Metal, Goth and even, God help us, Emo, are still animated and enervated by that sense of abandonment and maladjustment, still prepared to be deformed and made ridiculous by their drives and disaffections.

As Pascale Joassart-Marcelli writes, “Once something becomes mainstream, mass-produced, and accessible to most, it also becomes vulgar and is no longer appealing to cultural elites. Thus ‘good food’ must be constantly rediscovered or reinvented in order to confer status.”25

The average person reading this probably has some stuff lurking in their personal darkness that doesn’t need to stay there.

My guess is that shadow stuff works best with people who are on a kind of inner precipice. You know, people who want to take big, interesting steps in life, but, instead of doing that, helplessly watch themselves not seizing the things they claim to desire. If you’re totally self-possessed and in alignment with every element of your personality, then maybe shadow work is not for you.

In a week, you feel about the same, unless you’ve had an unusually intense psychedelic revelation. 

Maybe if your mind is enforcing a heavy-handed narrative frame, some of the aesthetic properties of life go unnoticed. And maybe the complexities of other human beings are harder to perceive behind the wall of concepts you’re placing in front of them. If you could take that filter off, perhaps the world would look different, and your existence would feel smoother, more intuitive, less fragmented.

It’s not controversial that narrative and self-concept can affect properties of your sensory experience, large and small. Depressed people experience a slower, more monochrome world. When you’re in love, the world is more vivid. People you respect seem to possess physical magnetism and a kind of largeness. And so on, and so on.

Maybe falling apart, or falling short, or disappointing yourself nourishes some dark part of you. (This is where the ‘kink’ part comes in—it suggests you have a predilection for your pain.) Maybe you should investigate the nature of this nourishment. What would happen if you tried to explicitly approve of the darkest elements of your nature? Is it possible that they wouldn't have such a hold over you?

and I don’t want to mess up the book’s integration deployment procedure, which appears to be quite effective

This process is called integration. Instead of continuing the process of splitting off bits of your soul, you try to heal the split. Proponents of shadow work will tell you that once you get some integration done, you won’t feel as much inner conflict.

Understand the desires you wish weren’t a part of you.

Itself, shadow work is fairly simple to explain and quite plausible. The idea is this. There are parts of you that you consider unacceptable. Habits you don’t like, memories of things you’d rather not have done, thoughts you’d rather suppress. Normally, what you do is a sort of clumsy triage on these parts of yourself, as necessary. Bad memory surfaces? Involuntarily grunt and move on. Binge on your favorite substance? Sober up, feel bad, swear it’ll never happen again.This isn’t all that effective, as evidenced by the fact that you’re constantly suppressing all of this stuff over and over again. It’s like the cartoon closet with a bulging door, ready at any moment to spew unpleasantness all over your inner bedroom. You’re caught in destructive cycles, and, all the way through the cycle, you’re having the same thoughts over and over again. “Why am I doing this? And, by the way, who’s doing this? Me?”

Lights are now brighter, and the world seems more aesthetic, in general

permanently altered my subjectivity

I certainly do not believe, in general, that people can achieve instant global changes in their consciousness through reading weirdly-titled spiritual self-help books written in a funky feminine vernacular. 

I think life is a bit absurd, and humans are a bit absurd, so humorless art is tough for me.

“Be kind to each other,” which comes up in Everything Everywhere. But you’re wrapping humanistic messages within such goofy, over-the-top elements. Do you think it’s easier to get people considering existential philosophy if you pack it in humor?

It’s very compelling, because I think the only way we can feel anything is if the person that is trying to tell a story first acknowledges how awful everything is, first acknowledges how dark everything is, how meaningless it all is. Then I can be like, “Okay, now we can have a conversation, convince me why there is still beauty,” or whatever. Because if you just start with the beauty, I can’t fully engage.

Residents in safer areas may simply not know they are subsidizing the residents of risky areas, especially if they are unaware that the NFIP is tens of billions of dollars in debt. In places such as Avon, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the interdependency of areas at high risk of flooding and areas of lower risk is thrown into sharp relief as neighbors fight over the cost of beach nourishment to protect their communities. The politics of inequity are more powerful than the rationality of the markets.

The systemic risks in catastrophe bonds and other insurance-linked securities (ILS) reveal an opportunity to value systemic risk.

Because the problem is endemic and insurance companies need a large risk pool, it is impossible for a primary insurer to select policyholders to avoid systemic risk without exiting the market, if they are even aware of the risk in the first place.

regulatory incompetence exposed a systemic risk that resulted in the near collapse of the power grid.

focused on building better physical models, which are at least significantly better than the statistical models that they superseded

Does there exist an economic mechanism that can incentivize full winterization in the face of catastrophe? The peril of financializing risk is twofold: financial institutions are less knowledgeable about operational risk than the utilities themselves, and since they specialize in finance, they prefer financial solutions rather than regulations. More broadly, the market is reactive rather than proactive – once risk is securitized, the security is traded and the valuation of the risk stays in the financial space rather feeding back into the “real world”. A proactive approach would seek to reduce the risk, regardless of its valuation.

It is only recently that insurers have offered rebates for protection against wildfires or good driver behavior. Perhaps insurance companies could incentivize purchasing generators and installing battery packs, but the type of person interested in reducing their dependence on the grid is probably not interested in shelling out for insurance they need less of.

Insurance premiums represent a significant, albeit mostly invisible, cost of living in a geographical area, and they are likely to increase after the storm. Homeowners may be familiar with high premiums associated with living in flood, wildfire, and earthquake zones. In general, homeowners are incentivized to adequately prepare for disasters instead of pursuing claims because claims will increase their deductible. Where risk is high, homeowners may vote for regulation and projects that reduce their risk and hopefully their premiums. With the California wildfires, this is already happening the form of community-wide mitigation standards.

In summary, exactly who is going to pay is being shifted around, while utilities are going to have a harder time borrowing money because credit agencies have adjusted for the systemic risk unearthed by the winter storm. Reducing that systemic risk via winterization should restore the creditworthiness of the utilities.

The idea is that utilities will proactively winterize to reduce their liability, and perhaps to reduce the cost of their liability insurance. Yet after the winter storm of 2011 that also caused blackouts in Texas, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) noted that “generators were generally reactive as opposed to being proactive in their approach to winterization and preparedness.” Nobody happened to sue, liability did not increase, and winterization was not taken seriously. Ultimately, winterization is a systematic issue even larger than the wildfires in California, so customers would essentially be suing the utilities for a service that was not provided to most people and money that was not made, so only the lawyers would win. This is especially relevant for the many utilities that are run as cooperatives in Texas.

When combined, these two policies price-gouged utilities arbitrarily, benefiting those with more functional power generation and more mandated blackouts.

