Me, often: see a nice-looking website, find the font attractive, look it up with Fontanello, learn it’s… Georgia.
The United States has a poverty problem.…
Most Americans — liberals and conservatives alike — now believe people are poor because “they have faced more obstacles in life,” not because of a moral failing. Long overdue, however, is a reckoning with the fact that many of us help to create and uphold those obstacles through the collective moral failing of enriching ourselves by impoverishing others. Poverty isn’t just a failure of public policy. It’s a failure of public virtue.
To break this cycle, we must commit to becoming poverty abolitionists.
— Matthew Desmond, “America Is in a Disgraced Class of Its Own,” The New York Times
[W]riting [a book] is an excruciating process full of failure. But when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue.
All Hail Dead Week, the Best Week of the Year:
These days at the end of the year offer a kind of grace, a time when simply existing is enough, outside the records of success and failure.
— Helena Fitzgerald in The Atlantic (via Austin Kleon)
Abby the dog was missing for two months, then rescued from Missouri cave —The Washington Post
Sometimes the news is good.
Accented characters in macOS
Today I learned…
macOS has a wonderful input mechanism where you press and hold a key on your keyboard to display the accent menu. It’s easy to internalize: long press “a” if you want to input “á”.
from Álvaro Ramírez. I knew iOS could do this, but I never thought to try it on a Mac.
In fact, humans are mostly distinct individuals thinking terrifying things.
—Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files #197
“[Writing is] networking for introverts.”
— Derek Sivers (via CJ Chilvers)
Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do, is to pay attention.
— Barry Lopez, quoted in “Barry Lopez Urged Us to Pay Attention to a Burning World” by Ben Ehrenreich in The New York Times