Brian Sholis
@briansholis
Brian Sholis
- "Squashed evaluations: When an entire rich form of activity gets evaluated through one tiny window, then the importance of whatever’s in-frame gets over-exaggerated — and whatever’s outside of that frame gets swamped."
C. Thi Nguyen • Review Drift
"This counsel is surely weighted toward white-collar knowledge work, although I hope it’s at least somewhat valuable to any reader."
Derek Thompson • Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life
- “… a clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes in which energy spreads out among more particles or into a broader area.”
Natalie Wolchover • The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks | Quanta Magazine
- “The desire to invert a structure of injustice—to inflict on those we take to be the bearers of privilege the disregard they have inflicted on others—is one I very much understand, one I feel in myself. But it is always ethically suspect to speak of any human experience as irrelevant to our common human experience; it is always, let me go... See more
Garth Greenwell • Just a moment...
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.”
* “It’s lack of awareness to lossiness that dooms most conversations to miscommunication, not the lossiness itself.”
Mandy Brown • All communication is lossy
A thoughtful essay about how our online identities—even when our default mode is misdirection or obfuscation—are visible to the platforms we use, and by extension to capitalism and its prerogatives.
Emma Stamm • Who Can It Be Now — Real Life
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."