The hotel room has a large wall of windows, floor to ceiling, stretching from one corner of the room to the other. It lets in the light in the morning and wakes us up with a wash of brightness that sets the mood for the day.
Outside the window, there are mountains.
We can see the snowy peaks of mountains rising up above the buildings, providing a majestic backdrop to the city that can’t be ignored. The mountains define the view from the hotel window; they remind me that the world is large, that there is much to explore outside the hotel room walls. Even on the few rainy days we have, the mountains make me want to head outside and look up.
—
The street is lined with high-end furniture stores, most of which are closed by the time we get to the neighborhood to have a drink at a local wine bar. Cars whip by at a relatively fast speed, but the view down the road slows me down.
In the horizon, there are mountains.
Perfectly framed between the mid-rise buildings that line the street are two summits chiseling the sky. The white lines painted on the road guide my eyes towards the heights, but my feet too. I am drawn to them, and walk slowly along the sidewalk in their direction. The mountains define the view down the street; they remind me that there are bigger things than furniture and wine bars, that there is much to find awe in beyond our daily comforts. The peaks disappear when we turn the corner, but they linger in my mind.
—
I walk along the seawall, the ocean beside me on one side, a good friend I haven’t seen in months on the other. We talk about the things delighting us in life, the things frustrating us, the things we don’t quite know; next to us, the water rushes by, heading through the inlet out into the open sea.
Beyond the water, there are mountains.
There are no buildings obscuring my view of them, just a vast and open body of water that runs to the feet of the mountain range, crashing up against the shore somewhere in the distance, beyond my view. The range rises into the sky like a wall with pickets pointing towards the heavens, a frame in which to fit the sea and the clouds all in one place. The mountains shape our conversation; we speak openly about aspirations, about reaching towards new heights, about embracing life and all it brings.
—
I catch a glimpse from the airplane window as we depart. Below us, there are mountains.
I shall see them again, soon.
Perhaps the World Ends Here
Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
Really fascinating and frightening look at what a smartphone-mediated life means for children and adolescents. Was particularly struck by this differentiation between online and “real-world” interaction:
First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.
Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.
Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.
Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.
Really interesting short post by Mandy Brown on “hedge words” in language. Was particularly taken with this short observation:
The move toward inquiry values the opportunity to learn over the desire to validate one’s existing—and necessarily incomplete—knowledge. That is, inquiry is a dynamic, active movement, unlike the stuckness and stagnancy that a decree evokes. Inquiry is an open door; decree, a closed one.
This article is not only the reason I will probably never go on a cruise in my whole life, but is also one of the best pieces of travel writing I have ever read.
“The slow writer embraces the protracted and unpredictable timeline, seeing it not as fraught or frustrating but an opportunity for openness and discovery.”
A really in-depth look at the Trudeau government—including snippets from an interview with the Prime Minister himself— by Justin Ling. Some good passages about the frustrations of the public service, too:
One former civil servant, who worked on high-profile technology files across multiple departments, said the bureaucracy was suffocating—“nothing could move forward,” they told me. A vast network of problems conspires to frustrate actual innovation: too many teams working on the same files, an obsession with image over application, petty competition for resources, a lack of information sharing, buck passing, silos between teams. The mismanagement is so dire, they said, that civil servants often work on technology projects in secret, afraid of telling their superiors lest they get mired in approvals and meddling.
Sandra Boynton books are a favorite in our household. Who would have thought she’d be such a hoot when being interviewed too?
The ways of fictive 2D bipedal hippos are notoriously mysterious. I think it’s a risky—and probably even misguided—business to think of any group as a collection of identical individuals. Well, OK, with the possible exception of mosquitoes; in my experience, they seem unnervingly similar to each other, aside from the luxuriant eyelashes on the lucky few. But that’s a different story altogether.
Socrates believed the way to do philosophy was by dialogue. Two people proceed by question-and-answer, with an exchange of contradiction and confirmation. “When we’re battling it out at the blackboard, it’s the same thing,” says Fink. “The difference is that we can actually see the argument that we’re having, chalked up on the board.”
I have a great relationship with my parents, but was really interested in this piece on parents being overly involved in their adult children’s lives.
I would love to visit the Rabbit Hole, a museum where picture books have come to life:
Did you ever have to make a shoe box diorama about your favorite book? If so, you might remember classmates who constructed move-in ready mini kingdoms kitted out with gingham curtains, clothespin people and actual pieces of spaghetti.