The scarcity policy also assumes that generators are relatively independent, but the many utilities and cooperatives that existed before deregulation that owned generators and produced more electricity than their own retail needs were essentially overpaid for their reduced power production.

translating that risk assessment into everyday costs

so in market terms, there was both high demand for heating and a low supply due to cascading failures from the rolling blackouts

to incentivize the retention of extra power generation capacity in times of high demand

Ultimately, the consequences of the winter storm are a case study in how the financialization of catastrophe has yet to grapple with managing systemic and regulatory risk.

The projection is significantly higher than the estimates based on property damage because it also includes lost income due to business interruption. An analysis of electric utilities by BlackRock in 2019 concludes that “climate-related risks are real for utilities, but mostly not priced in.” In addition, ERCOT did not have the regulatory power from the Texas legislature to enforce winterization, so the miniscule fines it did levy did not remedy the deficiencies in preparation by the utilities.

While the cost of mitigation for this particular storm will remain hypothetical, the estimated $18 billion insurance bill after the storm is all too real for the insurers taking a loss and the policyholders that will have to pay increased premiums in the future. If money is not spent on prevention, it will be spent on repair, and insurance companies should be capable of translating that risk assessment into everyday costs.

The reality is that household well prepared with a diesel generator, bottled water, and seasoned firewood is not going to be able to unfreeze hydrants or restore pressure to water mains so firefighters can put out house fires during the winter storm.

“Preppers” propose long lists of recommendations to be ready for a future storm, ignoring the substantial outlay for preparations that may never be used. Homeowners do not have the time to investigate systemic deficiencies, they just assume that the grid will work and that elected officials will keep it running.

a lack of imagination

the fact is the market is still heavily regulated. It’s not deregulated, it’s just regulated differently

inter-dependencies and the risk of a cascading set of events of the pandemic and the freeze that leaves us further vulnerable

but a lesson how fragile society can be when the institutions we trust fail to work for us

I began to use confessional anecdotes as a strategy to engage diverse readers. Coming from a black working-class background, I was especially concerned with the importance of creating liberatory feminist theory that would speak to as many folks as possible. Through lectures and conversations, I found that audiences across race and class were quite willing to engage complex theoretical issues if they were presented in ways that were accessible. Using an anecdotal story to illustrate an idea was one way to bridge the gap

offers abolition in her discussions of two topics: confessional writing and healing

We need to pay up: upgrade what we have and maintain it well. And we need to elect public officials committed to doing so, especially as our changing climate continues to produce more extreme storms of all kinds, all year round. Government, Hirs noted, is supposed to ensure the health and safety of all its citizens. If Texas wants to have its own grid, then Texas needs to run it responsibly. “Charity begins at home.” Hirs said. “Let’s look after ourselves.”

In the last few days, many have suggested not too gently that it’s time for Texas to join the rest of the country’s electricity grid—that way we could more easily share power with, say, Louisiana or Oklahoma or any other state in need. But that move comes with drawbacks. On our own, Texas has led the nation in energy innovation in wind and solar. Our grid allows us to move such renewable power from its sources, mainly in West Texas, to consumers in our major metropolitan areas. “That would not have been possible if Texas weren’t independent,” said Skelly. “The future trick will be to remain independent enough to innovate while strengthening our connections to our neighbors so we can share the love back and forth.”

I appreciate the tradition, I find it meaningful, and though I don’t actually consult my horoscope or abstain from pork, though I don’t actually believe, I think it has a lot to teach us . . . But you can only hold this kind of position if there’s someone else to do the work of believing for you. A secular Jew needs the black-hatted frummers who keep every one of the commandments. An ironic astrologist needs the person who believes that lumps of matter in outer space really do control his life.

Astrology weaves my small frustrations into the story of the universe.

make decisions to improve the financial makeup of their business, and to help them make decisions to ensure that they don’t lose money

regular fodder for Eater’s infamous (retired) Deathwatch series, which tracked dying restaurants

He has used his restaurant knowledge and real estate expertise to capitalize on the rise of “experiential real estate,” or the art of creating destination food offerings at the base of office buildings or hotels. And while Kamali has geared the majority of his business toward advising hotels, he sees a lot of opportunity for expansion into working with luxury department stores, airports, and casinos.

Here, landlords expect tenants to start paying rent on spaces immediately, long before the restaurant is open for business, and any issues with, say, equipment fitting correctly, or the placement of gas hookups, usually don’t surface until after the lease is signed.

During World War I, Germany adopted summer DST in the belief that it would reduce civilian consumption of electricity, which was generated mostly by burning coal needed for the war effort. Germany’s allies also moved their clocks forward. Britain retaliated by doing the same, as did the U.S. once it entered the war. Whether this coordinated action saved much coal is unclear, but maybe the combatants avoided confusion as to when the day’s trench warfare should begin.

(I’m noticing some similarities, as I write this, to what I’ve read about what being agender feels like– although of course agender people are not cis. If my agender readers could confirm or deny the similarity, that’d be helpful.)

They’re cis by default, not out of a match between their gender identity and their assigned gender.

I think that some people don’t have that subjective internal sense of themselves as being a particular gender.

I’m also excited for the potential space for rituals. For regluar walks to familiar parks and cafes. To finding a new favorite hammock spot. To have a standing desk that goes up and down and for the ability to hang my mind map posters on the walls and leave my notes on the floor. To have a place where I feel safe, comfortable, and a little more grounded.

Because of this newly discovered link between the brain and gut, scientists now attribute (besides functional gastrointestinal disorders such as the already mentioned irritable bowel syndrome) various neurologic and psychiatric pathologies to the alterations in the gut microbiota. It has been intimated in the previous paragraph that the bacteria can cause anxiety and depression through its influence on the amygdala, which opens new possible ways of therapy in psychiatry (Kelly at al. 2016)

All in all, the list of disorders associated with the brain-gut-microbiome axis is still growing and it currently includes, among others, posttraumatic stress disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, anorexia, alcoholism, schizophrenia, manic depression (Smith and Wissel 2019: 11)

‘The microbiome’s ability to shape affect and emotion therefore indicates that the influence of bacteria may spill over into every aspect of what it means to be a conscious, living organism.’ However, as noted above, the communication is bidirectional and therefore our emotional states have at the same time an impact on the microbiome structure (Aguilera et al. 2013; Zijlmans et al. 2015).

For example, certain bacteria are known to improve object recognition and object discrimination (Savignac et al. 2015).

