The New Romantics
To be a gardener is to give a fuck. To be a gardener is to be invested in a place—to know it, to protect it, to be present to it. How can we protect and heal ourselves and our planet if we’re not willing to step into, and value, the role of the gardener?
Wonderground • Audacious Gardening: On Daring to Care
Regaining the connection between human and nature, so maybe the instinct of human nature can finally take over.
“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.”
The God you find in the pub
The point Klinenberg wanted to make was this: If there was no such thing as a library, and someone proposed it today, there's a 99.9% chance they and their “radical and crazy idea” would be laughed out of the room.
But, as we know, it’s not a crazy idea.
But, as we know, it’s not a crazy idea.
Andy Olin • Public libraries are the crazy, radical ideas that might save society | Kinder Institute for Urban Research
You Don’t Have To Make Art
The early chorus of generative AI tools:
“Now everyone can make art regardless of their skills or tools.”
Could you not make art before? Even elephants can paint. Our ancestors created well known art by etching with a stone into the walls of the caves they called home. A kid with a box of discount crayons has no problem
This is intelligence. Not in the IQ sense, but in the "I know what matters" sense. In the "I know who I am without the algorithm telling me" sense.
Trend is not inherently bad. But when you build your identity around it, you become a vessel for the algorithm—not a creator of your own world.
stepfanie tyler • Taste Is the New Intelligence
Simone Weil, writing in Oppression and Liberty (published posthumously in 1955):
“Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking.
L. M. Sacasas • Attending to the World
This is the quiet art of living well. It does not demand that we abandon the world, but that we engage with it more mindfully. It asks that we slow down, that we look more closely, that we listen more carefully. For in doing so, we discover that much of what we seek—clarity, peace, even strength—was always within reach. It was simply waiting for us
... See more