a mansion with a heated toilet. Imagine how nice it must feel to shout “Sell! Sell!” or “Buy! Buy!” at least one time. In my industry, for example, everyone has already written a book and I can barely muster the brain power to write a newsletter. I’m just sitting in my sweats imagining myself yelling “Sell! Sell!” This is a fairly stupid use of my time. Maybe I should be imagining myself yelling “Buy! Buy!” instead?

I guess the point here is that I think it can be nice to just quietly work through things, with no time limit and no decisions to be made, just kind of always being in process. A friend likened herself once to a magpie, always collecting details from conversations to put into her writing. I’m more like a clam — opening my mouth at regular intervals, then closing it tight for a bit. (That’s what clams do, right…). It’s cool to take your time to see how you think or feel, to just let all the information and feelings slither through your brain like a clam. You don’t have to buy a bread oven to figure this out (though if you do, I’m going to text you a million questions), but hey, I bet you’re thinking about it now.

In 1981, Coevolution Quarterly published a 20 question quiz written by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman, and Victoria Stockley that is designed to reveal how well you know your local natural environment. Here are the questions:

1. Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.
2. How many days til the moon is full? (Slack of 2 days allowed.)
3. What soil series are you standing on?
4. What was the total rainfall in your area last year (July-June)? (Slack: 1 inch for every 20 inches.)
5. When was the last time a fire burned in your area?
6. What were the primary subsistence techniques of the culture that lived in your area before you?
7. Name 5 edible plants in your region and their season(s) of availability.
8. From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region?
9. Where does your garbage go?
10. How long is the growing season where you live?
11. On what day of the year are the shadows the shortest where you live?
12. When do the deer rut in your region, and when are the young born?
13. Name five grasses in your area. Are any of them native?
14. Name five resident and five migratory birds in your area.
15. What is the land use history of where you live?
16. What primary ecological event/process influenced the land form where you live? (Bonus special: what’s the evidence?)
17. What species have become extinct in your area?
18. What are the major plant associations in your region?
19. From where you’re reading this, point north.
20. What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom where you live?

People living here 200 years ago — or even 75-100 years ago — would definitely have known all of these and many currently living in the area, especially those who have lived here much longer that I have, would know most of this. Being mostly an indoorsman, I am only am aware of some of these, and even then only partially. How well do you know your local environment?

I found the quiz in Rob Walker’s newsletter and he added a helpful exercise for us low-scorers:

Pick one of the questions you don’t know the answer to - and make it a point to learn what that answer is. After you’ve mastered that, move on to a new question.

I chose the question about soil series and learned that the state of Vermont has an official State Soil: Tunbridge soil.

The Tunbridge series consists of loamy, well-drained soils that formed in Wisconsin-age glacial till. These soils are 20 to 40 inches deep over schist, gneiss, phyllite, or granite bedrock. They occur extensively in mountainous areas of Vermont, in all but one county.

Tunbridge soils are used mainly for woodland. White ash, American beech, white birch, yellow birch, hemlock, white pine, red spruce, red maple, and sugar maple are typical species. Sugar maple is especially important; Vermont produces the largest amount of maple syrup in the U.S. Some areas have been cleared and are used for hay and pasture. Recreational uses are common on these soils. They include trails for hiking, mountain biking, snowmobiling, and skiing.

Neat!

Update: See also The Big Here Quiz for more questions and the origin story of such lists.

Update: Turns out I posted about this almost 16 years ago (and forgot about it). (thx, john)

Tags: Jim Dodge   Leonard Charles   Lynn Milliman   Rob Walker   Victoria Stockley

Historically, contracting the measles has been linked to subsequent illness (and possibly death) from other causes. In the past few years, scientists have discovered why this is: measles causes “immune amnesia”.

Enter “immune amnesia”, a mysterious phenomenon that’s been with us for millennia, though it was only discovered in 2012. Essentially, when you’re infected with measles, your immune system abruptly forgets every pathogen it’s ever encountered before — every cold, every bout of flu, every exposure to bacteria or viruses in the environment, every vaccination. The loss is near-total and permanent. Once the measles infection is over, current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what’s good and what’s bad almost from scratch.