First of all, it should be noted that the vast majority of the symbiotic bacteria dwells in our gut (Sender et al. 2016). The research of the last decade shows how important these microorganisms are for various processes we used to associate only with the central nervous system, namely with the brain. To give a better idea of the relevance of these new findings, they are so ground-breaking that some even call it a paradigm shift in neuroscience and psychiatry (Mayer et al. 2014). As a result, scientists have started to talk about the brain-gut-microbiome axis. Specifically, the brain-gut-microbiome axis refers to bidirectional communication between the central nervous system and the gut microbiota. This happens via several parallel interacting channels including the immune, endocrine and nervous systems (Martin et al. 2018: 133) with the major role played by the vagus nerve

The most questioned aspect of the theory is the transmission of microbiota between generations (see e.g. Godfrey-Smith 2015; Stencel 2016; Hurst 2017). Rosenberg and Zilber-Rosenberg (2018) argue that this transmission happens both vertically (e.g., transfer of maternal vaginal and fecal microbes at birth, or many others via breastfeeding) and horizontally (i.e., from the environment). Nevertheless, at the same time, they admit that this point of their theory is, considering the state of our current knowledge, the hardest to generalize3

The current biological research shows that the symbiotic bacteria are responsible for various physiological processes in our bodies and thus fulfil the functional condition of being considered part of the individual (Gilbert et al. 2012). To describe this biological entity referring to the host and its microbiota, scientists use the term ‘holobiont’ (Rohwer et al. 2002: 8). As far as we know, the holobiont concept of an individual applies to the vast majority of organisms on Earth (Herron et al. 2013) which has led many biologists to conclude that all animals and plants are holobionts (e.g. Rosenberg and Zilber-Rosenberg 2018).

The paper first shows relevance of the contemporary research on the symbiotic bacteria for the study of our consciousness. Then, it discusses whether the brain itself is actually a necessary condition for the mere existence of consciousness. Finally, it concludes that our consciousness is our emergent property caused by the bidirectional communication between the brain and the gut microbiota.

These issues include social justice and equity in urban sustainability initiatives, the urgency of climate adaptation and mitigation, and the need for broader and more fundamental transformation of the infrastructural systems underpinning social well-being.

The NATURA project has defined NbS as “…solutions that are based on nature-preserving protective ecosystems, incorporating ecological elements, or even mimicking ecological processes in built infrastructure, offering flexibility in the face of changing conditions and providing multiple benefits to society, often at relatively low cost.” NbS then serves as an umbrella term encompassing different ecosystem-based approaches for climate adaptation inclusive of existing concepts such as green infrastructure, urban ecological infrastructure, and ecological engineering. In the broadest sense, NbS refers to the use of ecological elements to improve urban quality of life in the face of climate change and other social ills stemming from current infrastructure systems.

Building off of pre-existing approaches to integrating ecological and built systems, NbS attempt to meet a wide array of social goals including improving urban quality of life, supporting transit and recreation, and mitigating the impacts of extreme events

Without transdisciplinary research approaches drawing on both biophysical, social science, and participatory research paradigms, it will be impossible to have projects that are context-specific, co-produced and owned by the communities navigating competing demands of different groups.

He said you could plan only so far ahead.

As for the trees that would be destroyed, Silver said, “Robert Moses planted those trees.” (They were old.) “These trees are nearing the end of their life cycle,” he added. “I need to think of the next generation of trees.”

Silver, an urban planner by trade and the first African American head of the American Planning Association, was unsentimental about the trees and the park. To him, East River Park was long overdue for an upgrade.

The whole story was full of vicious ironies. The city had prioritized flood protection for the vulnerable Lower East Side but, in doing so, had subjected the neighborhood to an experiment in community-engaged planning, under a looming deadline that distorted the debate. The city’s reversal had then deepened divisions inside the community. “The city owns that division,” Avila-Goldman said. And while there’s no overt plan to bring in private developers, Naomi Schiller of East River Alliance points out that it would be foolish to think an attractive, brand-new park with stable flood protection wouldn’t increase land values and eventually force working-class populations out. It is a well-documented process known as “green gentrification.” As geographer Samuel Stein puts it, “Real estate displaces them before climate change has a chance to.”

In mid-April, just as the city was getting ready to award a $1.27 billion contract for the reconstruction of East River Park to the lowest bidder, a joint venture based in Queens, ERPA organized its largest public protest yet. Myles and Emily Johnson, with Arnow quietly stage-managing, led 500 opponents of the plan from Tompkins Square Park to a “die-in” in front of Rivera’s office on East 4th Street, then to the amphitheater at Corlears Hook, where a diverse and distinguished group of speakers denounced the plan. Several City Council candidates spoke, including two from District 2, both running against Rivera with East River Park as a centerpiece of their platforms.

These actions all received favorable coverage at the hyperlocal websites Bowery Boogie and the Village Sun.

He told me he began looking at the East River Park project as a model of community participation in early 2018, just before the city changed the plan, then continued to study it as the community devolved into warring factions. At first, he was puzzled — “It was just people yelling at each other” — but eventually he concluded that the city had fundamentally broken the promise of community engagement by imposing a top-down plan, then appealing to its superior engineering expertise. More profoundly, he thought, the controversy represented a kind of preview of the battle over climate-change adaptation that will take place in the decades to come. “We haven’t had a real conversation, as a society, about the relationship between society and nature,” he told me. “We haven’t discussed what the trade-offs are going to be.” In a high-stress and at times highly confrontational way, the city was having that conversation now.

And he was beginning to be disturbed by the way the process of community input seemed to render some people invisible. “If we have a meeting on a Monday night at 6:30,” Holland said, “I know who’s going to come to that meeting and who is not.” The plan was not perfect, but it was expensive — putting over a billion dollars into a neighborhood that didn’t usually see that level of investment — and the 2022 spending deadline was approaching.

The plan would first go to the community boards (3 and 6) and then to City Council. According to tradition, the council would follow the votes of local representatives — in this case Margaret Chin of District 1 (Chinatown), Keith Powers of District 4 (Stuyvesant Town and up), and Carlina Rivera of District 2 (the Lower East Side).

Instead, her contact gave her a heads-up that the plan had changed. The next afternoon, the city announced that, instead of building the berm, it was going to bury the park in eight feet of fill and build a new park on top.

Both before and after the design competition, the plan went through several stages of “community input,” in which local residents, including Holland and Ortiz, told the architects and planners what amenities they would like to see in the plan. They wanted more lawns, more approaches to the water, better access across the FDR to the park.

This meant the park itself would remain in the flood plain and occasionally get inundated in accordance with the Dutch concept of keeping “room for the river.” But the hundred thousand people living across the FDR would be protected in the event of a Sandy-type storm.

The largest of the grants, $335 million, went to a project for lower Manhattan called the Big U, developed by the famously imaginative Danish architecture firm the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). The firm’s plan proposed an integrated system of flood protection that would form a giant U shape along Manhattan’s southern edge. Different areas received different designs depending on the local topography. In the Financial District, BIG envisioned an interlocking series of “pavilions of protection,” part shopping, part flood barrier; in the very dense neighborhood between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, where Trever Holland lives and the FDR is elevated, the architects designed a series of gates, “decorated by local artists,” attached to the underside of the FDR that would flip down in the event of flooding.

