Brian Sholis
@briansholis
Brian Sholis
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."
Mandy Brown • Official myths
- "The speed of the Earth’s rotation is affected by a variety of atmospheric and geologic factors, including the behavior of the planet’s inner layers; the reshaping of its crust, such as through the growth of mountains or bodies of magma; and the friction of the ocean’s tides against the seafloor. The aggregate effect of these forces has historica... See more
The New Yorker • The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time
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.”
* “Like a marriage, the best friendships require investment, compromise, and sacrifice. By creating shared alignment, trust, and companionship, strong friendships nourish the soul and sharpen the mind.”
David Perell • The Fruits of Friendship - David Perell
- “Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future.”
The New Yorker • Being in Time
headless brands and
* “Shared experiences — especially novel, challenging, and unfamiliar ones — are the best way to foster tight bonds. Host a retreat. Travel with friends. Rent a car, start driving, and see where you end up.”
David Perell • The Fruits of Friendship - David Perell
- “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 further... See more