making-meaning

The ingredients of ‘good’ curation

I think great curation comes down to five key elements that span the processes of searching, selection and contextualizing:

Preservation: Caring for, reviving or resurfacing things that might otherwise be lost or forgotten in archives or streams.

Connection: Inspiring moments of surprise –, “I didn’t think of

Rachel Botsman • How to curate your life to find more meaning

Your extreme local, embodied community is your only truly real one. Think of it this way: Whose bodies are closest to yours when you’re sleeping at night? Those are the ones who can keep you safe. You have to know these people, care about these people, or even just recognize these people.

When we know each other, our relationships transcend whatever... See more

Real action starts on the ground.

5. Middle age is really the time, I think, that the tamped-down parts of yourself, anything you’ve ignored, any dreams you left behind, come first trickling then bursting back up out of the place you’ve put them in, and the foundation of the structure you’ve build to survive in the world and get to this point starts to get washed away. It happens... See more

10 scraps from my notebook

One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.

Charlie Warzel • I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again)

Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms.

“All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies,” Nguyen said at one point. “Every time you’re yo-yoing, you’re like, If I change my angle this much, or if I pull a little bit here, or if I drop it, oh, then it works! ”

Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore

By contrast, when “everything is at our fingertips” — when art is compressed into the same omnipresent and infinite digital non-time as every random piece of internet garbage — I think that we’re left feeling incomplete on some basic human level, like we’re the practitioners of a vibey old religion whose rituals were all but erased, and whose... See more

Streaming is an affront to God

And so, when people valorize these kinds of outmoded media, and outmoded acts of endurance and devotion, I don’t think it’s just about empty nostalgia. Because these are touchstones and processes — precisely in their inefficiency — by which people can open themselves up to transformative experience, and honor the depth and fullness of what art means to us.

Both responses miss something important, though. They both assume that what we know as “culture” is the only type of culture that could ever exist.

There’s a third possible response, and that’s that there’s a new culture all around us.

We just don’t register it as “culture.”

Default Friend • No, Culture is Not Stuck

When everything is cheerfully “retro,” Fisher argued, we lose our grasp on history—and, without a sense of why the past happened the way it did, our anything-goes embrace of “happy hybridities” is an empty gesture. “What pop lacks now is the capacity for nihilation, for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists,” he

Mark Fisher’s “K-Punk” and the Futures That Have Never Arrived

Hua Hsu, December 11, 2018, New Yorker

Journaling, especially if you include things you’re grateful for, is the cheapest possible therapy. It’s been shown to provide positive mental health benefits, alleviating anxiety, and tamping down intrusive thoughts while improving short-term memory. Focusing on gratitude has been shown to decrease materialism in young people, among the myriad... See more