Donovan set up a competition called Rebuild by Design, run by Bloomberg-administration veteran Amy Chester, to solicit design ideas on the shape of post-Sandy flood protection in and around New York. In 2014, the top designs received a pledge of nearly a billion dollars in HUD funding for a series of projects to defend New Jersey, Staten Island, the Rockaways, the Bronx, and lower Manhattan.

But the mayoral race was about to heat up, and if the activists could just delay the plan’s implementation a little longer, it was possible the controversy could become an issue in the race; and if it became an issue, it was possible the next mayor could come up with a different plan and the park could be saved.

But the DDC had declared it infeasible, imposed this new plan, and, since then, refused to heed any objections.

How long would it be before City Hall started raising funds by giving up space, for example, in the Baruch Houses or Jacob Riis?

She was concerned the compost yard would have no place in the new park; the Parks Department has refused to promise her that the new park will include it.

Fannie Ip, a longtime Lower East Side resident and former legal assistant, had done the closest study of the various flood-protection plans and filed numerous Freedom of Information Law requests to learn more.

Repression means don’t feel that emotion, and management, which will come later, but it is literally something where we are told it is not okay to feel sad. It is not okay to be angry. It is not okay to be scared. It is not okay to be jealous, whatever the emotional experiences are. We are told that. We are told it either by being punished for it or being bribed out of it, or it is just maybe so hard core in our own system that we are just like no, no, no, I am not going to feel like that. With that, there are muscular constraints that come with it, or then the emotions start to control us. We have these big, emotional experiences. I can’t believe I said that when I was angry, or I lost control. That’s where the world says that’s what emotions are. Emotions never really get out of that for most people in most languages. Emotions are there creating disruption, and they need to be managed apparently to make good decisions, which is complete hogwash when you look at the neuroscience or so that I can manage myself, control myself. Then we start to try to manage the emotions, which is a form of repression, but there’s an intellectual component to it. We are actively deciding emotions aren’t good. We are going to manage by running a lot, or we are going to manage them by telling ourselves we are not going to be emotional. We are managing them by ignoring them. We are going to repress them in a way that has more intellect to it. It is not like a body repression, which is the distinction I am making there. Meditation, by the way, can be that. It doesn’t have to be that, but Adia Shante, who I adore his work, basically at one point said for most people meditation is management and that’s torture, something to that effect. Even meditation can be a way to manage the emotions instead of allowing and feeling the emotions, which is the next step. Then we will start to allow the emotions. We will feel the emotions, and we will start expressing those emotions in a way that isn’t at anybody, isn’t manipulative, isn’t part of a power struggle with somebody. Then we will usually do anger and sadness first, then probably fear, then joy, bliss, peace. All of that stuff starts coming. This is where the meat of the work is. For some people, some emotions are easier than others. Usually the negative emotions, almost always, I am not even sure if I have seen a case where it hasn’t been the case. The negative emotions need to move first and then the positive emotions. Oftentimes people don’t understand they are repressing the positive emotions. 

There also seems to be a unifying thing that happens in the developmental cycle where in cognitive development, the sense of self unifies, or the sense of time unifies. There is an emotional unification that I think that also happens on the emotional development side. It’s not just a grand cycle. It’s like lots of little iterations to get there. You are going back and forth. You are pendulating through the cycle, through the growth and development. All of those things seem to be really similar for emotions. 

Repression means don’t feel that emotion, and management, which will come later, but it is literally something where we are told it is not okay to feel sad. It is not okay to be angry. It is not okay to be scared. It is not okay to be jealous, whatever the emotional experiences are. We are told that. We are told it either by being punished for it or being bribed out of it, or it is just maybe so hard core in our own system that we are just like no, no, no, I am not going to feel like that. With that, there are muscular constraints that come with it, or then the emotions start to control us. We have these big, emotional experiences. I can’t believe I said that when I was angry, or I lost control. That’s where the world says that’s what emotions are. Emotions never really get out of that for most people in most languages. Emotions are there creating disruption, and they need to be managed apparently to make good decisions, which is complete hogwash when you look at the neuroscience or so that I can manage myself, control myself. Then we start to try to manage the emotions, which is a form of repression, but there’s an intellectual component to it. We are actively deciding emotions aren’t good. We are going to manage by running a lot, or we are going to manage them by telling ourselves we are not going to be emotional. We are managing them by ignoring them. We are going to repress them in a way that has more intellect to it. It is not like a body repression, which is the distinction I am making there. Meditation, by the way, can be that. It doesn’t have to be that, but Adia Shante, who I adore his work, basically at one point said for most people meditation is management and that’s torture, something to that effect. Even meditation can be a way to manage the emotions instead of allowing and feeling the emotions, which is the next step. Then we will start to allow the emotions. We will feel the emotions, and we will start expressing those emotions in a way that isn’t at anybody, isn’t manipulative, isn’t part of a power struggle with somebody. Then we will usually do anger and sadness first, then probably fear, then joy, bliss, peace. All of that stuff starts coming. This is where the meat of the work is. For some people, some emotions are easier than others. Usually the negative emotions, almost always, I am not even sure if I have seen a case where it hasn’t been the case. The negative emotions need to move first and then the positive emotions. Oftentimes people don’t understand they are repressing the positive emotions. 

I think to some degree people who move more from their emotional experience are not intellectual writers, so they don’t write it down and vice versa. I think that’s where a lot of the work falls short. Also, I might just not have found it yet. I just want to start with that, but what’s interesting to me is the emotional development cycle as I see it is very, very similar to a lot of the cognitive development in the way that it feels circular on some level. I feel like it is like a spiral, so when you are at the top of the spiral, it feels circular, but you have actually made progress, something to that effect. The beginning and the end feel very similar. 

Then we start to try to manage the emotions, which is a form of repression, but there’s an intellectual component to it. We are actively deciding emotions aren’t good. We are going to manage by running a lot, or we are going to manage them by telling ourselves we are not going to be emotional. We are managing them by ignoring them. We are going to repress them in a way that has more intellect to it. It is not like a body repression, which is the distinction I am making there. Meditation, by the way, can be that. It doesn’t have to be that, but Adia Shante, who I adore his work, basically at one point said for most people meditation is management and that’s torture, something to that effect. Even meditation can be a way to manage the emotions instead of allowing and feeling the emotions, which is the next step. Then we will start to allow the emotions. We will feel the emotions, and we will start expressing those emotions in a way that isn’t at anybody, isn’t manipulative, isn’t part of a power struggle with somebody. Then we will usually do anger and sadness first, then probably fear, then joy, bliss, peace. All of that stuff starts coming. This is where the meat of the work is. For some people, some emotions are easier than others. Usually the negative emotions, almost always, I am not even sure if I have seen a case where it hasn’t been the case. The negative emotions need to move first and then the positive emotions. Oftentimes people don’t understand they are repressing the positive emotions. 

