Category: essays

How To Write Insults

Karen

Hamilton Nolan’s newsletter this week is a masterclass in insults. Of course, it’s easy when the target is ICE “I’d rather destroy the lives of entire families than have the fellas make fun of me” agents, aka “twitchy, puffed up, goofy ass cops.”

Please, enjoy:

It can be difficult to laugh at riot cops. But we should all try. Because they’re so fucking ridiculous. Hey, nice huge helmet and body armor and fake ass gun and shield to oppose a bunch of skater kids waving around flags. You all are the most terrified group of human beings in the United States of America. You all are the types of people who open carry handguns to go to Buffalo Wild Wings. You all need to stop getting your news from idiots on idiot websites. You all need to read some fucking books and gain a minimal sense of perspective. You all need to embrace the crushing realization that for your whole lives you have been afraid and confused and have embraced a misguided set of macho enticements that have seduced you into believing that manhood depends on looking like some sort of cartoon action figure when in fact it is this look that reveals to the world the deep inadequacy that haunts you every day.

 

As he concludes, “Fuck off, losers.”

 

 

Wednesday Essay

Karen

This is from Mike Monteiro, a designer and writer and just all around smart guy. He’s been answering questions and this is in answer to, “How can we stay positive about the future these days?” His replies often have a lot of personal anecdote but they always work out as a metaphor–especially here.

… we couldn’t afford to heat the entire house. So during the winter, we heated what we could. And during those winter months, if you needed heat, you came to the living room …

Sometimes you cannot heat the whole house. The heat rises, it spirals. It escapes through every crack.

Sometimes you cannot be positive about the future.
But what if we redefined what we had to heat? What if we redefined the future to something we could actually manage. Because the future is too vague a term, and filled with too much uncertainty.

What if we could be positive about tomorrow?

[…] Spiraling into hopelessness helps no one. Giving an unhoused person $20 and a winter jacket that’s been sitting in the back of your closet might only help one person, but it also helps one person. When the systemic issues feel too big, we do what we can. When we cannot heat the whole house, we heat the core.

 

Hand Made

Karen

It’s the twelfth anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse today, the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history. It was also the 114th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire a few weeks ago, on March 25.

I’ve read a couple essays recently, one specifically about the legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster (All Our Clothing Is Haunted) and one more about the fact that most industrial sewing still can’t be automated (All Clothing Is “Handmade,” Even When You Can’t See It).

They’re both worth a read and they both bring up a fact I don’t think many people realize: Robots aren’t making clothes; humans are. As Haley Houseman says in “All Clothing Is ‘Handmade,'”

No matter what you are wearing, it was made by a skilled team of workers. Somebody gently joined the toe seam of your socks on a machine where a human hand must stretch each individual knit loop in a row across a series of long teeth as fine as a comb. Every single seam of your shirt and pants was pushed through a sharp sewing machine needle by a person. Fabric was carefully laid out in broad stacked sheets, and then someone bravely cut individual sizes of a garment’s pattern pieces like slices of a layer cake. The zippers, buttons, and other crucial fastenings that keep your clothes on your body were attached—and only made possible—by the supple dexterity of fingers, even this late into the industrialization of clothing production. Every single label was carefully sewn in. Finished garments were ironed, folded, and packaged by someone flexing sore wrists at the end of a long week.

Let’s Learn About Sharpshooters

Karen

I’ve had this article about sharpshooter Elizabeth “Plinky” Toepperwein saved for a while. No reason why I thought of it again! Just an interesting read on a thing a woman could do!

In the days before television or air-conditioning, hundreds of men in suits—and a few women, decked out in Victorian-era dresses and corsets—braved heat and cold to watch Plinky shoot shotgun shells off [her husband] Ad’s fingers and Ad hit a bull’s-eye while standing on his head. Crowds loved to see Plinky “peel” a potato, held by Ad, by chipping it away with bullets. […]

The Toepperweins’ advertisements often extended a special invitation to women, and they came in droves. Syndicated columns touted the healthful nature of outdoor trapshooting and proclaimed that, as Plinky wrote in 1917, “there is absolutely no reason why a woman should not shoot as well as a man.” Some women formed female trapshooting clubs, and tournaments added amateur women’s divisions. Annie Oakley, now in her fifties, joined the upswell by giving shooting clinics for women. When Oakley and Plinky met at one of them, in 1915, the older sharpshooter reportedly told the younger, “You’re the greatest shot I’ve ever seen.”

Essay: How To Think About Politics

Karen

The full title of today’s essay is “How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself,” which is…pretty apt these days. Hamilton Nolan lays out a case that, rather than treating a candidate as a hero, our job is to elect someone who can be pressured to do something right:

For the most part, it is wrong to think of elections as contests between “good” and “bad” candidates. With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests. Embrace the idea that we are simply pushing to elect the cowards, rather than the enemies. Why? Because the true work of political action is not to identify idealized superheroes to run for office. It is, instead, to create the conditions in the world that make it safe for the cowards to vote the right way.

