>> I asked him what he sees as the value of quiet. “The further we get into quiet, the further we discover who we are,” Hempton said. “When you speak from a quiet place, when you are quiet, you think differently. You are more uniquely yourself. You are not echoing advertisements. You are not echoing billboards. You are not echoing modern songs. You’re echoing where you were.” When I asked Hempton’s co-founder the same thing, he chided me: “That question itself comes from a noisy situation.”

I’m so with Thallikar when he says that the sound is like, “crying constantly and moaning in pain.”

I love absolute silence. I make sure to find long stretches of it every day and most nights. Right now, I can hear a river and that’s it :)

Yep. Life’s good. Every minute is a gift. Why is that so damn hard to internalize sometimes??

I know about a dozen people who are sharing themselves online in a way that seems extremely authentic, interesting, and healthy. Kelly is one of them. Even though we only barely know each other, I enjoy spending ~5-10 minutes per week staying up to date on her life.

Internet 3.0 is going to look and feel like internet 1.0. Can't wait.

Bombshell.

Jia knocked this one out of the park.

Required reading for anybody who thinks about the intersection of social media/tech and humanity.

Heavy. Excellent reporting. Important.

Read this.

Interesting. I agree that the world is on fire. I think the US, too, is on the verge of some serious destabilization. “Revolution” might be too strong of a word, but it’s actually less scary than “Orwellian.” Great find @kaspermjk

I love standing at bars and I hate sitting at them unless I’m eating. This article cracked me up. I’ll keep my eyes open for foot rails now.

Standing desk users, beware:

> Turns out, humans aren’t really designed to stand for long periods with feet flat on the floor.

I can't get enough of this.

Sad. I used to not understand how things like Christmas and weddings got people down, but now, a bit older and wiser, I’m starting to understand.

However, I’ve never been to a bad wedding. Maybe I’m just lucky. They’re always fun! Maybe I’m just #blessed with good friends with good vibes. ;P

One golden rule that everyone should follow is: don’t financially stress your guests. That should be obvious, but apparently it isn’t.

I grew up pretty sheltered. I didn’t see homeless people on a day-to-day basis in the small, upper middle class town where I grew up. Then I spent most of my early 20s in the Bay Area. Homelessness was a thing, but nowhere near as bad as it is now. What I’ve been seeing more recently in Oakland and SF looks like some of the toughest slums I’ve ever seen, in places like India, South Africa, Brazil, and China.

This is the issue that, I think, defines Silicon Valley. Only in a society that can live like this would people produce the kind of technology that’s currently being produced. We need to ramp up on compassion, humanity, community.

The worst part is how everyone acts like this is all so hopeless. It’s not! We can do so much better. We just need a slight shift in mindset. These are *profoundly* solvable problems.

Excellent article. In some ways, our past is still our present.

Stuff like this is tough to read:
>> The U.S. government, knowing that it couldn’t vanquish the powerful tribes of the northern plains, instead signed treaties with them. But it was also playing a waiting game. Buffalo, once plentiful, were being overhunted by white settlers, and their numbers were declining. Major General Philip Sheridan, a Civil War veteran tasked with driving Plains tribes onto reservations, cheered their extermination, writing that the best strategy for dealing with the tribes was to “make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them.” (An Army colonel was more succinct: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”)

Reading this reminded me of reading Roberto Bolano's 2666, which I read within the last year or two. It's a huge book and a giant chunk of it involves never-ending descriptions of countless rapes (murder, and mutilation) of women in northern Mexico. It is the kind of book that changes the relationship between reader and world, for life.

This is a powerful, personal story. As a man, I don't really engage much with the #metoo movement, besides occasionally saying (IRL and online) "I support it," which amounts to nothing, and, in some ways, could even be negative. My voice - in general - takes up too much space, so I'm trying (hard) to get better at shutting up.

It occurred to me, as I read this article, that reading is a good (silent!) way to stay engaged. As I read this article - slowly, carefully, taking in all of the feelings - I felt like I was participating in the #metoo movement in a very productive way. Reading is listening. Knowledge is power. Empathy keeps us human. This is a story worth sharing. It's tragic and sad and dark and real AF.

Wonderful. I always try to be open to new friendships, but I'm also a bit hot/cold about hanging out with other people. For example, I spent most of this past spring completely alone, camping around the Great Lakes Region. Then I spent a big chunk of the summer crashing on couches of friends and friends of friends in the broader Kansas City area, meeting and hanging with new people on basically a daily basis. Lots more drinking, staying out late. I've been in Fairplay, CO for just a few days, but I already have over a dozen friend targets - this place is teeming with cool people. The person I'm doing ceramics with this afternoon already feels like my friend.

Just as there are a million different ways to live, there are a million different ways to approach friendships.

The author failed to note the importance of making connections with all different kinds of people - old/young, with different ideas about the world. It makes life more interesting, rather than just hanging out with a bunch of similar people.

Wow. Yes. I love the way he describes the difference between a trip and a ramble.

This is a writer I’m very eager to read.

Great, deep investigation!

It seems like there’s a simple dichotomy here: if don’t support the conditions these miners are in, you can’t support capitalism. I don’t support capitalism, but I’m also not *that* horrified by the conditions described in this piece. So many products, all around us, all day every day, can be traced back to some kind of harsh production conditions. I think lots of industries all around the world have non-zero death rates.