Repression means don’t feel that emotion, and management, which will come later, but it is literally something where we are told it is not okay to feel sad. It is not okay to be angry. It is not okay to be scared. It is not okay to be jealous, whatever the emotional experiences are. We are told that. We are told it either by being punished for it or being bribed out of it, or it is just maybe so hard core in our own system that we are just like no, no, no, I am not going to feel like that. With that, there are muscular constraints that come with it, or then the emotions start to control us. We have these big, emotional experiences. I can’t believe I said that when I was angry, or I lost control. That’s where the world says that’s what emotions are. Emotions never really get out of that for most people in most languages.

. In general, the ‘solutions’ of the right – blaming problems on the migrant or the scrounger – are easier to grasp than the complex critiques of capitalism provided by the left. However, the idea underlying universal rent is simple and easy to understand. Each of us has an equal right to the land and natural resources; and so if some individuals or corporations have more than their fair share, they owe us compensation. And given that the vast majority of citizens own so little of the land, this idea has the potential to unite both left and right voters around a common cause. Of course, it won’t convince the elite. But we are the many and they are the few. If even half of the 99% can be persuaded to demand their right to universal rent, we will win. We can start today, by joining campaigns for land value tax and for universal basic income.

In addition, a land tax could penalise the hoarding of land by developers with no intention to build, one of the major causes of our current housing crisis.

I don’t want to write anymore, I want to go outside. They say you should never have what you desire. But every day I ask myself, what do I want in this life? My greatest fear is to have lived with too little abandon; that when I look back on my life, I’ll feel I’ve wasted so much of it and held too much inside.

I hope there’ll be an explosion of desire and wantonness where I live this summer. It’s spring now, and it’s already started. Last summer in Manhattan there was a lot of hooking up, a lot of making out on the piers, like how the old city might have been, how the new city might be, a lot of going home and fucking, a lot of experimentation. Everyone wanted to make out. At least downtown they did, from the East River Amphitheater to the West Side Highway, although it felt like it wasn’t driven by sexual desire so much as by a desire for human contact, for intimacy and closeness, and to recall that after everything that had happened, we were still in a body, we were alive. There’s another passage from Atomised where Houellebecq writes, “What the boy had felt was something pure; something gentle, something that predated sex or a need for sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out and touch someone, to be held lovingly in someone’s arms. Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.” That’s what last summer was like.

Twitter critic Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost (@ghostofchristo1) recently wrote, “My main hope is that the first post-COVID summer turns into a carnal free-for-all that transcends politics and brings people together at the basic level of physical connection, sans phone. People’s psychic energies can’t be drained by the virtual political space any longer.”

My editor told me about a friend of hers, a man in his thirties, who’s dating a girl, mid-twenties, who doesn’t want to hang out much, but wants to talk and text every day around the clock. This sounds like a fucking nightmare. But a self-fulfilling one: The illusion of perpetual connection has become a barrier to the experience of physical closeness. After all, why meet up if you’re getting your emotional needs met from afar? I suspect this illusion of closeness is, in part, what’s stopping us from experiencing lust. There’s a loss of distance and mystery, of both risk and reward. We cannot begin to close the gap between ourselves and another person if we don’t believe one exists.

In the sexy panopticon of social media, we’re all socialized more like how women have always been: Our goal is to appear desirable to others rather than feel desire ourselves. Who can be expected to connect with someone else, to experience real passion under these conditions?

This is an age of great individualism and narcissism. We live in the marketplace of identities; vanity is what drives economies now. And this is a problem that transcends not just sexual desire. Everything we do in our lives—for instance, my writing and sharing this essay—can be thought of in terms of self-presentation, a world full of people living for an imagined audience.

For the nomad, the question of why you are temporarily somewhere is simply ill-posed. It’s like asking a settled person, “why aren’t you moving?” For the nomad, a period of rootedness is unstable, like travel for the rooted.  It is a disturbed equilibrium that requires explanation. An explanation of non-movement, and eventual resumption of movement, are required.

Better questions concern the quality and shape of the movement itself:

The modern world is organized around rooted living, with travel as its subservient companion concept. Travel is unstable movement away from home with a purpose, even if the purpose is something ambiguous like exploration or self-discovery. It is always a loop from home to home, or a move from old home to new home.  For the rooted living person, travel is a story. A disturbed equilibrium that requires explanation and eventual correction, resulting in a return to equilibrium. A small handful of stories explain most cases: business trip, visiting family, tourism, backpacking, finding myself. Even hippie-drifting, karma-trekking, eat-pray-loving and backpacking are purposeful patterns of movement in a world that is a landscape shaped by rootedness.

Vegas confuses people. Most regions are understood in terms of their attractions for rooted people. California is for techies and entertainment types who like good weather. New York is for finance types who like gritty, tough urban living. Chicago is for easygoing types who work in areas like logistics and commodities. Vegas doesn’t have a clear raison d’etre on the rooted-living map (except perhaps as a retirement location). You travel there for a bit of hedonism; you don’t live there. For nomads on the other hand, Vegas does have a very clear raison d’etre. It is a great city to pass through (not so great to grow roots in). I’ve taken to making a weak joke: “Vegas is like the miscellaneous file; you meet a lot of random people there. I was initially having fun watching them, but then I realized I am one of them.”

Nomadism is not an instrumental behavior. It is a foundational behavior like rootedness, the uncaused cause of other things. Book promotion is simply one of the many activities that benefits from constant movement, just like growing a garden is one that benefits from staying in the same place.

It is a non-job, like the other non-job title I sometimes claim, “independent consultant.” Both are usually taken as euphemisms for “unemployed.” For the legible, the choice is between gainful employment and lossy unemployment. For the illegible, the choice is between gainful unemployment and lossy employment.

True nomads decide they like stable movement better than rootedness, and then decide to fill their lives with activities that go well with movement. How you are moving matters a lot more than where you are, were, or will be. Why you are moving is an ill-posed question.

whether robots are doing that or whether humans are doing it

I would start on a note in my phone and that was really helpful, because once you start writing inside of essays, you can lose the stream of consciousness that you want to have. You do that particularly well. I think Leslie Jamison also does that really well, where you feel her mind working in the writing, which is very difficult because anyone who’s written knows that once you edit, you’re completely lost in the sentences and you lose the larger shape. So the notes thing allowed me to jump from one idea to the next. And as somebody who has grown up in the age of the internet and enjoys reading long books but can have a short attention span, I appreciate the way you can pick up and put down a book of essays

on representation and sex, embodiment, and capitalism. But you also expressed anxiety in the book that you won’t be taken seriously, because women who look like you in particular, and who also capitalize on how they look, are especially not taken seriously.

I could go into a whole thing about my relationship to the internet and women and control. I think it’s something that is at the forefront of our cultural conversation right now, around Only Fans and revenge porn and maybe even related to crypto and NFTs and the free internet, but that’s a separate conversation.

