“Affluent families pay for the unbundled services and get something close to what civic infrastructure used to provide, except curated and selective and predictably high-quality. They aren’t just buying community. They’re buying social risk insurance: insulation from institutional failure, controlled peer environments, future opportunity pipelines. They’re also buying the option to never encounter the people whose lives are getting worse because the substrate they’re paying to replace has gone missing for everyone else.” makingpublicwork.com/destructi…
“When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark” www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…
I have the previous version of this knife and use the little pry bar as much as the knife thejamesbrand.com/products/…
“The practice economy is what keeps a community running. It’s knitted together through relationships, reputation, and service. It’s the most resilient form of work in human history, compressed by every economic revolution. It always comes back.” schoolofthepossible.substack.com/p/the-pra…
“Impromptu meals with friends. Making memories with my family. Going to bed early instead of watching another episode. Amazingly waking up (earlier!) feeling rested. Walking in the woods. Making more room to eat, drink, and be merry. (And play Magic: the Gathering.) All of those things are, by nature, slow, unproductive (depending on who you ask), and, perhaps because of their inherent slowness, compounders of joy over time.” blankenship.substack.com/p/margina…
🆕 Ghost Acreage: “a term from agriculture and economics. It describes the unseen land, water, energy, and labour required to produce what we consume, even though those resources may sit outside the ways we usually measure things.”
Ghost Newspapers: “Most towns still have a local newspaper, but they don’t cover their communities any more.”
Ghost Forests: “The haunting remains of what were once stands of cedar and pine. Since the late 19th century, an ever-widening swath of these trees have died along the shore. These arboreal graveyards are showing up in places where the land slopes gently into the ocean and where salty water increasingly encroaches. Along the United States’ east coast, in pockets of the west coast and elsewhere, saltier soils have killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind woody skeletons typically surrounded by marsh.”
Ghost Artists: “Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.” /via pixel envy
Ghost Hotels: “The “ghost hotel” nomenclature refers to an entire apartment building which is functionally a hotel because most or all units are short-term rentals instead of tenant-occupied.”
Ghost NetworkHealthcare: “…he, like millions of Americans, was trapped in a “ghost network.” As some of those people have discovered, the providers listed in an insurer’s network have either retired or died. Many other providers have stopped accepting insurance — often because the companies made it excessively difficult for them to do so. Some just aren’t taking new patients. Insurers are often slow to remove them from directories, if they do so at all. It adds up to a bait and switch by insurance companies that leads customers to believe there are more options for care than actually exist.”
Ghost NetworkTelevision: “Now MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.”
Ghost Kitchen: “A virtual restaurant, also known as a ghost kitchen, cloud kitchen or dark kitchen, is a food service business that serves customers exclusively by delivery and pick-up based on phone and online ordering.[1] Virtual restaurants are stand-alone businesses that either operate out of an existing restaurant’s kitchen or from a separate kitchen set-up away from a restaurant.”
See also: American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists “That’s how I feel when I walk through the bare, people-less parking lots of my neighborhood to get to the grocery store. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen other pedestrians while making this trip. If not for the moving cars nearby, it would be like walking through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s an isolating experience, one that makes me feel very small and vulnerable.”
The J-Card generator is too fun. Like, I want to make some mixtapes fun (yes, I have an unopened blank tape and a tape player). I even made my own J-Card (and related mix).
Across a range of formats, from merchandise and the sign on NPR’s headquarters to billboards and ad screens on the New York City subway, the recognizable block letters transform into urgent and timely questions—many that listeners around the country are asking. “How does AI affect my electric bill?” “Why are groceries still so expensive?” “How is my farm going to survive?”
