Flashing Palely in the Margins
Timing.
The weather changed suddenly, last week. The last few days of August were sunny and warm and bright; the first day of September ushered in clouds and overnight lows that dropped to single digits. Usually, I wait until the end of this month to celebrate the fall, but autumn has declared itself early this year, not wanting to wait its turn.
I love the fall—it is my favourite season—but I am unsure of its timing this year. Timing really is everything, after all; so many things we cherish would be unwelcome if they came at the wrong time. These past few weeks, I’ve been working on getting my timing right, on many fronts.
I’m in the process of drafting some essays to share here, but in the meantime, here are some things I’ve been reading and enjoying, recently:
- Walk This Way: “The more we embrace the romanticism of walking, the more we seem to look down on those who walk because they have to.”
- The New FOMO: “Social mania may be ideal for mainlining breaking news, but it’s not great at providing meaning and context.”
- I Don’t Love You, Toronto: On Books and Cities: “When anyone asked me why I was in Toronto, I’d say, ‘Love,’ and then muse over the love I didn’t feel for the city after all these years of living here.”
- Library Visits Have Gone Way Up Over the Last Two Decades: “Between 1990 and 2014, visits to public libraries grew by a whopping 181%. For context, the population of the US increased by 28% during that period.”
- Rebecca Solnit: if I were a man: “How do you think big when you’re supposed to not get in the way, not overshadow or intimidate?”
- I Don’t Read To Like: “Part of the problem is in the word ‘like,’ that little heart we tap ten thousand times a day. I like lots of things, so many things, but I am not guided by what I like.”
- How to stop the deadliest drug overdose crisis in American history: “What’s important to understand, experts said, is that the opioid epidemic is in fact the story of two crises — which Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University drug policy expert, explained as the dual problems of ‘stock’ and ‘flow.’”
- The Ideal Day: “Before fixating on the definition of a successful life, let’s get clear on the definition of a successful day.”
- The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial: “Premium mediocrity is creating an aura of exclusivity without actually excluding anyone.”
- Why you should defy the crowd and keep enjoying summer after Labour Day: “Fall is good and great, and it will come in time. But September’s summer days are wonderful: a kinder, gentler summer without the scorching heat waves.”
- Hooters Is the Most Underappreciated Restaurant of the 21st Century: “The reason why Hooters appeals to me so much is because by tailoring itself to heterosexual men, it has unwittingly created a space where female patrons can go to be invisible.”
- The Storytelling Ironwork of New Orleans: “Cast iron balconies are at once bulky and intricate, their patterns tangled with flowers, leaves, and other motifs from nature. Wrought iron balconies tend to be simpler, but they make up in artistry what they lack in complexity.”
- The Secret Queer History of Kombucha: “Katz’s whole career has been about walking this tightrope, tempering the hyperbole surrounding kombucha on both sides. He sees it hysterically vilified as venom or spoken of with effusive exaggeration; the reality lies somewhere in the middle.”
- What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t: “The larger problem we face is not suffering but sadness, and the sadness is caused by the fact of loss. To love less in order to lose less seems like no solution at all, but to see loss squarely sounds like wisdom.”
- A Thousand Ways To Make It: “Growing up, I knew there would be food on the table, in the fridge, a delicious, seemingly inexhaustible supply. For me, the act of cooking was to be about self-sufficiency, adulthood—not a reanimation of childhood.”
- “Technically, illusions are my only skill.”
- Photographs of the ocean, by Brent Broza, that you’ll be surprised aren’t actually paintings.
- Map of Europe with each country represented by one of it’s most recognizable pieces of art.
- The Tree Alphabet was made by Katie Holten and was used in her book, About Trees.
- Recent photos of Jupiter taken by NASA’s Juno Probe, processed by Seán Doran and Gerald Eichstädt.