A collection of links to thought-and-emotion-provoking things that I found last month.
We have so many Americans who can’t follow their dreams because they know that their first responsibility is to protect their communities is just gut wrenching
The Inseparable Link Between Climate Change and Racial Justice
Integrating into the rhythm of this bustling household means I can’t waste a day “doomscrolling” on my phone and subsisting entirely off of soda and nibbles of chips and hummus. My family depends on me to do my part, and in a way, this life is not so different from the partnership I treasure with my husband. Our arrangement is going so well that I’m no longer so reluctant to have a baby, and I’m even thinking of asking my parents to live with us if we do. As much as I thought that joining a multifamily household would be cumbersome, what I discovered instead is balance. Despite the stress and uncertainty brought on by this virus, we are, inexplicably, happy.
The Pandemic Forced Me Into a Multigenerational Home
An interview I did with Altar This on my altar building and creative practice.
You will be punished for trying new things.
The social obligation to be bad at things
You will be punished for trying things that don’t work.
You will be punished for trying to understand how good you are at something.
You will be punished for succeeding.
If I sat down and tried to design a set of social norms for discouraging people from being their best selves, I honestly don’t think I could have done a better job than this.
Why don’t we want people to be good at things?
In other words, being in an intimate relationship with someone of another race is a particular type of challenge within a friendship, and you’re likely to be better at it if you are doing it in more than one relationship. It will never stop being a challenge, but you can improve.
There’s a Divide in Even the Closest Interracial Friendships
Including ours
Food is not, and should never be, a privilege. But it is,” she says. Unlike food pantries, the refrigerators can be 24/7 anonymous resources. They don’t ask how many people are in your family, what your income is, or question how much you are taking. They are built around community trust, an understanding that people will take what they need and leave what they don’t.
The Secondhand Refrigerators Feeding New Yorkers
Often, the environmental systems that we wish to sustain are often quite low in entropy: corn and soybean monocultures, and populations of tuna, salmon, and lobster, for example. Organizationally, these highly organized systems are low in entropy. They are very simple and this makes them vulnerable, like a sorted deck of cards. What’s more, they are inefficient. Diverse ecosystems are always more productive than monocultures will be, which means that we are fighting the law of thermodynamics when we aim to sustain them. Not breaking it, of course; you can’t break a physical law, but fighting it has its costs.
Entropy: The Second Law of Sustainability?
Americans are particularly voracious users of energy, with the typical person in the US using more than 30 times the amount of electricity at home than the average person in India.
Rich Americans’ homes generate 25% more greenhouse gasses
Attractive people are more likely to be seen as competent and be hired for a job (Busetta, 2013). They are perceived as smarter and having more social grace (Kanasawa, 2010). They are perceived to have better personality qualities like trustworthiness (Dewolf 2014). They are perceived as kinder (Snyder, Tanke and Berscheid 1977). They are more persuasive. They are more likely to benefit from acts of kindness from a stranger. They have greater self esteem (Thornton, 1991).
The Greatest Privilege We Never Talk About: Beauty
In his book “Antifragile” the author and risk expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes the interesting point about the Western model suffering from the same delusion as the Soviet one, albeit from the other side of the political spectrum: he calls it Soviet-Harvard Delusion. In short, it means that overvaluing theoretical projections while failing to embrace factors such as uncertainty, emergence and serendipity exposes companies to failure at a greater scale than they would with deliberate experimentation. Because with experimentation you’re open to the possibility of getting things wrong and you make progress through continuous trial and error on a smaller scale. Taleb thinks, the best way to achieve real knowledge is through the process of “random tinkering”, or “bricolage.”
The Soviet-Harvard Delusion
Skunks and badgers have white stripes that serve as the opposite of camouflage and signal their efficient defense mechanisms. To be so visible and still survive, they must be capable of defending themselves…As a general heuristic, the more conspicuous an organism is, the deadlier it is.
Signaling: The Language Peacocks, Gazelles, and Humans All Speak
So,the model can generate a “Seneca-like” production curve which clearly shows the “Seneca cliff”. It goes up slowly, then it collapses quickly. As Seneca says, “the way to ruin is rapid.”
The Seneca effect: why decline is faster than growth
Instead of organizing your files primarily by topic (for example, web design or psychology), which is time-consuming and mentally taxing, organize them according to the projects you are actively working on. This ensures that you are consuming information with a purpose – to advance your projects and goals – and only at a time and place where you’ll be able to put it to use.
Building a Second Brain
You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.
Stop Trying to Make Hard Work Easy
But here’s the big thing, you need to know that YOU are the magic! And magic people don’t take sh*t.
Sex Tips From Frida Kahlo