“In a way, infection of the measles virus basically sets the immune system to default mode,” says Mansour Haeryfar, a professor of immunology at Western University, Canada, “as if it has never encountered any microbes in the past”.

This re-learning process takes up to three years, which “around the time it takes infants to acquire immunity to everyday pathogens in the first place”. In the meantime…

It’s not surprising, then, that measles doesn’t just increase the risk of illness, but also death. In fact, childhood mortality from other viruses is strongly linked to the incidence of measles. The 2015 study showed that when childhood mortality in the UK, US, or Denmark goes up, this is usually because measles has become more prevalent.

The findings explain why vaccinating children against measles has the unexpected, beneficial side-effect of reducing deaths among children, way beyond the numbers who were ever at risk of dying from measles itself.

Of course, an extremely effective and safe vaccine offers protection against both measles and the immune amnesia it causes. But with the steep rise in anti-vaccination sentiment during the pandemic and the increasing willingness of conservative leaders to disregard public health protections in favor of “individual freedom”, widely vaccinating against this dangerous pathogen in the US & elsewhere will be more difficult than in the past.

Tags: medicine   science   vaccines

A partnership of three institutions — the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Association Marcel Duchamp, and the Centre Pompidou — has just launched the Marcel Duchamp Research Portal, which houses almost 50,000 images and 13,000 documents related to the life and work of Marcel Duchamp.

Tags: art   Marcel Duchamp

Lili Loofbourow on that great symbol of capitalism, now hollowed out by (mostly) private equity and (partly) changing consumer habits:

They aren’t easy to physically dispense with, malls.

It’s no surprise, then, that people are desperately trying to find new uses for them. The afterlife of a dead mall is interesting. Schools are moving into malls; some students are completing high school in a converted Macy’s in Vermont. A Dillard’s in Texas is now a radio station. Malls are becoming home to community colleges and libraries and offices. The Eastmont Town Center in Oakland, California, is home to a Center for Elders’ Independence, Social Security offices, and a lab.

These efforts are noble and good. They are also—and can’t help but be—anti-makeovers. Malls were made to be malls. This means every effort to repurpose a mall becomes a fascinating performance of architectural insufficiency, of a bespoke thing being wrenched into a different, and more practical, and less entertaining, function. It’s not that you can’t have schools in malls—or libraries, or social services. It’s that malls, being temples to consumerism, were tailor-made to be exactly what they were. Trying to square-peg another operation amid the former makeup counters beside onetime dressing rooms makes the result seem impoverished, weird, jangled. The erosion of detail is essential, but it makes the space grim.

Americans get nervous when symbols change. If the American grocery store was, among other things, deployed as an active rebuke of Soviet scarcity in the Cold War, the American department store was a serene display of endless availability. There were more kinds of makeup than anyone could possibly want, and they all had loyalists. Can we adapt to a new idea of the mall, the way old maritime warehouses turned into loft-living for gentrifiers? Should we? A stroll through these deserts finds dots of life poking through: mom and pop stores offering to repair watches or do your dry cleaning or your hair. I visited the Eastmont Town Center recently to see what it looked like in its new incarnation as a hub for seniors and Social Security and a “self-sufficiency center” where an anchor store used to be. A security guard stopped me at the entrance: Without an appointment and a specific destination in hand, she would not let me in. It puzzles me that the building is less accessible as the site of a library than it was as a mall, but I love the idea of a mall serving people in need. Still, the new configuration isn’t scratching the itch a mall did—at least according to other nostalgic mallgoers who have tried to haunt its halls. As one Yelp review reads: “Not enough stores, too many social services.”

“Americans get nervous when symbols change” — I’m going to be thinking about that for a while.

Something I think about a lot is if they remade Back to the Future today. Marty would travel back in time to 1992, and probably accidentally invent dubstep or something. But if he and Doc still met in the parking lot at the shopping mall, it would be a very different, much more haunted place. And the time machine wouldn’t suddenly crash into pine trees, but would appear near the mall’s peak in popularity. The scene from 1955 where Marty marvels at the officious gas station attendants would be replaced by one of Marty at the mall, amazed at the sheer number of people shopping, walking, letting themselves see and be seen at the outlet that in his time is now home to a plasma bank.

