FYI #107
Manufactured Inevitability and the Need for Courage, by L.M. Sacasas… While the degree of agency we share over the shape of our world varies greatly, I remain convinced that we all have choices to make. But these choices are not without consequences or costs. And each one of us will find, from time to time, the need for courage, and it strikes me that such courage, call it civil courage or courage in the ordinary, is the antidote to what Arendt famously diagnosed as the banality of evil.
Every Object an Archive, exit interviews for aging technologies, super interesting sounding project by Antistatic
Introducing the Oakland Review of Books Syllabus, I don’t have a particular connection to Oakland but I love the intention of this project… The threads of Oakland’s history and future are too varied and too tangled for any single perspective to capture the vastness of this place and its local and global reverberations. We will never capture it in its entirety. The point is to attempt. To nurture rootedness in a place – for the old and fresh roots alike – is to wrestle with the preconceived narratives and imaginaries of that place and demand something more real, more immediate, more complicated, more more.
Living Under an Open Roof: Family Life in a Compact Tokyo Home, via Never Too Small
Three popular colour pairings from the 2010s that are making a comeback, via House & Garden. Pink & red is a personal favourite
Meet the cool new magazine that’s taking the globe by storm, LitHub piece about Equator
Hilton Als, on Ruthie’s Table 4
Sean Shibe: Tiny Desk Concert, via NPR
I recently borrowed a library copy of Rachel Cockerell’s book, Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land. The format is super interesting. Cockerell is speaking at Sydney Writers’ Festival event in March.
Also enjoyed, Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones. The writing is beautiful. I particularly liked reading about Whybrow’s connection to Donella Meadows, principal author of The Limits to Growth (1972).