#9.5 We Were On A Break!
Hi there, this week we have for 10 great links for you to check out plus some bonus music recommendations.
Our little newsletter completes 10 weeks today! We’ve been at it for over 2 months now, and frankly, even we find it hard to believe. So to celebrate this tiny milestone, we decided to give ourselves a little break. This edition we don’t have our regular pieces on pop culture and policies. Instead, we have dug up 10 cool links that we think you should check out along with some earworms catching our attention.
If you’ve ever read a fantasy book, you would know that there are multiple parallel universes existing in its writers’ minds. Ever wondered where they come up with such whacky ideas from? Let Neil Gaiman explain it to you.
Read: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
The Ideas aren't the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.
What if someone mapped every week of human life and created a graphic showing just how long-short our life is? You’re in luck, someone has actually done it.
Image: waitbutwhy.com
The fields of Economics and Fiction Literature may not seem like they have much in common, but there’s more to it than what we thought.
Read: The Study of Economics Could Learn a Lot From Science Fiction
If economies are built using the tools of fiction, then they can be reimagined using those same tools. Science fiction can remake the realm of economic possibility, whether by dreaming up new currencies or experimenting with radically different systems of exchange. The books on this list all engage in this kind of narrative speculation and offer glimpses of a more sustainable and just society.
Some people have apparently painted animals without ever seeing it themselves:
It is possible to find crazy things on the internet because well…it’s the internet. But along with the nice things, there is also a craving for the simpler pre-internet times where every tweet wasn’t vying for our attention.
Read: What Silicon Valley Has Brought Us
I wonder sometimes if there will be a revolt against the quality of time the new technologies have brought us, as well as the corporations in charge of those technologies. Or perhaps there already has been, in a small, quiet way. The real point about the slow food movement was often missed. It wasn’t food. It was about doing something from scratch, with pleasure, all the way through, in the old methodical way we used to do things. That didn’t merely produce better food; it produced a better relationship to materials, processes and labour, notably your own, before the spoon reached your mouth. It produced pleasure in production as well as consumption. It made whole what is broken.
“Purgatory stood somber. Her painted skin, lead luster long gone, cracked off in chalky flakes as she shook the bats and the sparrows out of her attic, the itch of their living irritating her frame.”
Check out this zine: Background Noise: An Assemblage of mismatched memories and misguided thoughts
Breasts are an important part of growing up for half of the planet’s population. Read Nora Ephron’s experience coming to terms with them.
Read: A Few Words About Breasts
I suppose that for most girls, breasts, brassieres, that entire thing, has more trauma, more to do with the coming of adolescence, with becoming a woman, than anything else. Certainly more than getting your period, although that, too, was traumatic, symbolic.
The New Normal has mandated working from home for all of us. Check out these comics on Work From Home.
“When I tell the story about my great-great-grandmother’s braid, listeners get chills and sprout small smiles, as if they want to believe me but can’t allow themselves the indulgence. My friends say something like, “That’s some 100 Years of Solitude shit,” - A short story
Read: He Comes While We Are Walking
There is time and there is memory.Time seems to stretch forever, but memory is like water: it evaporates, lies dormant, rushes back to you,happening now and in the distance, here and far away. If you touch one part of it, the other part feels it, too.
There are so many books and not enough time, watch this mini documentary-ish on How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content.
Phew. We hope you find something interesting among these.
If not, here is some music we’ve been jamming to lately…
That’s all for this break week. We tried something different that we hope you liked. Thanks for sticking by for 10 weeks!
As always, write back to us and let us know what you thought of this! We’ll resume our regular programming next week.
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Until next week,
Love and a week off in Iceland
Diti & Sneha