Tags: capitalism   consumerism   malls   shopping

Today, or at least one day this month, wear something that would be beautiful as a pillow, curtain, or the entire interior of a lush Mongolian ger, with the carpets overlapping and the fire roaring. Dress to appear like a forest as seen from space. I mean, this is your one life. For instance, this ruffle-skirted bodysuit with rain boots.

Have a fashion conundrum? Or want tax advice? Write to EmilyWritesBack@gmail.com.

In trying to explain what you’re about to see here, I cannot improve upon the Dr. Adrian Smith’s narration at the beginning of this video:

But sometimes I think the most useful thing I can do as a scientist is to point the fancy science cameras at some moths flapping their wings in front of a purple backdrop. I mean, whose day isn’t going to be better after watching a pink and purple rosy maple moth flying in super slow motion? This is a polyphemus moth, a gigantic species of silk moth. What you are seeing, like all the rest of the clips in this video, was filmed at 6,000 frames per second.

Most of the moths in the video are delightfully fuzzy and chonky — if these moths were birds, they’d be birbs. Shall we call them mopfs?

The rest of Smith’s AntLab videos are worth looking through — I’ve previously posted about his slow motion videos here. (via aeon)

Tags: Adrian Smith   flying   science   slow motion   video

“To make living itself an art, that is the goal.”
– Henry Miller

(via)

Filmmaker James Robinson has an eye condition he calls “whale eyes” that causes him to see differently than (and look differently to) most people. In this short film, he makes a plea to “normal” people for acceptance of his and others’ differences.

But his video is also an essay on seeing, in the deeper sense of the word — seeing and being seen, recognition and understanding, sensitivity and compassion, the stuff of meaningful human connection.

In a society that does a lousy job of accommodating the disabled, Mr. Robinson appeals for more acceptance of people who are commonly perceived as different or not normal.

“I don’t have a problem with the way that I see,” he says. “My only problem is with the way that I’m seen.”

Tags: disability   James Robinson   video

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has been one of the most prominent & insistent voices warning against the rise of authoritarianism & fascism in the United States in recent years — you may remember his 20 lessons from the 20th century on fighting authoritarianism from November 2016 and his more recent piece on the right’s coup attempt on January 6th.

Over the weekend, Snyder published a short piece about what he believes will happen as a result of the 1/6 insurrection and the Republicans’ ongoing effort to push their Big Lie about election fraud — basically the end of democracy in America.

I have the Cassandra feeling this spring because it is so obvious where all of this is heading. President Trump tells a big lie that elections are rigged. This authorizes him and others to seek power in extra-democratic ways. The lie is institutionalized by state legislation that suppresses voting, and that gives state legislatures themselves the right to decide how to allocate the electoral vote in presidential elections.

The scenario then goes like this. The Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022, in part thanks to voter suppression. The Republican candidate in 2024 loses the popular vote by several million and the electoral vote by the margin of a few states. State legislatures, claiming fraud, alter the electoral count vote. The House and Senate accept that altered count. The losing candidate becomes the president. We no longer have “democratically elected government.” And people are angry.

No one is seeking to hide that this is the plan. It is right there out in the open. The prospective Republican candidates for 2024, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, are all running on a big lie platform. If your platform is that elections do not work, you are saying that you intend to come to power some other way. The big lie is designed not to win an election, but to discredit one. Any candidate who tells it is alienating most Americans, and preparing a minority for a scenario where fraud is claimed. This is just what Trump tried in 2020, and it led to a coup attempt in January 2021. It will be worse in January 2025.

Like he says, so obvious and out in the open. As far as I’m concerned, this is a done deal and there’s not a lot that can be done to stop it. The horse left the barn some time ago and most people can’t even tell the door is open, much less that it needs closing.

Tags: Jan 6 attack on Congress   politics   Timothy Snyder   USA

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I think Stoic philosophy would be more popular if it all came out of the mouth of a happy pixie.

