Three year old just came up to me: “I’m having a meeting downstairs so please be quiet.” 🤫
This morning Emma made me a colour by number Tiana to do. Claire took care of the Rapunzel.
Any of us can do something good, in writing, when the world gives us a shove, but a true writer is inevitable only when we recognize in the work a unique and unmistakable universe of words, figures, conflicts.
But I tend to imagine, first, that the ordinary person and the extraordinary person set off from the same terrain: literary writing with its cathedrals, its country parishes, its tabernacles in dark territories; and, second, that chance plays the same role in both the minor work and the great work.
Elena Ferrante, writing in Harper’s 📚
Booking in demand campsites for the summer is hard. Apparently I’m not the only one up at 7am refreshing my browser compulsively.
As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away… you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour.
But you’d be wrong.
Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling — instead of what’s most true, or most useful — it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how real our political opponents are, and thousands of other things — and all these distorted judgements then influence how we allocate our offline time as well…
So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place.
From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks 📚. If this is true (and I think it is) then its effects are proportional to the degree to which an individual (or community) in question is “very online”. Blue-check journalism Twitter springs very much to mind here.
This story by Lauren Groff is my favourite thing I’ve read in a while. 📚
From the kitchen, the smell of bread lifts, smooth white rolls speaking careful English for the family, brown loaves laughing in Irish for everyone else.
From Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat 📚
Stars have always done asset-based wealth building, just like any other rich person, but quietly—celebrities who buy up rental properties or fast-food franchises generally have not sought public praise for becoming landlords, or for extracting wealth from the labor of the working poor.
Now everyone from Justin Bieber to Shaq wants to be treated as a cultural visionary for placing six-digit bets on the long-term value of a digital receipt for an ugly cartoon, and they want you to know this is the new cool thing, and there’s still time for you to get in on the ground floor.
If Hilton and Fallon and their celebrity friends are going to go out there and pump-and-dump their way to additional wealth, they could at least do the rest of us the courtesy of being a little more discreet about it.
📚 Finished Trust by Domenico Starnone. I was struck by two things: first, the success with which Starnone renders Pietro both insecure and assured; second, the way he builds around the central conceit (a shared, shameful secret) so successfully he ends up not relying on it at all.
🤒
I’ve been using a Keychron K4 for the last two years. I love it, but I’ve started getting a little bit of pain in my right hand (between my index and middle finger). I switched back to an Apple wireless keyboard and things have improved somewhat; hopefully temporary!
I’m working in slack for the first time; previously the company chat app was G Chat.
One thing I miss: in Chat you could schedule a “do not disturb” status that would have a little red indicator, mute notifications, and stay that way regardless of your activity. I always had it on after hours - that way I never felt any of the pressure of signalling “hustling”, and I wasn’t putting any social pressure on anyone else when I did have to work late.
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🎥🍿🎬 if anyone is looking for a new movie service to try - here’s a month free of Mubi. Selection is very good and the writeups attached to each film help. We’ve particularly enjoyed Azor and Things to Come.
Let me know if you try it out!!