The main floor of the Rabbit Hole consists of 40 book-themed dioramas blown up to life-size and arranged, Ikea showroom-style, in a space the size of two hockey rinks.
A wonderful way of thinking about delight in everyday life:
I am in a phase of life where I am resetting expectations about how grand things should feel. Who’s to say that dozens of tiny crescent-shadows are less magnificent than gazing upward to see the sun’s flames lick the edges of the moon?
Not me. I’ll take the cosmic where I can get it.
Speaking of delight: One Minute Park allows you to visit parks from around the world for one minute each.
I know all of you reading this don’t need much extolling about libraries (we all love them here), but this piece on the coming enshittification of libraries is deeply distributing. Will be writing to my public library system to see what they are doing.
An interesting proposal: “Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness–it dies behind paywalls.”
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How do you grieve for something you’ve lost, when you knew all along that the something wasn’t meant to last forever?
These past few weeks, I’ve been grieving. With a stroke of a pen, the Ontario Digital Service, an organization I helped conceive of and build from scratch, was effectively erased from existence. The reasons people have given for its dissolution are many, and none of them seem adequate enough; a lot of my career self-worth was tied up in the existence of this organization, and it is hard to fully grasp what it means now that it is gone.
Major re-orgs happen in every organization, so I guess this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Even when building the ODS originally, we had said that we hoped it would live until it served its purpose, and then be retired gracefully. We all knew that this was not going to last, but still I am grieving over what was lost.
I’ve been busy with other things in life, so I haven’t fully had a chance to process this change; my thoughts might evolve as time goes on. For now, I am buoyed by knowing that the work that we did was delightful and essential, and that many of the things we built are now existing and thriving in other parts of government, here in this province and elsewhere. As one of the handful of people who created the ODS, I had a direct hand in not only forging the organizational model, but also in building the culture of the organization—one that was mostly lauded as creating a great place to work in public service. I see tendrils of this culture and employee experience extending into different departments and divisions, into different jurisdictions, into the work people do in service of the public everywhere.
I am proud of the work we did in not only building digital products, but in creating standards and expectations that were built on how to best serve people. I am proud of not only the strides we made in embedding digital expertise across public service, but in building a welcoming culture where people were encouraged and supported to experiment and play and grow and thrive. I am proud of the alumni that have come through the ODS and the amazing things they have done since leaving. I am proud of what we built, and how it has grown since its early days into what it was.
I am lucky, in my career, to have been part of the teams that have launched some big initiatives that have had lasting impact on the way organizations best serve people. I am sure, very soon, I will have the opportunity to be part of something new, and I am excited for that prospect.
For now, I grieve what was lost. We did great things, and we did them well together. To all my colleagues, past and present: thank you for making the ODS a place I was proud to call my workplace over all these years. Here’s to new adventures ahead, and to fond reminiscence of what once was.
You Lose Something Every Day
Willie Perdomo
It was Dre who once said,
You lose something every day
Your mind on the way to the store
The floor on the way to your mind
Your mind on your way to the clinic
The clinic on the way to one more
The mad in the way of your kind
The lyrics to your favorite song
The cure on the way to the camp
The finish on your way to the line
Your nickel in the way of a dime
The short to your favorite long
The loss on the way to the find
The skin that was yours to bare
The crown that was yours to wear
The floor you were forced to clean
The game that was yours to fair
The face you were pushed to mean
It was Dre who once said,
You lose something every day
This is one of the most beautiful and most wrenching things I’ve read in a while: The Sadness Scale, As Measured by Stars and Whales:
There’s a whale in the Pacific Ocean that sings at such a high frequency no other whales can hear it. Scientists have been monitoring it for over twenty years, and for all that time it’s been alone, still hoping someone is listening. Speaking of singing, every year on the anniversary of its arrival the Mars Rover sings Happy Birthday to itself, millions of miles from anyone, and if that doesn’t send some wind sweeping across the ocean of your insides, I don’t know how to reach you.
