If I had a question like that on my mind as I tried to make art.
I would never write another word.
1️⃣ The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done (New Yorker, 2020)
“What Mann and his fellow-enthusiasts were doing felt perfectly natural: they were trying to be more productive in a knowledge-work environment that seemed increasingly frenetic and harder to control. What they didn’t realize was that they were reacting to a profound shift in the workplace that had gone largely unnoticed.”
The Time Kanye and Ninja of Die Antwoord Played Basketball at Drake’s House
2️⃣ Margaret Atwood, The Art of Fiction No. 121 (Paris Review, 1990)
“INTERVIEWER
Do writers perceive differently than others? Is there anything unique about the writer’s eye?
ATWOOD
It’s all bound up with what sorts of things we have words for. Eskimos, the Inuit, have fifty-two words for snow. Each of those words describes a different kind of snow. In Finnish they have no he or she words. If you’re writing a novel in Finnish, you have to make gender very obvious early on, either by naming the character or by describing a sex-specific activity. But I can’t really answer this question because I don’t know how “others” observe the world. But judging from the letters I receive, many others recognize at least part of themselves in what I write, though the part recognized varies from person to person, of course. The unique thing about writers is that they write. Therefore they are pickier about words, at least on paper. But everyone “writes” in a way; that is, each person has a “story”—a personal narrative—which is constantly being replayed, revised, taken apart, and put together again.”
Simon Hill & Craig Foster reflect on commentary from Socceroos v Uruguay
3️⃣ Making Meaning (Harpers, 2020)
“Artists feel the anxiety of relevance during every season of fellowship applications, those rituals of supplication, when we have to make a case for ourselves in a way that feels entirely foreign, for me at least, to the real motivations of art. Why is this the right project for this moment? these applications often ask. If I had a question like that on my mind as I tried to make art, I would never write another word.”
Posing as an Old Lady to Expose Online Scammers
4️⃣ Have You Ever Tried To Sell A Diamond? (The Atlantic, 1982)
“N. W. Ayer placed a series of lush four-color advertisements in magazines that were presumed to mold elite opinion, featuring reproductions of famous paintings by such artists as Picasso, Derain, Dali, and Dufy. The advertisements were intended to convey the idea that diamonds, like paintings, were unique works of art.
By 1941, The advertising agency reported to its client that it had already achieved impressive results in its campaign. The sale of diamonds had increased by 55 percent in the United States since 1938, reversing the previous downward trend in retail sales. N. W. Ayer noted also that its campaign had required "the conception of a new form of advertising which has been widely imitated ever since. There was no direct sale to be made. There was no brand name to be impressed on the public mind. There was simply an idea -- the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond.”
British Traveller Is A Boxing Prodigy
5️⃣ The Things That Carried Him (Esquire, 2008)
“The seven soldiers stood in a stiff line and fired three volleys each. This is a part of the ritual they practice again and again. The seven weapons should sound like one. When the shots are scattered—"popcorn," the soldiers call it—they've failed, and they will be mad at themselves for a long time after. On this day, with news cameras and hundreds of sets of sad eyes trained on them, they were perfect. After the final volley, Huber bent down and picked up his three polished shells from the grass.”
6️⃣ Essay: How do you describe TikTok? (Substack, 2020)
“The mechanism to navigate the TikTok feed is your thumb swiping, like a gondolier’s paddle, up to move forward to new content, down to go back to what you’ve already seen. This one interaction is enough to allow For You to get to know your content preferences. You either watch a video to completion and then maybe like or share it, or you skip it and move on to the next.
The true pilot of the feed, however, is not the user but the recommendation algorithm, the equation that decides which video gets served to you next. More than any other social network, TikTok’s core product is its algorithm. We complain about being served bad Twitter ads or Instagram not showing us friends’ accounts, as if they’ve suddenly stopped existing, but it’s harder to fault the TikTok algorithm if only because it’s so much better at delivering a varied stream of content than its predecessors.”
Red Bull Presents: Max Cooper Live
7️⃣ “What’s Actually Going on in Our Nursing Homes”: An Interview with Shantonia Jackson (Dissent, 2020)
“Winant: One thing we’ve been hearing about is how a lot of nursing home workers have to have a couple of jobs, often at different nursing homes, or maybe they do home care. And that’s one of the ways that the virus gets moved around.
Jackson: I’m glad you brought that up. I was working at Berkeley Nursing in Oak Park. And I was also working at City View. Berkeley is all seniors. I took a leave, because I felt like I didn’t want to take the virus from City View, with 253 infections, to Berkeley, which didn’t have one case. So I took it upon myself. And the nursing home industry is so fickle, and selfish, and disrespectful, because they were actually angry at me for leaving. I thought my director of nursing would be appreciative, because what if I came over here and I transmitted to all these elderly people? They all would have died. And they have the nerve to be mad at me, and calling me, saying, “You’re not going to come back?” No! I’m dealing with 253 cases over here. I want to be careful for the grandmas and the grandpas.”