Is being able, so successfully, to make men want you, to understand what men want and play on that desire, a form of power? Or are all of these things just simulacra of power and control? My sense is that you give a pretty ambivalent answer to these questions. On one hand, you rightly condemn those who criticize you and other women for capitalizing on their beauty. And you acknowledge that the way you look has given you a certain form of power. But in the book, you tell these stories again and again of realizing that the real power lies with men. The men who direct, film, and manage you, who own the companies and production houses, and who so often treat you as fungible and stupid, simply a body to be sold, consumed, and unfortunately occasionally assaulted. Again and again, you express contempt for the control that these men exercise, and a longing for more creative power. Someone, as you say, who might make a movie one day, rather than get naked in one. Do you think that this is a fair assessment, and to what extent was power and control at the forefront of your mind as you set out to write the book?

Ratajkowski confronts with unflinching frankness topics like shame, solidarity, and the search for male validation in a culture that often confuses exploitation with empowerment.

to focus on the process of creation

Skeptics say this is precisely the problem: Faced with the challenge of limiting carbon emissions or curtailing growth to preserve Earth, it’s cynical at best and shameful at worst to instead spend billions of dollars to flee the planet. But the most ardent advocates for colonization argue that Mars can be a testing ground for sustainable ways of living. Economic systems, environmentally friendly technologies, and architecture developed there could, in their view, make Earth’s cities stronger. The most optimistic among them believe Martian settlers will have a unique chance to create more just, equitable, and bountiful societies. After all, they’ll have centuries of trial and error from which to draw. Guillem Anglada-Escudé, an astrophysicist who was one of the key scientific minds behind Nüwa, a Martian settlement project conceived by the think tank SONet and the architecture and design studio Abiboo, envisions colonization as a collectivist effort, driven by pioneers willing to “contribute as much as possible.”“Like Thomas Paine said with the American Revolution, we hold it in our power to begin the world anew,” says Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society. “We want to try to bring as much of the best as we can and leave as much of the worst behind.”

home is the set of rituals we carry around and the friends we partake in them with

but it needs to be the focus of web3 public goods funding efforts going forward. At a DAO governance level, there is a growing disconnect between how money is made and how it is being distributed in the name of public goods. Without taxation to fall back on, or a central decision-making body, we need to be more conscious about what we are doing and what we are trying to achieve. 

This would provide more certainty and longevity to projects and make it easier to plan for the future. 

owned the money-making project outright or was otherwise entitled to a stream of future revenue in perpetuity?

For other public goods projects and non-technical contributors, outside sources of income do not exist or are not as readily available. As a result, the projects themselves are unsustainable without constant funding top-ups. Most successful public goods projects in web3 will never be able to generate direct revenue without restricting access to content or fundamentally changing the character and nature of a project.

Developing a better understanding of what we mean by “public goods” is going to become increasingly important. We need to educate people in web3 so we can make better decisions as individuals. If we can make better decisions as individuals, the collective will be better off and innovations like quadratic funding will function much more efficiently. 

In a perfect world, the community knows what a public good is and is in the best position to judge what is needed and/or valuable. Unfortunately, this has proven to be untrue. The community is more likely to donate to popular projects they have seen before, with little or no consideration as to whether or not a project is a public good. Projects, whose founders have larger social media followings, are obviously going to receive more donations than other projects. As a result, these projects will likely receive a greater amount of money from the matching pool. In what way then does quadratic funding improve upon the current centralized approach to the funding of public goods at a government level? To the extent that the community’s participation acts as a voting signal for a quadratic formula, surely there should be clarity around what participants are voting for. Are they voting for what they think a public good is or what a public good actually is? Without the quadratic matching, this would not matter. With quadratic matching, it matters a great deal. The matching pool consists of money collected from donors who expect that the money will be used to fund digital public goods. At the moment, there are clearly projects being funded by the Gitcoin matching pool that are not public goods and could not fall within a broader definition of public goods. 

The challenge of funding public goods in web3 is one of the most interesting real-world experiments ever conducted. In a perfect world, public goods would be managed by a contract that magically knows how much money to allocate to each person or project and automatically distributes the money in the fairest and most impactful way possible. The contract would know exactly what to do and would act autonomously of people, who could be corrupted by outside influences. In reality, it is a much more complicated proposition. Even if we agree that public goods should receive funding in web3, we still have to raise money and then determine how to equitably distribute that money in some way. We can break the funding of public goods into two distinct tasks — raising money and then distributing money. To the extent that any of this is easy, raising money is the easier of the two tasks.

Is it the end of the world if a podcast cannot make money and the creator stops producing the content? On an individual basis, no, it does not matter. On a collective basis, in the way we think about public goods, it matters a great deal. If we expect people to contribute and create public goods of value that are not corrupted by outside interests, we need to find a way to ensure that these people have access to funding. In the case of the media, if we want clean discussions and clean information, we have to move away from the special interests that plague traditional media. To do this, we have to fund media and content creation in web3 as a public good. When it comes to open source code, it is much easier to identify public goods and assign a value to the work. When it comes to everything else, a lot more that needs to be considered. Deciding who should get access to public goods money and how much they should receive is very challenging. There are a lot of mouths to feed in web3. There are a lot of people creating and contributing to public goods. So, who decides? 

I didn’t think I had much of a chance of getting in. I think self-doubt is an all too common problem for women.

When you make only one part of a system stronger, it breaks the rest, unless the other parts are strengthened to compensate.

the goal is managing complexity without perfect models.

In human systems

As a rule, if you cannot model a system with enough fidelity to predict it, you cannot control it.

But these outcomes are adaptive, not goal-directed. How do you add goals?

The study of most complex systems shows that disparate goals can lead to harmony despite conflict; alignment in the absence of clearly imposed goals, organizational or systemic, is clearly possible.

These small-scale goals combine in complex ways and can work at cross purposes, and it’s easy for them to lose the plot.

build from unanticipated needs, unguided by the unclear, underspecified goals.

Fixing this mismatch requires a powerful countervailing force to compensate, in the form of a mission.

signal-to-noise ratio

it distorts my use of twitter in interesting ways

If organizations don’t properly specify goals, their metrics can’t compensate. If their metrics don’t support their goals, goals will get lost in the organizational shuffle.

what is whiteness if not an all-consuming command into sameness, an implication that anything besides itself is to be pitied or conquered?

Idealists hoped that the internet would circumvent, rather than directly dismantle, existing hierarchies of domination, by allowing users to shed the visual signifiers of race, gender, and class.

the tension in this utopian vision is that the internet will usher in a new age of diversity while also simultaneously erasing all differences between individuals.

Lisa Nakamura

Immediately after stating that “ours is a world that is...not where bodies live,” Barlow declares that “we are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.”

In 1996, John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote a document titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,”

I must also orient myself towards an attitude of active construction, rather than simply passive consumption.

these communities would be strengthened through collective action rather than shared passive consumption. They would become lively spaces for dissent and discourse, as members weighed different strategies for achieving shared goals. And through participating and contributing to them, individuals might find not only a feeling of belonging, but also a newfound sense of agency.