That sounds kind of bleak! But it does make it possible to try to move forward.

You do not need to allow this glaring inconsistency in their approach to human rights to paralyze you, as you try to assess them. Nor do you need to deny that this contradiction exists. You just need to understand that they are cowards. The willingness to overlook certain morally indefensible things is something that most people accept, in their own hearts, when they go into electoral politics. … The cowards, unlike the enemies, can be moved into the right place. That is why we vote for them, when faced with the choice of the two.

Wednesday Essay: Future Medieval

Karen

This essay about the rise of the “Future Medieval” design trend probably explains why I’m seeing medieval games and beat machines popping up. It’s an interesting read, design-focused but accessible, with lots of examples (including the images I used here) and links to what the author is talking about. Check it out: Heralding the ancient and otherworldly charm of Future Medieval graphics

Future Medieval is a collective acknowledgment of the messiness of our current reality: an era marked by chaos, uncertainty and deep societal divides. It’s no surprise that the aesthetic language has shifted accordingly. The dense, esoteric forms of Future Medieval reflect a world grappling with upheaval, much like the original medieval period, a time of both the Black Plague and a stark divide between the haves and the have-nots (how different is a feudal landowner from a 21st-century tech billionaire, really?).

[…] When I asked illustrator Maddie Fischer why she’s so inspired by the Middle Ages, she agreed with this personal angle. “I think medieval art is a fascinating portal into an era of human history that sometimes seems so ancient and so distant, and yet is ultimately not that far in the past,” she said. “Life, alone, in that era is so wild to imagine — and how anyone managed to be an artist on top of it all blows my mind.”

F1 And Socialism

Karen

If you want to read an amazing take down/appreciation of Formula 1 racing, hurry to the Internet Archive and read cycling journalist Kate Wagner’s piece. It was published on Road and Track over the weekend, then was pulled down 24 hours later, and now even her writer bio is gone from the site.

Why? Oh, maybe because of the subhead: “If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.”

Or maybe because of the opening sentence: “Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us.”

Or maybe because of whole paragraphs like this:

Essays That Are Not About The Gym But Could Be

Karen

Heather Havrilesky shared a recent essay about her voice lessons and practicing a new thing even when it feels silly: “immersing yourself in borderline absurd practices, habits, and behaviors that don’t achieve much, that look laughable or foolish to others, that appear as a burden or an unnecessary hassle on the calendar…”

She goes on to talk about how we all talk about pursuing our passions but the reality of it is just a lot of unglamorous showing up, and wow did I feel that about going to the gym three times a week for five years and watching the weights move up glacially slowly:

Gaining mastery of a new skill is mostly drudgery. You sit down and do the hard work and you marvel at how bad you are, day after day. That’s the road, and there is no end point, there is just more road, endless road. Even though we talk about passion like it’s this heavenly blast of light and sound that drives you forward to greatness, real, genuine passion often feels more like some Cormac McCarthy novel where things go from bad to worse and you never arrive anywhere at all. But somehow (also like a Cormac McCarthy novel!) the bleak trees, the pavement, the bitter cold wind, all of these things are weighty, lustrous. You are almost dead of course, always almost dead, but somehow more alive than ever.

Delighting In Things

Karen

This Heather Havrilesky essay came through my inbox about the same time I started the current book/box hobby, and this definition of “dilettante” in it floored me:

“Did you know the word dilettante comes from the verb ‘to delight’?” my friend asked. “As in, to delight in many things at once.”

“Wow, really?”

“Yeah! People get so hung up on mastery, when all that really matters is delight.”

“People get so hung up on mastery, when all that really matters is delight.” You don’t have to be good at your hobbies. You don’t need to gain all the knowledge on every subject. Just do them and be delighted.

(The rest of the essay is pretty great, too–less about hobbies than about staying open to delight, which pretty much translates to noticing and showing up. Yes.)

 

Wednesday Essay

Karen

This was Heather Havrilesky’s newsletter for Ask Polly this week, and there was so much that I recognized in it: the conflicting goals among family, the effort it takes, the shame and regret always under the surface. I had a hard time pulling my favorite quote so just go read it:  Why It’s the Hardest to Show Up For the People You Love the Most.

And ironically, the more someone matters to you, the more difficult it can be to stay close to them. Your shame and guilt and regret are activated by how much you care. Your differences feel more painful and aggravating than they would otherwise. Your flaws feel more embarrassing. Your sadness feels more real, more palpable, more like a personal failure.

Merely recognizing all of these difficulties is enough. Most people feel guilty and confused instead. And many people distance themselves from the people they love the most, just to avoid these unpleasant emotions.

Don’t protect yourself from the most important people in your life. Show up in spite of everything. This could be the last time. Notice the heaviness in your bones. Notice the afternoon sun on the grass. Notice the heavy sighs, the darting eyes, the efforts to be understood. Notice the dark clouds in the south at dusk, the dirty plates, the nervous laughter. Let it all in.