“Most people…think that the leader is the loudest person in the room or…the one who talks back to the boss. But what a century’s worth of effective organizers mean is something different. Who’s the person that everyone goes to for advice?” https://thebaffler.com/latest/raising-hell-jaffe
The gap between your abilities and your taste is not something to be crossed but rather something to cultivate: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/stay-in-the-gap/
And the “comic mode” brings me to David Graeber’s writing on play: “at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.” https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun
Thinking about the tragic figures in WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD led me back to Joseph Meeker’s THE COMEDY OF SURVIVAL and what it means to ditch the tragic mode for the comic one: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/less-blood
Benjamín Labutat’s WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD is both fiction and non-fiction, both wave and particle, both history and imagination, and somehow, something else entirely. I loved it. https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world
Trying to gather up a reading list for a big project and realizing how much this exercise is like Borges’ map—it will only be complete when it becomes equivalent to the project itself.
“Websites have always been tiny mutinies.” https://robinrendle.com/notes/coming-home/
Molly White on the POSSE philosophy, with notes on both the present benefits and limitations; the latter are numerous but not insurmountable from a technical perspective. (The cultural/political/economical perspective is another matter.) https://www.citationneeded.news/posse/
Resilience is collective, not individual: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/resilience-is-collective/
“Social life is anything but scarce and people are anything but reasonable.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/what-are-we-making-together
Next time you’re struggling to write, you can blame the gods: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/battle-with-the-gods
To be creative “requires that we be able to retire from a world that is ‘too much with us,’ that we be able to be quiet, that we let the solitude work for us and in us.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/unconscious-machine
God I love Le Guin so much and hope her blog has been backed up a hundred times over.
“Who ‘we,’ white man?” https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/54-le-guins-hypothesis
“If this is where being a good girl gets you, I recommend being bad.” YES. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/being-bad/
With Q4 pressure building, a reminder that the amount of work that is asked of you will always & forever exceed what you can do. You are already making choices about what to get done and what to leave on the floor—make them count: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/too-much-and-not-enough/
“We cannot build a strong, democratic country without ending the occupation.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/20/holocaust-survivor-veronica-cohen-80th-birthday-protest-israeli-prison
I’ve been chasing some unnameable quality in my writing for a few years, and it feels like it’s finally within my grasp—and I can’t separate that fact from the choice (and the grief) to distance myself from the platforms. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home
A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home
Zadie Smith: “the humans I know and love, this machinery is not worthy of them.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-zadie-smith.html
“We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle…so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/what-we-do-not-know