The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.
From The Anti-Social Century. Emphasis mine.
From r/CozyPlaces.
Photo by Tomasz Filipek of the Neon Museum + more from 99% Invisible.
It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms. Narrative resists compression.
Art by Eve De Haan. Photographer unknown. /via Future Now / are.na
“every dashboard is a sunk cost / every dashboard is an answer to some long-forgotten question / every dashboard is an invitation to pattern-match the past instead of interrogate the present / every dashboard gives the illusion of correlation / every dashboard dampens your thinking”
By Stanley Roy Badmin.
Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.
In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.
People are following their “personal taste curation” instead of “mass consensus.” /via Jorge Arango
From Eternity! Eternity! by Vincent Glielmi. /via booooooom.com
A collection of ghost words …
🆕 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 Network Healthcare: “…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 Network Television: “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 art of Silvia Celiberti / Instagram / via booooooom.com
a recurrent theme is a fatigue with the style of self-narration that the platforms encourage — which, whether we realize it or not, has been heavily influenced by brand storytelling logics. We talk about ourselves like we’re products.
the best defense, the most meaningful work, the best preparation you can do at the level of an individual life is to boost your local resilience. To become a person of place. To connect with the people and land where you live. This is what we’re built to do.
How I became ‘collapse aware’. This is not a depressing read (or listen, the author read option was great)! /via Dense Discovery
Kinopio is such a neat tool.
A “Christmas” album that resurrects each year. Example comment:
The last time my grandfather and I hangout together 2 Christmas' ago, I had this on in the car and I’ll never forget when he told me how much he enjoyed The Grinch flip. It made me so happy. I miss him everyday now. What a good human. Rest in peace.
Cancel all my meetings, Said the Gramophone’s best songs of 2024 dropped!
“RENAISSANCE # 05” by Conrad Jon Godly via Colossal
A very gothic morning.
“Truly this book is in memory of my brother, Jeff. When confronted with hatred or violence, he used to say: I don’t get that station, man. His inner radio was all about oranges, dogs, and trucks. We always made up life on our own. I miss him every day.”
From the dedication of Mecca by Susan Straight.
↑ Mississippi River Elevation Study by Tim Wallace.
Listen to the world’s largest and oldest tree.
When I tell you the Taco Bell is haunted now, a poem.
r/TheNightFeeling, photos taken at night.
Near death experiences, ghostly visits, growing up in Alaska, this episode of Otherworld was pretty wild.
A cover of Folsom Prison by Rachel Goodrich.