Brian Sholis
@briansholis
Brian Sholis
- "the structure of the online environment right now seems to demand that superstar reviewers put up frequent updates. … But if you’re reviewing the kind of thing that is subtle, that takes a long time to really get to know, then the context of review has drifted really far from the context of use. So we’re evolving this perverse ecosystem centered... See more
C. Thi Nguyen • Review Drift
- “On the elegant analog clock, meanwhile, time swells and recedes, like waves and seasons and life. The hands evoke the rotation of the earth, the movements of celestial objects, the cosmos.”
New York Times • How Analog Clocks Can Give Us More by Giving Us Less (Published 2020)
1. Your career is not your life2. Explore, then exploit3. Don't do the job you want to tell other people you do. Do the job you want to do.4. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what you value—and how much professional success matters to you5. Flow comes from voluntary, difficult, worthwhile work
Derek Thompson • Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life
2019 profile of Wendell Berry by Amanda Petrusich.
Archive-friendly link: https://archive.is/wMaf1
WB: “The thing that worries me very much is how much language we’re using now that is so abstract as to require no thought at all. I mean very important words. Justice, for instance. I had a list, I think, of eleven kinds of justice. Restorative justice, climate justice, economic justice, social justice, and so on. The historian John Lukacs, whose work I greatly respect, said that “the indiscriminate pursuit of justice . . . may lay the world to waste.” And he invoked modern war, which kills indiscriminately for the sake of some “justice.” He thought the pursuit of truth, small “t,” much safer. I want to remember—and this comes to me from my dad, to some extent—that our system of justice requires a finding of truth, and it labors to see that justice is never done by one person.”
WB: “Once you accept that something or somebody is exploitable, there’s another limitlessness. Exploitation leads, with perfect logic, to exhaustion. And our ways of land use exploit both land and people.”
WB: “You must either decide this is worth working at, or just leave it undone. Marriage is not perfect agreement. But you’ve accepted this other person into your mind. I work alone, but always with her presence in my mind. And she is somebody I want to impress. I’m going to write this with the hope that it’ll help her to love me. I feel the stakes are pretty high. I’m in a conversation with her that hasn’t ended yet.”
WB; “Our dominant practice now is to solve problems with other problems.”
WB: “You can’t think about the issues we’re talking about without finally having to talk about mystery. You’ll finally have to talk about the commitment that doesn’t see any end. That’s a life that you are not going to be able to prescribe, that finally you’re not in charge of.”
Using the enforced idleness that comes after major surgery, Sven Birkerts meditates on how time contracts and dilates and what that means for a sense of self.
Lapham's Quarterly • Strange Days | Sven Birkerts
- “My discomfort with our current use of “relevance” as a term of judgment is that it conceals its criteria, and that those criteria are not aesthetic, but social and political. I worry that if we make such “relevance” not just one among other judgments we might make about art, but a condition of our interest, we have made that condition purely... See more
Garth Greenwell • Just a moment...
- “It’s striking to think that the past has weight not just because it influences the future but because it has its own intrinsic value.”
The New Yorker • Being in Time
On the "myths" about IRL versus remote work. "By constantly comparing remote work to an office straw man, we’re not engaging seriously with the challenges of remote work."