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Lucia

“The skirt and top are from Bushwick thrift stores, jacket from Depop, and my Dr. Martens from a sidewalk sale in Williamsburg. I stopped buying fast fashion a long time ago and prefer to shop thrift or vintage exclusively. I love finding a garment and imagine who wore it before me and how they styled it. If I won the lottery tomorrow I’d still be buying vintage.”

“Plants may appear to be languishing simply because they are dormant.”
—Oxford Dictionary of English

A number of friends and colleagues have linked to Adam Grant’s piece, “There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing.” In psychology, Grant says, “we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing,” but a “term was coined by a sociologist named Corey Keyes” that describes the “void” in between them: “languishing.” It’s a state in which, Grant says, you’re not totally burned out, but you’re not full steam, either.

“Psychologists,” says Grant, “find that one of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them.” But one has to remember that naming doesn’t just describe the world, it creates the world, too. As Brian Eno says, “Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it.” 

We tend to see what we’re looking for, so if you hear the name for something, you start seeing it everywhere, and your eyes get trained to see that particular thing, while you miss everything else. (That’s why Paul Valery said that real seeing “is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”)

There’s also a danger that when you hear a term that sort of describes what you’re feeling, or seems right, you’ll be satisficed, and say, “Good, enough,” accept the term, and move on.

I disliked the term “languishing” the minute I heard it.

I’m not languishing, I’m dormant.

Like a plant. Or a volcano.

I am waiting to be activated.

“Nature is a language / Can’t you read?”
—The Smiths

I feel very lucky to be married to a gardener, because gardening gives us rich metaphors for creative work that we don’t get from our business-focused productivity-obsessed culture. (I dedicated the last chapter of Keep Going, “Plant Your Garden,” to seasons and cyclical time.)

Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova posted a lovely meditation on a passage from Olivia Laing’s essay about Derek Jarman from her book, Funny Weather:

Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades.

Gardeners not only develop a different sense of time, they develop the ancient wisdom of knowing when to do things:

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up…

It seems to me that the reason that so many of us feel like we’re languishing is that we are trying to flourish in terrible conditions. It is spring outside — or the “unlocking” season — but it is still “Winter in America,” and, as any gardener knows, if you try to wake a plant out of dormancy too soon, it will wither, and maybe die.

For example: take the mountain laurels in our backyard. One of them died from the terrible ice storm. The others have put out leaves, but not blossoms. They’ve sensed that this year is not the year to create anything new. They’re waiting for better conditions.

I’m not languishing because I’m not trying to flourish.

“Barren days, do no planting.”
—The Farmer’s Almanac

It is a mistake and a misreading of nature to think that you, a living creature, will be flourishing all the days of your life.

My friend Alan Jacobs recently wrote about his exhaustion, and pointed to the work of a new favorite writer of mine, historian Ada Palmer, who has documented in several posts the ways famous historical creators have had to put their work on hold throughout history. (And how many a “golden age” is only golden in hindsight.)

For example, Michelangelo, who lost four years of work to a lawsuit:

In his autobiography he’s talking about this lawsuit that arose because of the della Rovere tomb project, in great detail, and then there’s a line that says Michelangelo realized that, while dealing with a bunch of lawsuits and Pope Adrian and such, he’d been so stressed he hadn’t picked up a chisel in four years. Because he spent the entire time just dealing with the lawsuit. (Anyone feeling guilty about being overwhelmed by stress this year, you’re not alone!) And we have four years worth of lost Michelangelo production, because he didn’t do any art that entire time, because he was just dealing with a stupid lawsuit. And that’s not the sort of thing that fits into our usual way of thinking about these great historical figures. We imagine Michelangelo in his studio with a chisel. We do not imagine him in a room with a bunch of lawyers being curmudgeonly and bickering and trapped in contract hell.

Or Isaac Newton, who people have held up as an example of what you can get done during a plague:

The true fact (historian here, this is my period!) is that Newton did theorize gravity while quarantining, but didn’t have library access, and while he was testing the theory he didn’t have some of the constants he needed (sizes, masses), so he tried to work from memory, got one wrong, did all the math, and concluded that he was wrong and the gravity + ellipses thing didn’t work. He stuck it in a drawer. It was only years later when a friend asked him about Kepler’s ellipses that he pulled the old notes back out of the drawer to show the friend, and the friend spotted the error, they redid the math, and then developed the theory of gravity. Together, with full library access, when things were normal after the pandemic. During the pandemic nobody could work properly, including him. So if anyone pushes the claim that we should all be writing brilliant books during this internationally recognized global health epidemic, just tell them Newton too might have developed gravity years earlier if not for his pandemic.

