culture

Let’s face it. Things are bad right now. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, it’s hard to be happy about anything at the moment, unless you’re, I don’t know, a bridge troll, I guess?

I’ve been thinking about kindness a lot lately. As anything, it’s the result of the juxtaposition of several events, but without a doubt I’ve been mostly thinking about it in the context of raising my daughter.

The New York Times reports that a Seattle-based company has announced that they will be increasing the minimum wage for all of their employees to $70,000 per year. “The market rate for me as a C.

Nika Harper’s recent post is gettig a lot of attention, as well it should.

Interesting piece from PBS that makes a strong case that while Millennials have been raised to be more inclusive of diversity, the framework in which they’ve been instructed blinds them to the systemic racism present in our society.

Chris Kluwe takes a look at the NFL retirement program, and provides some blistering commentary on what happens to athletes when they leave the game. An intense drive to be the best, no matter the cost, now unsure what to strive for.

I don’t actually set out to write political pamphlets. I’m always writing story first, and even before that I’m always writing character first – everything is born of character. But I think that I have some very strong feelings about some things; in particular, ideas of fairness and justice.

This old post from Anil Dash has been making the rounds again this week, and for good reason. As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals.

This GQ story about the North Pond Hermit is amazing. One day in 1986, Christopher Knight left family and friends behind for good, and spent 30 years leaving alone in the woods of Maine, sleeping in a hidden tent.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Kindly remember that if, unprompted, you tell someone about your system for getting organized, you are no better than a vegan. — @Pinboard

Man is the animal that tells stories about himself to himself. — Salman Rushdie, Lecture at the University of Iowa (March 2004) It’s been years since I sat in that lecture hall, but Rushdie’s description of humans as storytelling creatures still gets me with it’s perfect simplicity.

Every night, homeless people construct their nightly shelters outside the Quaker meeting house. Quakers will not make you leave. And have a high level of empathy. A few weeks ago I was walking home and there was a woman, a homeless woman, setting up a space.

If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship. — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Great piece from Lev Grossman on the radical changes that the codex introduced into reading, specifically the ability to interact with the text in a non-linear manner. He makes a valid point that e-readers make similar interaction a clumsy affair.

My friend, Quentin Lewis has put together a fun examination of of how Christmas has been celebrated in the western world – with particular emphasis on how it has been celebrated in the United States and England – over the last few centuries.

Those of you who already read Ellis’ work will find no surprises in his first column for Wired UK, but this piece is worth reading regardless. There’s a lot of meat in this column, but it would be easy to discount it as simply strange.

Eric Rice recently wrote this post wondering, “How can I stop being called a ‘blogger’?” To summarize, his issue is that it is ridiculous to be labeled by a single medium, especially when the medium is so prevalent that the term becomes meaningless as a categorization tool.

Just a quick post to let you know that I appeared on the latest episode of the Creepy Sleepy Show Podcast, where DHP, Greg and myself discuss the new Radiohead album, titled In Rainbows.