I have a few crystals that I do love, but I think I’m done with them. Only partially because of this article. I’ll probably gift them away. I’m into little knots of wood now.

Freedom means doing whatever you want, every day. It means acting on internal voices instead of external ones.

Dare I say: Go millennials! Let’s keep pushing the needle on this.

Wow. This quote is fantasy land, but at the very end the truth almost peeks through:

>> "So one of the social issues that I really care about is making sure that our products promote positive well-being. So we did a lot of research on well-being and what the research concluded was that there were basically two major uses of the internet. There’s a big distinction between when you’re connecting with people and interacting with people and when you’re just passively consuming content. When you’re just passively consuming content, if you’re just kind of going through YouTube recommendations or you’re browsing through a feed and you’re not interacting with people, it’s not that that’s negative, but it’s not associated with the same positive uplifts in well-being. And if you’re taking a lot of time doing that instead of connecting with people, then of course there’s an opportunity cost. So net it might be negative."

Whoa. This is excellent. The top half is stronger than the bottom half, but the whole thing is great. I’m always thinking/reading about education and education policy. It’s one of my favorite topics. Just a few days ago, a retired school administrator in Kansas reflected to me that, “it’s all cells and bells now.” So sad, so true.

The irony of all of this (and why I’m optimistic that it’s all going to come crashing down - including, hopefully, pretty much everything about higher education) is that to be born super wealthy — super expensive private schools; golden ticket on the golden elevator — is itself a curse that messes people up. Brains and hearts and souls can’t open up when everything is a stressful performance. We’ve already lost entire generations of creative potential.

We need a new Enlightenment. And let’s not look to tech/robots to make it happen.

Noo!!! Okay, well, five free per month is chill I guess. That's relatively standard. I guess this just means no more willy-nilly clicking Atlantic articles unless the plan is to really read.

>> “A few days after my mother’s arrest, a kind Czech gendarme brought us a message from her. It instructed me to come to the barricade near the prison at two o’clock in the afternoon and chat with the Jewish Ghettowachmann—a ghetto policeman—standing guard there. Using a chain that hung from the narrow window at the top of her cell, she planned to hoist herself up and try to catch a glimpse of me. I went to the barricade every afternoon; it was very cold, and I stood there talking with the guard, never knowing whether my mother could see me. I later learned that she could see me, and that it gave her a tremendous boost.”

Wow. Something to meditate on:

>> The asteroid blasted a cavity between 25 and 30 miles deep in the first seconds of impact, creating a boiling cauldron of molten rocks and super-heated steam, according to the scientists’ interpretation of the rock. Rebounding from the hammer blow, a plume of molten rock splashed up into a peak higher than Mount Everest.

Cloudy Saturday morning in Kansas City, I’m rereading some blog posts that I wrote a few months ago. It’s DEFINITELY time to start blogging again!

This trip across the country is definitely changing me, again and again.

Had no clue how huge the fandom community is. Awesome. Inspiring.

Such a not-disturbing Ted Cruz is EXTREMELY disturbing.

I’m pretty sure Bernie supports a free press and Trump does not, although this article seems to want me think otherwise.

#manifesto

#read

I absolutely loved reading this and I want everyone I know to read this.

I do wish the author spoke more about the *struggle* to read. It takes work, like training for a marathon, and it requires time, patience and *discipline.*

I’m definitely not an “avid” reader although I REALLY want to be. 50 books per year is absurd, amazing.

>> “Every society has some group of people—somewhere between a minuscule amount and half the adults—that read a lot in their leisure time,” says Wendy Griswold, a sociologist at Northwestern University who studies reading. Griswold refers to this group as “the reading class,” and—adding up the NEA’s “frequents” and “avids,” and considering rates of serious reading in other similarly wealthy countries—reckons that about 20 percent of adults belong to the U.S.’s reading class. She said that a larger proportion of the American population qualified as big readers between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries—an era of reading that was made possible by advances in printing technology and then, eventually, snuffed out by television.

(I just finished Into The Magic Shop by James Doty. That’s a 10, too.)

So many interesting turns in this story. Ronan Farrow gives so many gifts that just keep giving.

The big picture here (about funding higher education) is more interesting to me than the moral failings of the people involved (Ito and Lessig).

I will say, though, that Lessig's main argument about anonymity being a good thing sounds like absolute bullshit the more I think about it. I usually like what he has to say, but this is nonsense.

Loved the top. Liked the bottom.

In just 25 years, we have "cut the number of wild animals on earth by something close to half."

Humans are funny - the way we think we're larger than life. This next century is going to be nutso.

Ha! I'm 32 and still the last line resonates with me. :)

Let's do this!

Excellent. There’s one particular paragraph that really blows everything up. It’s the one that ends with: “They’re busy producing 80 percent of the world’s farmed oysters.” Wow. Truth bomb.

Nothing is real! Everything is hype!

On reading.

>> Instead, reading's payoff often comes after some effort and maybe even a little boredom in the beginning. But the slower-paced pleasure comes with more satisfaction in the end.

I don’t agree with Cairo. Teaching “digital reading” is absurd. Thank god for the last paragraph.

Oh my god. UNREAL.