You may, indeed, be languishing, and I won’t try to take that word away from you. (I also don’t disagree with Adam Grant’s two suggestions for dealing with the feeling: “give yourself some uninterrupted time” and “focus on a small goal.”)

Me, I’m dormant.

I may even look dead, but like Corita Kent once described one of her own dormant periods, “new things are happening very quietly inside of me.”

Waiting to burst forth.

Bumpersticker as public announcement of a private lesson learned.

Dear Emily,

I need your help. My wife and I rent a home so routine maintenance and repairs are done by the rental company. It is a pretty small company that employs probably no more than a dozen different repair people. Most of these guys we know because we have been renting from them for several years. Aside from the man who smoked two packs a day and reeked so much of smoke that a simple repair left your house smelling like a cheap motel room, they've all been generally great. 

In late 2020, however, a black pick-up truck appeared in our neighborhood that featured many QAnon messages. The white handwritten messages stated things like: #SaveTheChildren. A neighbor brought it to my attention when he wrote an email to neighbors out of concern. "I don't want to delve too deeply into theories about pizza-loving lizard people but there is a black truck that I have now seen parked in 2 places around our little neighborhood today with a handwritten list of 2nd Amendment/Qanon hashtags prominently displayed on the back."

I did some light intel and realized that the truck belonged to a guy who had been hired by the rental company to do repairs. The company owns several properties on this block. Unsurprisingly, he is a white guy in his 30s roughly with a shaved head (or closed-cropped hairdo) who sometimes wears a knit-cap that has an American flag on it. I have yet to have a conversation with him, but I now know exactly who he is. (He did erase the writing on his truck just after the election.)

Here is the question. While he has yet to enter our house or yard, what if we have a repair or need that gets assigned to him? What would you do? Is this a person I should engage and start a conversation with? Should I ask about January 6th? Should I let him know that I know he is a Qanon dude? Should I tell the company that we are not comfortable with him?

Ordinarily I have no problem speaking with white, right wing dudes whose politics are different than mine. But this group seems really out there...

Please advise,

Your friend from Pennsylvania

Dear friend from Pennsylvania,

I don’t know what it is today, but I don’t feel like giving advice about anything. I feel like GETTING advice, but I also know that it won’t be coming anytime soon probably.

You know how at a certain age, you realize that nobody can help you and nobody can really comfort you? That the only real comfort is “inside you” from God probably, or at the end of a vigorous walk up a mountain or some crunches on the floor and a thermos of water and deep breathing or something? That you have to heal yourself, wring yourself dry of all the accumulated confusion and worry and digital detritus and lost treasure of underwater dreams that retreat from your memory like a beloved’s body sinking down, down, down from the wreckage? And you say, “Our Father who art in heaven…” or “Ommmmm,” or “Please, please, please,” or “I am all that I need. Everything will be fine! Everything is already fine!”

And how even the best novels and the wisest sermons and the most sublime music only heal you or entertain you—or whatever—to the extent that you’ve properly cultivated your own faculties? So really, it’s all on you?

Or how maybe the help that we seek is in silence? A $4 book I ordered arrived for me yesterday: Silence Is Yoga, by Swami Paramananda. He is the author, as well, of Self-Mastery, which makes the point that I’ve already arrived at myself thank you very much, that people are always rushing outside to seek help and guidance, but that all the help and guidance is inside ourselves, which is a funny point for a book to make, which presumably had to be sought out and purchased externally.

Looking at the cover of Yoga is Silence, Marshall asked me, “Is this a joke?” but it’s serious, about how there’s something valuable in silence that we cannot get to any other way.

But Marsh is right that it’s a great joke engine, to say “X is Y.” Let’s try it: Yogurt is Democracy.

