On the topic of death (a natural part of life we don’t often talk about), the website Modern Loss has extensive resources for many types of loss. Some places to start:
“So surprised to see Conservative thinkers like James Woods banned from Twitter, and Paul Watson banned from Facebook!” — Donald Trump, 5/3/19
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These are dark and dangerous days for American democracy. When a mainstream Conservative thinker like me can be thrown off a social media platform just for espousing the free-trade ideas of Adam Smith — and also for claiming people from Africa and the Middle East have lower IQs — it threatens everything that’s great about our society.
Conservatism is a legitimate philosophy, and it’s truly the beginning of the end when someone can’t advocate for small government or call Muslim immigrants terrorists and invaders. It’s insane that right-leaning intellectuals no longer feel free to praise the work of Benjamin Disraeli, or prey on underage girls.
The belief in human self-reliance is a cornerstone of Conservative thinking, which is precisely why it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that birth control makes women unattractive and crazy. The great father of Conservatism, Edmund Burke, said, “But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue?” and there can be little doubt that Burke, had he been alive in the 21st century, would also have spearheaded a racist, misogynist campaign of abuse against Leslie Jones.
The Conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. I didn’t make that up — that’s a sweet little gem from the one and only Russell Kirk, and pretty soon no one will be able to shout that in the public square anymore, or shout that white people are an endangered race either.
Brothers, our right to free speech is being trampled upon. In the Soviet Union, they jailed the dissidents. In China, critics are detained and then disappeared. Here in the United States, the unthinkable has happened because they aren’t letting me share my Reddit memes.
What next? Are they going to ban the Federalist Papers? Burn copies of Atlas Shrugged? Say it’s unacceptable to call Jewish people “Satanic termites” and rant and rave about the Jewish-controlled media? It’s a slippery slope to tyranny.
First they came for the socialists, and we actually managed to convince the President of the United States that they were violent Antifa who were as bad as Nazis. That was pretty clever of us! But now they’ve come for us, and facts don’t care about our feelings, and neither do the terms of service of privately-owned companies who have a legal right to ban our sorry asses.
What will become of us, the great Conservative thinkers of our generation, now that we have been banished to the Gulag of 8chan and Gab? Who will listen to our incendiary batshit crazy stories about Pizzagate and Seth Rich and mass shooting crisis actors and chemtrails and Hillary Clinton? Where can we find easily impressionable, spineless dullards to promote our internet pitchfork mobs and hate-inciting lies?
Oh yeah. The president. The president will still listen to us. Cool. Cool.
Raising living things requires resources. In the case of fish, it requires more fish so that another can grow larger. Artists Chow and Lin calculated how much. The surrounding small fish are required to grow the three yellow carp in the middle. [via kottke]
Check out this shot of the Sultan Abdul Halim Muadzam Shah Bridge, which connects Penang Island, Malaysia, to the country’s mainland. The total length of the bridge is 15 miles (24 km), making it the longest in the country and in Southeast Asia. In November, the bridge is closed to traffic for several hours to host the Penang Bridge International Marathon, the longest bridge marathon in the world.
Established in 1845, James Cropper has been producing some of the world’s best paper for over 170 years. Situated near Kendal, gateway to The English Lake District World Heritage Site, the company has a rich history. With records of paper being made at the site of its Burneside Mill as far back as 1833, the family-run manufacturer has undergone many developments through the years to get to the position it’s in now, as Europe’s leading coloured and specialist paper mill.
Type! Type the boulder up the hill! Type the eagle away from your liver! Type, damn you! It’s Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in the depths of Hades! Feel the burn of your repetitive strain injuries!
Check out this awesome view of Sydney, Australia, taken from the window of a passenger jet leaving the city. Sydney covers a 4,775 square-mile (12,367-sq.-km) area and boasts roughly 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of nature reserves and parks. From this perspective, we can see many of the city’s landmarks, including the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney Opera House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney Observatory, and others.
When I first read Virginia Woolf’s dictum that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” I was homeless.
It follows through on that first punch:
I know half a dozen published authors who’ve had to rely on food stamps. The seedy poverty of the author has been a cliche for centuries. We find the figure of the poor writer already in the medieval era, in the form of poet-clerics called “goliards,” who begged and sang ribald songs in taverns as they wandered from monastery to monastery. Hundreds of years later, in the Beat Generation, the type survived with no essential change. Now a new generation of writers are confronting ever lower and less reliable payment for articles, stingier advances for books, fewer jobs, and smaller royalty checks. A host of new threats to writers’ livelihoods, from internet piracy to the slow-motion collapse of the academic job market, means ever fewer writers are making a middle-class wage.
So, full-disclosure time! I have been on food stamps, as recently as a couple of years ago. I am currently on Medicaid, and thank god for that, because the open market for health care is terrible, and Medicaid is great. (Freelancers, stop paying COBRA or Obamacare and get yourself on Medicaid if you can.)