Instead, forming coalitions and finding solidarity with other groups was essential to preserving the existence of the community itself through a process of co-liberation.

Digital platforms have the ability to intervene in users’ lives far more than real estate agents ever could: they can suggest content and nudge users towards particular communities, without users ever having expressed a desire to find something new. If real estate agents make assumptions about individual preferences, algorithms assert the power to reshape our preferences in the image of profit.

Increasingly, behind every webpage and application is a massive network of third party trackers, logging devices, and cookies designed to capture and mine user behavior, a process Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Making assumptions about what users prefer and how they will behave is fundamental, rather than incidental, to the profit engine of surveillance capitalism. The vision of an internet that offered unparalleled freedom to its users has given way to one that surveils, predicts, and steers them instead.

Segregation is not merely the result of individual decisions, devoid of history or power relations. Schelling himself concedes that individual decision-making might be less pertinent than de jure or economically induced segregation and, furthermore, that “the lines dividing the individually motivated, the collectively enforced, and economically induced segregation are not clear lines at all.” Take, for example, the role of real estate agents in perpetuating residential segregation today, more than fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Real estate brokers regularly make assumptions about their clients’ racial preferences before steering them away or towards certain neighborhoods, arguing that it “facilitates the sales process.” Under market incentives, the responsibility for segregated outcomes is thus deflected onto individual consumers.

I wonder if I would’ve realized sooner that the community of funny, popular Asians I imagined existing online was not so much a neighborhood as it was a circus, performing for an audience whose members almost certainly consisted mostly of non-Asians.

but in my elementary school days, the lesson I absorbed was that talking about race was okay, so long as it avoided seriousness at all costs. I picked up the language of racial humor, retelling jokes from YouTube on the playground to win laughs from kids who weren’t as online as I was. Looking back, it’s hard not to be embarrassed by the subtext of those interactions: You don’t have to feel anxious around me — I get the joke, I think Asians are weird, too!

I wonder if I subconsciously gravitated towards the popular creators who looked like me

As Schelling’s experiment makes clear, even in a setting where one attempts to disregard power dynamics or history, social categories are stubborn: when individuals are marked by their group status and act accordingly, social segregation arises.

Setting aside whether the paradoxical erasure of difference in order to promote diversity was problematic in and of itself

The right not to work is an ideal worthy of the impaired and able-bodied alike.

Disability is an obvious example of the need for fundamental structural reform and I am surprised that people who desire change have not more often reached out to our movement. We epitomize many ways in which our political and social systems need to change. We are often born out of war, financial inequality, and environmental degradation. My disability is a birth defect caused by a U.S. Air Force contractor that illegally polluted my neighborhood’s ground water. They buried toxic chemicals near our community’s wells for over forty years, but did not bother to remedy the situation even after awareness of the damage was raised; most likely this is because the area was inhabited by poor Latino families and residents of a local Indian reservation. Thousands of people died or became impaired due to the Air Force’s negligence. Unfortunately, my case is not rare.

I remember one time I was in a flea market in Georgia, and a middle-aged toothless woman came up to me from behind her booth and said, “You’re so brave, I would hate to have your life.” I was about thirteen and even then I couldn’t help but smile because I felt the same way about her. I knew that I most likely would have more options open to me despite my disability than she ever had simply due to the educational advantages I have had and due to my unusual background and supportive family, and that I would hate to have her life too. Human beings are so quick to judge other’s existences, but what is even sadder to me is that if people could just take the extra step to see how their experiences are affected similarly, they would most likely find that our repressions share the same roots. What makes my life hard is the same as that which makes the flea-market woman’s life hard; we are both victims of a society that does not appreciate our value, or values our contributions in a very limited sense.

Progressives, like most able-bodied people, are loathe to identify with crippled people and more often than not refuse to acknowledge two simple truths. The first is that they, if they live long enough, will join our ranks. Impaired advocates sometimes joke that people should actually consider themselves “temporarily abled.” We all age and most people end up infirm. It is astounding how little concern there is for the quality of life and the unfreedom of the elderly in this society; I can only surmise that it is the result of a collective coping mechanism of denial. The second fact is that the treatment of disabled people is merely a more pronounced form of the condition of other populations in the contemporary workplace.

Fundamental social change looks like it is a long way off, I’ll admit, and in the meantime we are frequently told the only way to change the system is to participate in it. The more economic and social affluence one has, the more one can maneuver within the system.

The paradoxes and difficulties and the economic and social challenges of being disabled and living on SSI astound me daily; still, I remain unconvinced that fighting for equality within the current system (that is, to some extent, the right to be part of the exploiter class as opposed to being part of the exploited) is the ultimate ideal worth fighting for.

What I mean by the right not to work is perhaps as much a shift in ideology or consciousness as it is a material shift. It is about our relation not only to labor but the significance of performing that labor, and to the idea that only through the performance of wage labor does the human being actually accrue value themselves. It is about cultivating a skeptical attitude regarding the significance of work, which should not be taken at face value as a sign of equality and enfranchisement, but should be analyzed more critically. Even in situations where enforcement of the ADA and government subsidies to corporations lead to the employment of the disabled, who tends to benefit, employers or employees?

Capitalism has at it root the idea of an individual’s worth being intrinsically linked to their production value. Many, though by no means all, disabled people will never be good workers in the capitalist sense: if you cannot move or speak, it is hard to succeed in a mainstream career.

Because of the way the personal care system is set up now, it is true that being physically self-sufficient in these matters has made my life easier simply because I do not have to worry about institutionalization or fighting for a personal care attendant. However, my life has not changed that dramatically with the ability to pee or change my clothes when I want to, and I have since realized how little it affected my ego or my daily routine. The issues that caused me worry during this period were not things that directly were caused by my physical limitations (I was not embarrassed by needing help), but were indirectly caused because of the stigma others attached to needing help and by the worry that these physical necessities could lead me into a life without choices.

But no one partakes in American capitalism independently; there is no such thing as a “self-made” individual. In this respect, able-bodied people should take a second look at the position of disabled people; perhaps, ultimately, their position as interdependent is not so at odds with the position all able-bodied people occupy.

“Professionals tend to define independence in terms of self-care activities such as washing, dressing, toileting, cooking and eating without assistance. Disabled people, however, define independence differently, seeing it as the ability to be in control of and make decisions about one’s life, rather than doing things alone or without help.”

the position of the disabled are not absolute and should be challenged and changed.

Each human relates to nature through their own physical experience as gendered, as aged, and as abled, and each experience of embodiment should be seen as both historically and socially evolved through natural elements. The body is both a biological fact and cultural artifact; “the former constitutes a pre-social organic base upon which the latter takes form.”6 Disability activists and theorists see impairment as equivalent to “first nature” and disability as an example of “second nature.”

