the ocean always wins
Some stuff I’ve written since we last spoke:
Some pieces I’ve enjoyed recently:
‘Bread is practically sacred’: how the taste of home sustained my refugee parents
This old essay by Zadie Smith on the distinction between pleasure and joy, for NYRB
Haley’s latest missive for SSENSE, this time on tiny bags (and fascism, toot toot).
‘Enjoyed’ is maybe too positive a word, but I thought this piece about the California coast and climate change was written really beautifully. At the beach this weekend, my friends and I contemplated how much longer we’d be able to enjoy a quality of life that lets us even have beach days. As New Yorkers we have more time than many places, considering how wealthy NYC is, but other places - places our friends and family live - water will run out by the end of 2020. In six months. Climate change is class warfare. An important takeaway:
It was crucial, she learned, to actually work with the community from the beginning rather than doing all the research behind the scenes and then dropping a report full of government mumbo-jumbo declaring the city doomed.
“Never start a conversation with sea level rise is what we learned. Start the conversation with: ‘What do you care about? What do you want your community to look like?’ ” Lowe said. “We’re asking people to do some really big things, and we need to make sure we’re not asking them to do it all at once.”
right after I read that, I was on an ocean kick, so I revisited Jen Percy’s award winning story about search-and-recovery (or not) after a tsunami. Jen is one of the most talented writers we have in the game right now, and I feel incredibly lucky to know her.
I’ve been revisiting 17776, which is possibly one of the coolest things on the Internet, across any genre - if you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to do so! It’s about what football would be like in the future, and even if - especially if - you aren’t a football fan, it’s a really wonderful experimentation with how narrative can work.
adrienne maree brown’s post on mentorship is so prescient and useful, i wrote a lot of it down in my journal to return to. in particular:
you will do almost everything you say “i promise to never” do, especially things you promise to never do to someone who loves you. and if you don’t do exactly those things, it may be at great cost to your destiny. it’s in our design, so you’re not above it. promise less. promise to become yourself and nothing less.
your feelings are never more important than revolution. and your feelings are a crucial part of revolution. find the balance and get to work.
find the front lines of humanity inside your own life and system. advance them.
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