Hey friends,
I have a few more links to share than usual today, because I spent (see subject line) going to and from San Francisco this weekend, and drained my phone battery reading my backlog of email newsletters. The few hours in the city were definitely worth it, but I’ll make sure to plan a little better next time I venture north.
Have any of you had summer (mis)adventures lately? Intellectually, physically, or otherwise? Please share, I’m bored and waiting for experiments to run.
Stay cool,
Maya
Links
- 🖼️ A photographer recreates portraits of famous people by posing their descendants
- ✍️ A cool interactive article about how fonts affect the way we read
- 🛩️ Delving into “Aeroese,” the international language of pilots and the skies, from the poetic “mountain waves” and “angels” to acronyms ASDA and BOBCAT
- 🟦 Connections, a new word-grouping game from the NYT. It’s fun, but relies a bit too much on crystallized knowledge to be a favorite.
- 💸 If you have access to a billionaire, “most are very easy to program by simply playing to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of exceptionalism.” A sorta terrifying hypothesis.
- 🏛️ A man’s rented house he (illegally &) secretly turned into a classical villa near Liverpool, and other examples of “outsider art,” in which untrained artists work outside tradition and often, the law— other examples include a Secret Buddha garden in Thailand and a cathedral build by a monk near Madrid.
- 😴 Hanif Abdurraqib on the connection between laziness and discipline, and how he overcomes their inherent opposition: “I cannot stay in bed, because I would much rather be in pursuit of some revelation that might arrive to me in the process of doing this work.”
- 💬 Insights into the art of translation. Not a skill likely to be overtaken by algorithms just yet.
Books
- To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
- A book in which not much happens, two people die, and Virginia Woolf awes me with her beautiful, sometimes disturbing imagery of the passage of time and clever, often dark commentary on life as a whole. A noncomprehensive sampling:
- “It seemed to her such nonsense — inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.”
- “Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class.”
- “And, what was even more exciting… how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”
- “… she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.”
- “There was no treachery too base for the world to commit, she knew that. No happiness lasted, she knew that.”
- “What is the meaning of life? … The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
- The Myth of Sisyphus — Albert Camus
- One attempt at finding meaning among the absurdity of life… it “attempts to resolve the problem of suicide.”
- “…killing yourself amounts to confessing. It’s confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it… Living, naturally, is never easy.”
- “It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.”
- “The climate of absurdity is in the beginning… All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.”
- Will collect more quotes from my book and upload them separately when I have the time :)
- 🎧 Otherlands — Thomas Halliday
- A tour of ecosystems across the history of the earth
- “When seen at the scale of deep time, permanence is an illusion.”