Perhaps it is best expressed in the idea that disability is a political issue not a personal one. Disability theorists make this clear by making a subtle but significant distinction between disability and impairment. The state of being mentally or physically challenged is what they term being impaired; with impairment comes personal challenges and drawbacks in terms of mental processes and physical mobility. To be impaired is to be missing a limb or born with a birth defect; it is a state of embodiment. Being impaired is hard. Without a doubt, it makes things harder than if one is not impaired. However, more often than not, the individual accommodates for this impairment and adapts to the best of their ability. For example, I am impaired by arthrogryposis, which limits the use of my arms, but I make up for this in many ways by using my mouth. Disability, in contrast, is the political and social repression of impaired people. This is accomplished by making them economically and socially isolated. Disabled people have limited housing options, are socially and culturally ostracized, and have very few career opportunities. The disabled community argues that these disadvantages are thus not due to impairment by its nature, but due to a cultural aversion to impairment, a lack of productive opportunity in the current economy for disabled people, and the multi-billion dollar industry that houses and “cares” for the disabled population that has developed as a consequence of this economic disenfranchisement. This argument is known as the social model of disability.5 Disablement is a political state and not a personal one and thus needs to be addressed as a civil rights issue.

One fact that makes disability so hard to understand is that there is no single model of disability; the human body can be impaired in an almost infinite number of ways, and people of all walks of life can become impaired. “As with the population as a whole, disabled people are characterized by difference rather than normality: differences in terms of gender, minority ethnic background, sexual orientation, age abilities, religious beliefs, wealth, access to work and so on. Clearly, their situation cannot be understood or, indeed, transformed by any theory or policy which is based on conventional notions of normality and the existence of a single set of culturally dominant values.”4 The only thing impaired people have in common is their political disablement and the economic, behavioral, and emotional similarities that impairment can cause. Disability, partly as a result of this intense differentiation of those people affected, may be the only branch of the civil rights movement that cannot be appropriated. Disabled people are an example of a movement and identity whose image and capabilities are infinitely various. This variety, however, is what makes us so difficult to incorporate into the modern corporate environment; what changes will need to be made for us, what adaptations, what special accommodations, what costs will be incurred, and what profits diminished?

On average it costs $9,692 annually to provide someone with Medicaid Assistive Services. However, the national average annual cost to house one person in a nursing home is $40,784 and the standard of services in these institutions is often shockingly low.3 There is often a high incidence of physical and sexual abuse, as well as negligence to hygiene and psychological needs. Even at best, individuals are still stripped of countless freedoms people on the outside take for granted—such as choosing when and what to eat, when to sleep, and even who to talk to. Despite the fact that two million people are denied the privilege of determining where and how they live and who cares for them, the lack of press garnered by our two-week trek (and on disability issues more generally) does not exactly constitute a mystery. Disabled people are regarded as disadvantaged citizens, and so this fact is not news in itself. Disability is most commonly perceived as a personal tragedy, isolated and spontaneous, and so rarely worthy of a second thought let alone headlines (unless as a human interest story). Disabled people are far from enjoying the advantages of social or economic equality, but the point is that they are far from even being seen as a deserving identity group. While issues regarding racial, gender, and sexual orientation equality are all at the forefront of political and social theory, disabled people are almost always left out of these conversations. The disabled are viewed with sympathy as victims of “bad luck” who will simply have to accept disadvantage as their lot in life, not as an identity group that is systematically discriminated against. Unlike sexism and racism, which are perceived to be significant social problems, disability falls under the social radar and disablism is not recognized as a damaging or even particularly serious form of prejudice.

These are purposefully irrational actors imposing their irrationality on the market.

Post-modernism, of course, is the philosophy of complete relativism, where there are no absolutes and everything is relative. There’s certainly some truth to relative value. As any Austrian economist will tell you, value is subjective, and can be seen in the daily price fluctuations of nearly every commodity in the market.

For the uninitiated

we’ve gone from investment based on merit to investment based on popularity. Nothing quite captures this phenomenon like Dogecoin.

As a Godless philosophy took hold, we found that culture went to post-modernism, or radical relativism. In the same way, as money has been diluted over the past 100 years, it’s taken out fundamentals and civilization building with it. The market has removed fundamentals like yield and profit, and the only thing left is popularity, or collective will.

The fundamentals matter less and less in a world where anything too big to fail gets rescued. So what’s left?

If God doesn’t exist, then morals based on God need to be thrown out with it.

Much like Enlightenment thinkers who rejected God but still clung to Christian morality, if there’s a critical threshold of people who believe one thing, the rest of the market is rational in following it. But what happens when there is no critical threshold? What happens when most of the market doesn’t make investment decisions based on fundamentals and instead just cares about what everyone else is buying?

The money supply in every country has expanded significantly since 2008 and has accelerated in the past year. The additional money that comes into existence go to people who would rather store that value than spend it, which leads to investment in assets, driving yields lower and lower.Another way to look at the current market is that central banks have attempted to de-risk everything through a policy of rescuing anything close to bankruptcy by providing liquidity. There is no yield because these assets are supposedly de-risked.

In this article, I’m going to explain the reasons behind the current irrationality, the philosophical worldview led us here and the spiritual implications going forward.

With the knowledge that I’ll be back, I’m conflicted about whether I’m saying goodbye or goodbye for now. All I know is that I want to continue exploring and experimenting. Thank you LA for everything.

a switch flipped in my brain: I wanted to make up for lost time. Old friends came out of the woodwork to hang out. Friends I’ve known for half a decade but would only see when I was in LA visiting family became close friends and their friends became mine. I forged new friendships and strengthened old ones. The vagueness of invites that permeates the chill, flakey west coast culture was comfortable to me. I decided when and where to show up while considering my covid risk tolerance. In a world of uncertainty and chaos, I found comfort in imposing control over my own circumstances and defining my own guidelines.

Los Angeles was a respite for me, a safe haven. When the density and closeness of the concrete jungle that is New York turned into claustrophobia, paranoia, and panic, the sprawl and wilderness of Los Angeles offered me safety, solace, and structure.

October 16, 2021, for 1 year, 6 months, and 20 days. In a sense, Los Angeles will forever be home to me. I’m learning that I’m lucky enough to have two homes: one where my loved ones are and one wherever I am.

Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship.

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”

This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter

If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend. “There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

Sweetgreen, I eat even faster because (as can be true of many things in life) slowing down for even a second can make the machinery give you the creeps. Sweetgreen is a marvel of optimization: a line of 40 people – a texting, shuffling, eyes-down snake – can be processed in 10 minutes, as customer after customer orders a kale caesar with chicken without even looking at the other, darker-skinned, hairnet-wearing line of people who are busy adding chicken to kale caesars as if it were their purpose in life to do so and their customers’ purpose in life to send emails for 16 hours a day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients that ward off the unhealthfulness of urban professional living.