I wonder when our daughter is going to ask for a phone of her own, and what technology will be occupying the heads of children when she reaches that age, too:
Valorising technology, on the empty assumption that the work of corrosion and subversion and redefinition it is doing is emancipatory and progressive, became very hard to distinguish from worshipping power for the sake of how powerful it is. Enthusiasts were keen to read healthy tidings in the rise of the internet, and benefits both spiritual and political from the psychic and social changes it wrought, even though the clearest, the most potent, the only obvious claim that it could make for itself was one of brute ontology. It was an emergent phenomenon of singular scope and reach and gravity. But its spokespeople continued to read its effects as progressive, to insist it was doing humanity’s work. They continued to mock those who publicly worried about its dangers, even as its growing power to remake everything, by its own inner logic, and on behalf of the most profitable companies in the history of capitalism, was growing ever more flagrant.
The babysitters we’ve used so far have all been in their 20s and work as early childhood educators. It seems as though the stereotypical teenager-as-babysitter trend is waning everywhere:
The archetypal sitter lived just a few doors down. She was the daughter of your friends; she was the girl you’d been watching grow up for years. But Americans today tend to be less well acquainted with neighbors than they used to be, and they trust other people less in general. If you’re not familiar with the high-schooler on your block, you might not feel comfortable placing your children in her questionably capable hands. Even more than that: You might never connect in the first place.
Are We Watching The Internet Die?:
Generative AI models are trained by using massive amounts of text scraped from the internet, meaning that the consumer adoption of generative AI has brought a degree of radioactivity to its own dataset. As more internet content is created, either partially or entirely through generative AI, the models themselves will find themselves increasingly inbred, training themselves on content written by their own models which are, on some level,permanently locked in 2023, before the advent of a tool that is specifically intended to replace content created by human beings.
A few more AI-related pieces:
Why you, personally, should want a larger human population:
If genius is defined as one-in-a-million level intelligence, then every billion people means another thousand geniuses—to work on all of the problems and opportunities of humanity, to the benefit of all.
Last week I mentioned that I was loving the new NYT game Strands; Ian Bogost agrees in The Atlantic.
As a man with skinny chicken legs, the return of wide-leg pants is not something I’m looking forward to at all. (Though, in fifth and sixth grade, you couldn’t find jeans wider and baggier than mine, as was the mode.)
How’s your breathing when you’re working? Do you have email apnea?
I love reading stories about research and technology that tangibly and drastically improves lives: this look at the drug that changed how we treat cystic fibrosis is fascinating.
I’m fascinated by how other countries are dealing with the opioid crisis, especially those seeing success with harm reduction and treatment approaches.
A report found that some retailers “seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further hike prices.” This report is for the US, but I’m sure they’d find the same thing in Canada, especially with Loblaws/PC grocery properties. Grocery prices have risen way past the actual costs of providing them.
I’ve heard the story of Edmond Albius and the pollination of vanilla beans a few times, but it’s worth revisiting.
The world is in the midst of a city-building boom.
I don’t wear suits anymore, but I’d definitely wear one regularly if I had one by Martin Greenfield.
This list of Great American Novels has been a boon to my must-read list. So many great things to add.
Fascinated by this: Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and undeniably Indigenous.
Should there be an Oscar for title design? There should definitely be some kind of award, I think.
As a Liverpool fan who wouldn’t consider themselves a superfan but is still invested in the team, I’m intrigued by the cultural divisions cropping up in Premiership fandom these days.
“A sandwich is not a thing; it is a set of practices.” Is a hot dog a sandwich? The experts weigh in. (Whether it is or not, it’s still one of my favorite things to eat.)
“In the U.S. you don’t need 7-Eleven to have a good life. In Taiwan you cannot have a good life without 7-Eleven.” Why are Taiwan’s 7-Elevens so much better than ours?
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Below, a quick roundup of a few of the things I learned over the past few months.
