fans responded to most viscerally, perhaps, was the fact that it’s a book about becoming, both mentally and physically—about what it takes to shape a self, in all its completeness and disarray.
For reasons I’m sure my therapist could tell you, I wanted to be the kind of person worth celebrating, and didn’t realize that the only thing standing in the way was my own fear of taking up that space for myself.
So, we threw out a bunch of words and a phrase and a color, and all of us sat down to write. I think the color that day was gray or we could choose a color, I don’t remember. And I ended up writing “Ode to Grey.” So, it was written with her, side-by-side. Writing is really just a matter of allowing them to believe they have something important to report to the world. Whether it’s looking out their window and telling us what they see, or looking inside themselves and telling us what they feel. What’s best, of course, is telling us what they feel about what they see.
“Just” makes me feel like an idiot. “Just” presumes I come from a specific background, studied certain courses in university, am fluent in certain technologies, and have read all the right books, articles, and resources. “Just” is a dangerous word.
Writing for another publication you get a little circular avatar at the beginning of the post and a brief bio at the end of the post, and that’s about it.
With these two new models for schools in place (decision schools + trade schools), we'd also have the benefit of easy mobility later in life. Want to make a change and not sure what comes next? Go to Decision School, decide on a new path, then go to another trade school that can get you into that field.
I’d been caught off-guard by the publicity around How to Do Nothing. I was soon buried under the pile of obligations and opinions that followed. At times, it felt like I no longer knew what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought. I felt desperate for some kind of clarity. And by placing the will so high above circumstance, it projects an untruthful image of equal opportunity in which the unfortunate should have just tried harder. When I examine my identity, I do see an inalienable spirit grasping for infinity. But in the very same place, I also see an intersection of historical and cultural vectors, held up by a web of countless reliances.
Our Favorite Finds From the First-Ever Virtual Frieze Art Fair
The first virtual Frieze New York offers some very real benefits—like being able to browse, and read the backstory of, the pieces we might have missed.
Jenny Odell on taking the time you need to notice, think, and grow
It can be so uncomfortable to be working in an interdisciplinary way that’s hard to explain to other people and to yourself, and isn’t even really a thing yet. I wish there was a way to tell someone in that position, or me when I was in that position, “No, you’re actually on the right path, it just doesn’t feel like a path yet. Ironically, that’s the evidence that you’re doing something interesting.” It reminds me of the phrase in your book, where instead of saying “no” to something, you instead say, “I would prefer not to.” I can just read and absorb, and not have a 100% airtight analysis right now. You know? Or maybe I don’t need to respond right now, I can just take it in. But I would also say, it doesn’t matter if you know what kind of bird you’re seeing. For the purposes that we’re talking about, I think it’s really more about seeing something else that’s alive, and is living its life.
Poetry, perhaps more than any other literary art, is uniquely suited for giving voice to the deepest parts of ourselves. There is no reason that everyone shouldn’t have access to that experience.
According to this strategy, the best time to drink coffee is when you are already very alert. The reinforcement strategy has another element to it. When adenosine peaks, the best response is not to fight it, but “go with the flow” and (shock, gasp) sleep. With complete abstinence, it takes five days to reach adenosine normality;
Danny Hillis once defined technology as “everything that doesn’t work yet,” prompting the following corollary from Kevin Kelly: “Successful inventions disappear from our awareness.
fy_iceworld is one of the most divisive and popular custom maps ever made for Counter-Strike. But who made it? We dove into datamining and the old web to find o