I have been a professional writer for almost ten years and have only been employed at a full-time job with benefits for (counts fingers) let’s say three of them. The rest of the time, I’ve been on the 1099 economy, piecing together pieces of living from freelance gigs. I have been homeless, and I have lived with family who’ve been much more stable than I have been. My health has never been good, which has made it difficult for me to maintain full-time work when I’ve had it. I have been behind on my child support, but am currently (thank God) current.
I would not say I am devoted to writing, with my poverty a consequence of that devotion. This entire time, I have simply not known what else to do. I have been writing for my life.
There are a lot of us. We don’t always show it.
Most writers I know who’ve been really poor practice similar forms of self-censorship. Sometimes the reasons are obvious even to someone who’s never had money problems. One writer I know went through a patch where he had to report to a subway cleaning crew to keep getting his welfare checks. He talked about this openly to friends, but went through extreme contortions to hide it from a publisher who was considering hiring him. When I was first profiled for a women’s magazine, I had their photographer come to my apartment, only to have her look around and instantly suggest we go out to a park. After that, I had photographers meet me at a richer person’s apartment to save everyone time and embarrassment.
But often the decisions are less clear-cut. Social media, for instance, can be the ideal forum for openly discussing social class—but it’s also notoriously a place where going too far can damage your career. Most of us filter what we say. This affects how we talk about being broke. A post about student debt is safe, but one about living in your car risks losing face and professional standing. It can even come across as a passive-aggressive jab at more affluent people. One writer friend of mine commented: “On Twitter, we make jokes about being poor. We don’t talk about the fucking dread eating through us because we’ll never be stable. We don’t talk about what it means, that we’re on Twitter because we can’t afford therapy or social lives.”
I don’t know what to do about any of this. I can’t promise that I’ll be more forthcoming about this on Twitter, or here on Kottke.org, or anywhere else I write. I do know that my life is changing again, thanks in part to The Amazon Chronicles, and other opportunities coming into my life. I hope it continues to change. I hope it changes for all of us.
I can only testify, right here and now, that poverty and authorship coincide, including authorship that comes with a kind of modest fame. I can testify that there is nothing romantic about it, only the very real life of compromises that Sandra Newman documents so well in this essay. I can testify that talking about and not talking about it can both eat away at you. There is no cure; only doing better and doing worse, only new wounds and a moderate form of relief.
I disagree with Newman on one point. I think there is no real market for stories about poverty, first-person or otherwise. Not really. Maybe in fiction, maybe as a one-off. But one cannot be a writer about poverty in the same way that one can become a writer about technology; and in most cases, being a writer about technology is extremely difficult when one is poor. (You can track my poverty level through my writing subjects: when I’ve done better, I write about gadgets and the business of technology. When I’ve done worse, I write about memoir or pop culture: music, movies, television, comics, the internet. Things accessible from my memory or on my computer for free or cheap.)
People may want to read about what it’s like to be poor, but they don’t want to pay for it. Paying for things is a rich person’s privilege, and people pay for access to material wealth and things that get them closer to it. And in the free economy, people like the lingua franca of pop culture. Simple stories about heroes and villains, that when you scratch them open, tell them bigger stories about themselves and the worlds they live in.
That’s not to say that people can’t be brought to hear a different kind of story, but they do have to be brought there. How to bring them there? That’s what we’re all trying to figure out.
At a glance, this map shows both
the size and distribution of world religions.
See how religions mix at both
national and regional level.
There's one country in the Americas
without a Christian majority – which?
China and India are huge religious outliers
A picture says more than a thousand words, and that goes for this world map as well. This map conveys not just the size but also the distribution of world religions, at both a global and national level.
Strictly speaking it's an infographic rather than a map, but you get the idea. The circles represent countries, their varying sizes reflect population sizes, and the slices in each circle indicate religious affiliation.
The result is both panoramic and detailed. In other words, this is the best, simplest map of world religions ever. Some quick takeaways:
Christianity (blue) dominates in the Americas, Europe and the southern half of Africa.
Islam (green) is the top religion in a string of countries from northern Africa through the Middle East to Indonesia.
India stands out as a huge Hindu bloc (dark orange).
Buddhism (light orange) is the majority religion in South East Asia and Japan
China is the country with the world's largest 'atheist/agnostic' population (grey) as well as worshippers of 'other' religions (yellow).
The Americas are (mostly) solidly Christian
But the map – based on figures from the World Religion Database (behind a paywall) – also allows for some more detailed observations.
Yes, the United States is majority Christian, but the atheist/agnostic share of its population alone is bigger than the total population of most other countries, in the Americas and elsewhere. Uruguay has the highest share of atheists/agnostics in the Americas. Other countries with a lot of 'grey' in their pies include Canada, Cuba, Argentina and Chile.