If I were you, I think I’d just pretend I hadn’t seen the messages written on this maintenance guy’s black truck before he washed them off. (They could very well reflect the sentiments of the guy he bought his truck from last month. Or maybe he is mentally handicapped, or correct.) When he comes to the apartment, I think I’d keep the conversation on the topic of plumbing repairs. But if he made any comment about my framed Elizabeth Warren for President poster, I guess I would feel free to mention, in a casual way, that I think people’s emotions are the cause and solution to anything and everything. And that emotions come from thoughts. And so we should try to have worthy and well-informed thoughts, not stupid or inflammatory ones piped into us by a money-hungry machinery and angry strangers. (Then shrug and crack your gum, to indicate you know you could possibly be wrong.)

Your question is, in a way, about timing. WHEN is the time to be righteous and unyielding and magnificent? When is the time to be soft? When understanding? When do you make closing arguments? When do we live and let live, and when do we put our foot down?

Maybe think back to a time when you, against the odds, changed someone’s mind or made an ally out of an enemy or got along fine with someone with really dumb ideas. Then reverse engineer that. What were the elements of your past triumph?

Your question makes me try to remember the most peaceful I’ve ever been, or if I’ve ever managed to be admirably serene in the the face of some outrage. No impressive examples come to mind, except maybe how I am often able to very blissfully and magnanimously glide down the crowded aisles of my grocery store, even on Thanksgiving Eve, when everyone seems to be grumpy or stressed and jockeying for position.

I often feel full of affection and admiration and sympathy for every other person in the world, and that feeling is warm and calm. It must not be disturbed, though, by too much actual input from said other persons. For instance, just yesterday I shouted at my daughter, who had rudely told me repeatedly to “get out of my room” when I’d simply entered (after knocking) to place clean folded laundry on the foot of her bed. I shouted back, “Say that one more time and I will remove your door from its hinges!” And then I made a big show of frowningly inspecting the hinges to see what kind of screwdriver I would need to fetch from the basement.

No, but see! I didn’t go into her room suffused with that grocery-store benevolence I was telling you about. If I had, I might have taken her rudeness in stride, like a good mother should. (Shrug, crack gum, smile.)

Many of my serene moments that come to mind seem to be set if not in the grocery store then in the woods, or in my own dark house early in the morning after I’ve worked out at my Crossfit gym (I miss it!) or after I’ve written a satisfactory few pages of this newsletter. Or when I’ve been outside with friends or family for a long enough stretch of time that talking subsides and you’re just walking over the leaves and listening to breathing and birds whistling and chirping over your heads and the wind rushing through the tree branches, you know?

In summary: physical exhaustion + the outdoors + silence + a general warm feeling toward humanity and faith in the creator. If there is anyway you can engineer that frame of mind for yourself, good job!

Love,

Emily

Write to me. I’ll write you back!

Coming next…

What else kangaroos carry in their pouches, peach tea, be your own internet florist, travel by canoe, sexier date nights, and how to rearrange your house so that portals to other dimensions suddenly appear.

Writer Ted Chiang (author of the fantastic Exhalation) was recently a guest on the Ezra Klein Show. The conversation ranged widely — I enjoyed his thoughts on superheroes — but his comments on capitalism and technology seem particularly relevant right now. From the transcript:

I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.

Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there.

Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs. It’s not intrinsic to that technology. It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.

It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?

And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that’s sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.

Echoing some of his other thoughts during the podcast, Chiang also wrote a piece for the New Yorker the other day about how the singularity will probably never come.

Tags: artificial intelligence   economics   Ezra Klein   interviews   podcasts   Ted Chiang

 

Unlike Queen Marie who hates scented candles, I love them. I love candles in general. But for me it can’t be any old scented candle, it must sit inside a beautiful container and there are none more beautiful than those of Mad et Len.

Ugh, I want everything in this shop. Each item comes in a black iron container, which in itself is a thing of beauty, and everything is handmade in France.