During the 1998-99 snow season, the Mount Baker Ski Area received 95 feet of snow, setting the national and world record for the most snowfall in a year. The mark stands 25 years later. (Seattle Times)
From farm to plate, one in four animals raised on factory farms are wasted. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands found that in 2019, 18 billion of the 75 billion pigs, chickens, turkeys, cows, goats, and sheep raised for food around the world were never eaten. (Vox)
Hotel “stars” indicate the number and type of amenities offered by the hotel, not the quality of the hotel. (Wikipedia)
Toys as a category has had significant deflation — meaning they’ve gotten way cheaper in the last 30 years. This is due to a handful of factors, but mainly increased reliance on cheap overseas production. Simply put: a toy that cost $20 in 1993 would only cost $4.68 today. (BI)
A new aviation company has developed a type of jet fuel made entirely from human sewage. (BBC)
In 2023, a record low was reached in global child mortality, with only 3.6 percent of newborns dying by the age of 5. (NYTimes)
Tyromancy is the ancient art of divining the future through cheese, and has been used by various cultures. around the world for centuries. (Saveur)
In January 1955, Marian Anderson becomes the 1st African American to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera, singing the role of Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Un ballo in maschera”. (Wikipedia)
In 2024, more than half of humanity will live in a country holding a nationwide vote. (New Yorker)
The frog test is a pregnancy testing method relying on frogs to show the pregnancy status of women. The most well known frog test is the Hogben test, prevalent from the 1940s to the 1960s, by using the underlying principle of hormones and its subsequent biological response in both sexes of certain frog species. (Wikipedia)
Alcoholism can be a big issue in Antarctica. While there are no official statistics, some stations hold Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and the hearsay was troubling enough that in 2015, the Office of the Inspector General audited several American stations. (AtlasObscura)
Archaeologists have uncovered a cluster of lost cities in the Amazon rainforest that were home to at least 10,000 farmers around 2,000 years ago. Recent mapping by laser-sensor technology revealed those sites to be part of a dense network of settlements and connecting roadways, tucked into the forested foothills of the Andes, that lasted about 1,000 years. (ABC)
English Wikipedia received over 84 billion views in 2023 (Wikimedia Foundation)
The price of cocoa, up by 82% in 12 months, is at a 46-year high. (Economist)
2002-VE68, fondly called Zoozve, is the first discovered quasi-moon in the solar system, orbiting both the sun and Venus—a star and a planet all at once. (Radiolab)
NASA has expanded the search for extraterrestrial life by identifying 17 exoplanets that may harbor oceans of liquid water beneath their icy surfaces. (Physics-Astronomy)
Cheese fondue goes back centuries. But chocolate fondue is modern, invented in the 1960s at Chalet Suisse in New York, by Konrad Egli. (NYTimes)
The theme song for the children’s television show Arthur was sung by Ziggy Marley. The theme song for the children’s television show The Magic School Bus was sung by Little Richard. (Arthur Wiki/Wikipedia)
The moon is shrinking at a rate of about 46 metres over the past few million years, and that shrinkage is causing moonquakes, according to a new study from NASA. (CBC)
For the first time on record, global warming has exceeded temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius over a 12-month period. (Al Jazeera)
All Camembert and brie cheeses worldwide are inoculated with one genetically identical albino strain of fungi, Penicillium camemberti, which is not found in the wild. In recent decades, the fungus picked up mutations that interfere with its ability to produce spores, and that makes it much harder to clone. It’s now difficult for cheesemakers to grow the key fungus used to make brie and Camembert. (Vox)
Since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion. Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility. (Journal of Transport Geography)
Farming accounts for about 10 percent of climate pollution in both Europe and the United States. (Grist)
Americans spent 11.3% of their disposable income on food in 2022–a level last seen in 1991. (WSJ)
The human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene. (The Conversation)
Asian Elephants mourn and bury their babies. A study conducted between 2022 and 2023 finds elephants travel a great distance to bury their young with care. (ABC)
A new analysis of two million white-collar jobs found fully remote employees are laid off 35% more often than their peers who work in-office or hybrid roles. (Business Insider)
The deepest points in each of the Earth’s oceans are called The Five Deeps. (TKSST
“Email apnea” describes people’s tendency to hold their breath while [reading or writing messages. (GQ)
Chinese online megastore Temu was Meta’s top advertiser in 2023, reportedly spending $2 billion on advertisements at Meta. Temu also ranked among Google’s top five advertisers. (QZ)
Reintroducing just 20 species of large mammals (including beavers, bears and bison) could help to restoring the world’s biodiversity. Introducing these animals back into their historic ranges across the world could create the conditions necessary to allow these species to expand their ranges to cover over a quarter of the planet. This would help to restore ecosystems, lock away excess carbon dioxide and boost populations of other species. (NHM)
All but one of the 100 cities with the world’s worst air pollution last year were in Asia; 83 were in India. (CNN)
Dutch farms use only a half-gallon of water to grow a pound of tomatoes, while the global average is more than 28 gallons. (WaPo)