ten recent good things
Deb Chachra’s book, How Infrastructure Works.
I think of these two systems, time and mapping, as the infrastructure for infrastructure. Their growth in extent and precision has paralleled and enabled the infrastructural networks that rely on them.
Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Flights.
The world is ready to be overturned – it’s only a convention that the floor is beneath our feet, while the ceiling is overhead, the body no longer belongs just to itself, but is instead a part of a live chain, a section of a living circle.
Episode 9 of Shōgun.
Accepting death isn’t surrender. Flowers are only flowers because they fall.
Jaqueline Novak’s Netflix special, Get On Your Knees.
I do have a sort of poetic sensibility I like to warn people about at the top of the show because I know it can be trying at times. I can’t help myself. Yeah, I used to write poetry in college. Like many, I gave it up. I grew tired. I grew tired of being in a constant state of enchantment. You know, just so many hours spent curled in windowsills, just the muscles cramping, the eyes drying out from all that wonderment, just… Every night seeing the moon as if for the first goddamn time. I just wanted to grow accustomed to the moon, you know? I wanted to take moonlight for granted, like other girls.
Ted Gioia on the MacGuffin, What Is Really Inside the Briefcase in ‘Pulp Fiction’?
The fun is in the pursuit, not its final object. But consider the unsettling implication: Hollywood heroes are really chasing nothing.
Robin Rendle, Longboarding.
Onboarding is the interface. All of it. Not just a check list or a flow or big dumb modals with fancy illustrations in them. Onboarding is every moment in the application. So every moment should be cared for.
Heather Cox Richardson, April 12, 2024.
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort built on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor. … Over the next four years, the Civil War would take more than 620,000 lives and cost the United States more than $5 billion. By 1865, two-thirds of the assessed value of southern wealth had evaporated; two-fifths of the livestock— horses and draft animals for tilling fields as well as pigs and sheep for food— were dead. Over half the region’s farm machinery had been destroyed, most factories were burned, and railroads were gone, either destroyed or worn out. But by the end of the conflagration, the institution of human enslavement as the central labor system for the American South was destroyed.
Amanda Petrusich, Maggie Rogers’s Journey from Viral Fame to Religious Studies.
Headlines are overblown by design, but her audience’s devotion—something akin to worship—was real. The tumult of the Trump Administration and the pandemic meant that Rogers’s fans, like everyone, were increasingly desperate for moral guidance. But Rogers was, too. “I was looking for answers, just the same as everybody else,” she said. “It was really jarring—people asking me for advice on suicide, or to perform marriages. I started to realize that there was this functional misalignment with the work that I had trained to do and the work that I was being asked to perform.”
Rosencrans Baldwin, Stillness.
Phones ping. Pots clatter. Every day has its heartbeats and hydraulics, and so do I. But to sit with them, feel them in my chest and know them better—a feeling of freedom grips me.
Brooks Reitz, A sauce for anything/everything.
Tonnato is a sauce made from canned tuna, lemon, olive oil, anchovies, and mayonnaise. It doesn’t jump off the page when you read “tuna sauce,” but it way overdelivers on the plate. It comes together in the food processor in minutes and should be deployed liberally on anything: raw veggies, hard boiled eggs, and grilled chicken being a few of my favorite vehicles.