The nature that surrounds the brand’s atelier in the southern France Alps serves as the main source of inspiration for its perfume and candle lines as well as for the organic shapes of its furniture pieces, which always feature a certain sophisticated rawness. In the peaceful atmosphere of those rough and barely inhabited landscapes, the minds of Sandra and Alexandre, designers of MAD et LEN, are free to wander through their past experiences, recalling their trips all over the world, like the time they spent in Africa, New Caledonia, Fiji Islands and Malaysia, working and living as the locals.

By choosing to use only the finest seasonal ingredients, worked through a small-scale production, Sandra and Alexandre reviewed the traditional apothecary’s craft and achieved the highest standard of quality and pureness while respecting nature’s rhythms.

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“We believe that each one of our differences can make a difference.
We believe that beauty is as diverse as there are humans beings on earth.
We believe that perfume transcends our emotions.”

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apothecary pot

Inside the black iron apothecary pot, the scent you select is presented in either Vegetal Amber or Black Lava.

How utterly stunning is this? I would have to have both. A pot costs €92.

 

 

POT POURRI MINERAL TOTEM

The days of dried up old flowers in a bowl are over my friends.

Mad et Len is taking it to whole new stylish levels. You have a huge choice of scented fine stones and lava rock which come in a black iron totem with either a square or half moon top. Oh my goodness I could look at these all day.

A totem costs €85.

 

scented candles

The scented candles again come in their beautiful signature black iron container and each candle costs €85.

With my enduring love of all things concrete, Asphalte Rose has my name all over it.

Perfume

They have several scents in the collection too, which I can only imagine how lovely they would be.

Basically I want everything that smells in my home to smell of Mad et Len, including me.

The perfume costs €133 a bottle.

I gasped at the photos of this Clinton Hill Brownstone. Especially seeing this skylight and the hanging ceiling light. What a beautiful home.

The best Super Bowl halftime performance, by a comfortable margin, is Prince’s performance during Super Bowl XLI in 2007. Anil Dash has a great writeup that contextualizes the song choices and what it all meant to Prince.

Prince’s halftime show wasn’t just a fun diversion from a football game; it was a deeply personal statement on race, agency & artistry from an artist determined to cement his long-term legacy. And he did it on his own terms, as always.

Opening with the stomp-stomp-clap of Queen’s “We Will Rock You”, Prince went for crowd participation right from the start, with a nod to one of the biggest stadium anthems of all time — and notably, is one of the songs in the set that he never performed any time before or after. Indeed, though his 1992 song “3 Chains O’ Gold” was clearly a pastiche of the then-rejuvenated “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Prince had rarely, if ever, played any Queen covers at all in his thousands of live shows.

But with that arena-rock staple, Prince was signaling that he was going to win over a football crowd. He launched straight into “Let’s Go Crazy” at the top of the set. As one of the best album- and concert-opening songs of all time, this was a perfect choice. Different from any other Super Bowl performer before or since, Prince actually does a call-and-response section in the song, emphasizing that this is live, and connecting him explicitly to a timeless Black music tradition.

You can watch his entire performance here. But if you’ve seen it before and you’re strapped for time, check out the full-on mini-concert Prince performed at a Super Bowl press conference a few days before the game:

Incredible. I move that going forward all “this is more of a comment than a question” comments during conference Q&As are immediately cut off with blistering guitar riffs of Johnny B. Goode. Seconded?

Tags: Anil Dash   football   music   Prince   sports   Super Bowl   video

“An Art Revolution, Made With Scissors and Glue” is a wonderfully-produced NYTimes “Close Read” column by Jason Farago, looking at Juan Gris’s 1914 “Still Life: The Table,” and talking about the Cubists’ use of collage and its impact on art.

My only quibble is with this sentence:

Okay, maybe it’s a little more than a quibble. I’ll let curator Patrick Elliott explain with this excerpt from his essay in the catalog for a thoughtful show I saw at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, “Cut And Paste: 400 Years of Collage”:

The idea of collage is so brilliant, so simple, so rich and imaginative in every way, that you might wonder why nobody had thought of it before. Well in fact they had, but historians of modern art have tended to ignore anything before 1912. Books on collage scarcely mention the fact that collage has a history stretching back hundreds of years. Almost all of the exhibitions of collage held around the world have started with Cubist collage. If pre-modern collage is discussed, it is treated dismissively as a hobby, as the world of amateurs, folk artists, women and children, or something the well-off did in private, at the dining-room table and showed only to family and friends.