All belief systems represented on the scale below are present in the US and Canada. Most other countries in the Americas are more mono-religiously Christian, with 'other' (often syncretic folk religions such as Candomblé in Brazil or Santería in Cuba) the only main alternative.
Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago are the only American nations with significant shares of Hindus, as well as the largest share of Muslim populations – and consequently have the lowest share of Christians in the Americas (just under half in the case of Suriname).
Lots of grey area in Europe
Christianity is still the biggest belief system in most European countries, but the atheist/agnostic share is strong in many places, mainly in Western Europe, but especially in the Czech Republic, where it is close to half the total.
Islam represents a significant slice (and a large absolute number) in France, Germany and the UK, and is stronger in the Balkans: The majority in Albania, almost half in Bosnia and around a quarter in Serbia (although that probably indicates the de facto independent province of Kosovo).
Islam in the north, Christianity in the south
Israel is the world's only majority-Jewish state (75%, with 18% Muslim). The West Bank, shown separate, also has a significant Jewish presence (20%, with 80% Muslim). Counted as one country, the Jewish majority would drop to around 55%.
Strictly Islamic Saudi Arabia, but also some of its neighbors in the Gulf, have significant non-Muslim populations – virtually all guest workers and ex-pats.
Nigeria, due to its large population and even split between Islam and Christianity, has more Muslims and more Christians than most other African nations.
Different majorities across Asia
Because countries are sized for population rather than area, some are much bigger or smaller than you'd expect – with some interesting results: There are more Christians in Muslim-majority Indonesia than there are in mainly Christian Australia, for example.
Hindus are a minority everywhere outside India, except in Nepal.
North Korea is shown as three-quarters atheist/agnostic, but this is debatable, on two counts. In what is often referred to as the last Stalinist state on Earth, religious adherence is probably underreported. And the state-sponsored ideology of 'Juche', although in essence based on materialism, makes some supernatural claims. For instance: despite having died in 1994, Kim Il-sung was declared 'president for eternity' in 1998.
Of course, clarity comes at the cost of detail. The map bands together various Christian and Islamic schools of thought that don't necessarily accept each other as 'true believers'. It includes Judaism (only 15 million adherents, but the older sibling of the two largest religious groups) yet groups Sikhism (27 million) and various other more numerous faiths in with 'others'. And it doesn't make the distinction between atheism ("There is no god") with agnosticism ("There may or may not be a god, we just don't know").
And then there's the whole minefield of nuance between those who practice a religion (but may do so out of social coercion rather than personally held belief), and those who believe in something (but don't participate in the rituals of any particular faith). To be fair, that requires more nuance than even a great map like this can probably provide.
This map found here at map infographic designer Carrie Osgood's page. Information based on 2010 figures for religious affiliation.
and now, perhaps the most vital work I will ever do: using colordistance to objectively prove which David Bowie outfit most closely matches a given sea slug. congratulations to ceratosoma trilobatum, the coral family of colors, and also to me, for peaking early pic.twitter.com/ZaMypDB8dx
Please, tell me more about the all natural words that grew on the word bushes and were harvested by the word farmers in bushels and sent to the word market.
How can something decorative carry minimalist qualities? That’s the question I first asked myself upon seeing Dream-and-Maze-themed guest rooms from The Other Place guesthouse, designed by Studio 10.
Situated in Pingle County, Guilin, China, the renovated interiors are made of strange twists: staircases that lead to nowhere, curved openings, geometrical accents, and a play of vibrant colours. Dimensions are distorted and spatial division is almost non-existent, all confined within a larger space that can be seen as a mystery box full of fantastical wonders. Here, only flat surfaces are present—technical structures and appliances are hidden to implement the push for surrealism.
With the aforementioned components, one can’t help but to dismiss this project as decorative and even post-modern. Besides the monochromatic use of colours and minimal furniture, there is a lack of apparent minimalism. However, what I appreciate most in this project is the use of negative space to construct a feeling of openness within a restricted width. By clustering the rooms together, the designers were able to keep the generous ceiling height and used that as an agent to free up individual parties. With that system, Studio 10 cleverly delivers a lightness that’s neither dense nor sparse—the use of seemingly pointless staircases becomes a geometrical element to pull all the volumes together. The simplicity of this project then does not lie in the interior’s appearance, but in the mindset and decisions of the designers.
I believe in minimalist qualities in every aspect of life. Perhaps objects, designs, arts, structures, instances… shouldn’t be the ones that communicate those qualities to us, but we are the ones who should be able to look and live through the lens of minimalist individuals.
I came across this painting by Yves Tenguy titled L’Orage (Paysage noir) which looks to me like an homage to Christmas, replete with a red Christmas tree and the spirits of Christmas floating about! This is totally my kind of party ;)