This is a point I made in Newspaper Blackout: We think of collage and cut-up writing as a 20th-century invention, but there’s actually a 250-year-old history of cutting up texts, going at least as far back as Caleb Whitefoord skipping newspaper columns in the 1760s and Thomas Jefferson cutting up the gospels 50 years later. This work was done either in a pub to amuse friends (Whitefoord) or in private study (Jefferson), but it still happened.

I think the message of Farago’s piece — that we can all use the revolutionary tool of collage to process our overwhelming world —  is strengthened by acknowledging this preceding work that is usually ignored, like Victorian scrapbooks, mosaic work, découpage, paper collé, etc. The innovation of Picasso, Braque, and Gris, was to do this thing that people were already doing, but do it as Art with a capital A. Now, we can take collage back from Art, and back into our spaces, where it first begin.

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Read more posts about collage

These snow drawings by Sonja Hinrichsen are pure magic and make this Swiss mountain soul smile. (via)

Empress Elisabeth of Austria was fanatically devoted to her physical appearance. She remains famous for her elaborate and very time-consuming daily and evening beauty regimens, including spending at least three hours each day tending to her extremely long hair. She also stopped sitting for portraits after the age of 32 so as to maintain a public image of eternal beauty. Perhaps then it shouldn’t be surprising that she also had a truly splendid funeral mask made for public mourning that is incomparable to any seen in Vienna or any other royal courts of the time.

The mask is made of black velvet with jet bead decoration and lace trim. It features a lace bonnet with ostrich feathers and an asymmetrical veil that extended down to her hips.

In my work in the grief space we often hear from people who wish they could wear a pin (you sure can!) or some other visual indicator to let people know that they’re grieving. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen such a grand statement of grief as Empress Elizabeth’s mask and gown, on display at the Imperial Carriage Museum Vienna along with her equally stunning hearse:

Alas, I have been unable to find additional photos of the mask itself. Rest assured, we are coveting it something fierce. However I did find this French postcard depicting the Empress mourning the tragic and scandalous death of her son, Rudolf, in 1889. It is said that after his death the Empress only wore black.

h/t: r/ArtefactPorn and The Imperial Carriage Museum Vienna

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The post Haute Grief: Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s Mourning Mask and Veil first appeared on Haute Macabre.

For a number of years now, artists from Vermont Arts Exchange in North Bennington, Vermont, have been painting designs across the town’s snowplows. Last year, Rhonda Ratray, a teaching artist in the program, was invited by her boss, Executive Director Matthew Perry, to create that year’s design.

But, Ratray recalls, “It snowed earlier than expected and Norm [LeBlanc of the Highway Department] needed the plow for the roads, so we put it off till 2020.”

So this fall, together with her art students from Vermont School for Girls, which provides services to girls ages 11 to 20 with special needs, she developed the painting.

“When I had first conceived of my design, the plow was a light blue and I was thinking of a snowdragon/ serpent motif,” Ratray writes. “In 2020, Norm got a new plow that was a beautiful deep orange color and I felt I needed to tweak my design. I knew I wanted to do a beast and so a bat-inspired creation seemed more relevant in 2020 and it gave me an opportunity to utilize the base color of the plow.”

They cut out mylar stencils—one for each color: pink, yellow, black—to guide the painting of the yellow-eyed “Batbeast” with a fanged smile spanning the 11-foot-wide plow. “One of my students was especially helpful cutting the mylar stencils with me during class time,” Ratray writes. “After each layer was cut, we excitedly taped up the stencil and spray-painted.”

LeBlanc added reflective tape to make the creature’s eyes shine. “Which,” Ratray writes, “I thought was perfect.”

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Lady in East Village

My friend Yng just recently opened an Art Gallery and Art Shop in Boston and I am thrilled for her!

I love the name of her company, Praise Shadows, which was apparently inspired by this book by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Today I was just perusing her online shop and yep, I am totally getting one of these baseball hats.

Good luck Yng. I am so excited for this new chapter in your life!