Living in the Anthropocene as is means that the growth of human well-being is burdened with high cost to the natural environment.
In the same manner, human suffering gives nature an opportunity for recovery.
The coronavirus outbreak reminds us of this balancing act.
Residents of Beijing report hearing the birds better:
Reduced human activity due to the #coronavirus means we can hear the birds better! One of the most active in my compound right now is the Light-vented Bulbul (白头鹎, Bái tóu bēi). A vernacular name is 白头公, bái-tóu gōng, literally translated as 'white-headed old-man'. pic.twitter.com/BWMeAqHmMW
I use Unsplash on a weekly basis. It's one of the most popular stock photography repositories, and I appreciate the large selection, as well as vibrant and modern style of the photographs I find there.
Unsplash uses AI to tag and describe images. I encountered a number of interesting AI-sourced interpretations of well-known historical photographs. They made me chuckle.
In reality: Richard Nixon visiting quarantined Apolo 11 astronauts.
In reality: Graffiti painting on the Berlin wall titled "My God, Help Me Survive This Deadly Love", portrays the socialist fraternal kissbetween Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker.
In reality: Dwight D. Eisenhower, displaying Atoms for Peace post stamps, around 1955.
In reality: Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, visits Los Alamos in 1967.
The nature can teach us the virtues of real love, which begins with humility and patience.
It certainly has taught me. Wandering through the woods, experiencing vast spaces, free of human interference and mess. The most magnificent, or the most cruel (!), of its displays instils a sense of modesty: makes me feel insignificant in the abyss of the history of life and all its forms.
Just look at us—merely a star
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives...on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."#OTD 30 yrs ago @NASAVoyager took this picture pic.twitter.com/ylLzig2txS
— Stephanie Hamilton, PhD 🌌☄️🔭 is at #AAASmtg (@SpaceSciSteph) February 14, 2020
My favourite verse in the Bible, Corinthians 13:4, talks about love; it was always one of the rare parts of the Bible that made sense to me. It takes me to a place so far from busy streets, ugly politics, and nonsensical conflicts. It takes me to a pathless forest, the loudest creek, the chirpiest bird nests, and a roaring lion field. Replace love with nature and you get the essence of being.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away.
Listening to one of my favorite podcasts, On Being, by the brilliant Krista Tippett; she is in conversation with poets Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson. They go into how storytelling and the power of story gets trivialized, especially with the booming podcast industry. Krista read a piece of Ó Tuama's writing which resonated deeply within me; I feel it as a call to all of us, especially those who write, to serve the recovery of our world. We need imagination to see and accept being together where we are now.
These are the kinds of things we need for the tired spaces of our world. This is the way we need to move forward in a world that is so interested in being comforted by the damp blanket of bad stories. We need stories of belonging that move us towards each other, not from each other; ways of being human that open up the possibilities of being alive together; ways of navigating our differences that deepen our curiosity, that deepen our friendship, that deepen our capacity to disagree, that deepen the argument of being alive. This is what we need, this is what will save us, this is the work of peace. This is the work of imagination.
The episode is available here https://onbeing.org/programs/padraig-o-tuama-and-marilyn-nelson-a-new-imagination-of-prayer/
I first noticed this in myself, and later read about it as a Millennial thing.
Apparently, Millennials hate phone calls.
I feel a nervous jab in my stomach whenever I have to answer a call.
I remember the time before the internet and smartphones; I remember the time without a phone in my pocket. I remember having to call my friend's house and show good etiquette in how I correspond with her parents.
But my generation also got heavily immersed in personal technology and appreciate being connected to our friends and family. Texts are a big part of it. We grew up being used to responding to texts at our own time. The immediacy of a phone call requires that we respond at someone else's clock.
Millennial entitlement or healthier space/time boundaries?
My friend Archie and I worked for some time on an article about how we experience the peripheries we're from. Several of our conversations, brainstorming, questioning and exploring, resulted in this piece:
American culture, in particular, influenced us growing up. We’d soak up undubbed cartoons such as Transformers, Saber Rider, the American family TV drama 7th Heaven—all were aired on Saturday mornings. Watching Rambo, Terminator, or whatever Van Damme movies before bedtime, and playing Mortal Kombat in between. The Sims taught us what American houses looked like, why some people had pools and others didn’t; it taught us that in American capitalism there actually were shortcuts: if you were lucky enough to have a special code, you could add dollars to your account without doing any work.
and
Sometime in the late ’90s, early 2000s, stores with cheap goods from China started popping up in all major cities and towns across the country. The first thing you’d notice as you walked into one of these stores was the strong smell of plastics; then you noticed the variety of goods. Chinese stores have everything, as we would say: “from a needle to a locomotive.” Kitchenware, clothing, cosmetics, appliances, fake flowers, suitcases, toys. Old Yugoslavs frown upon the tawdry merchandise, remembering the high quality of locally-made items in the heyday. But they still shop Chinese. In this impoverished market, low-quality, potentially cancerous products, shipped from across the globe with a high carbon footprint, are a rare offering of normalcy for shallow pockets.
and
The prism of the generational gap reveals another layer of how our periphery is shaping up with China’s digital lead: on the one hand, one has to acknowledge the parents who understand the analog indications of influence, such as the railroads and highways; and on the other, their kids who understand memes and emerging social networks—a universal language no matter where you are in the world.
finally concluding that
Some changes may seem to be taking us backwards. Others actually move us forward. At the end of the day, one thing is certain—we’re stumbling onward unguided by our own desires and goals, but by the force of external power shifts. Add technology into the mix, and you get a fertile ground for the rise of dictatorial regimes, strong divisions amidst bulging filter bubbles, and a demise of truth as a virtue. For this reason, the most transformative thing we, as citizens of a periphery, can do is to educate ourselves and the people around us about how our periphery is changing, why, and whether it is in line with what we want. Well, is it?
I started learning English when I was five- or six-years-old. Some twenty-five years ago.
There were many things that made no sense to me in English. I didn't understand why verbs related to he, she, it required an s in the end. Articles made no sense, and I still struggle to use them fluently. I understand the rules, but the instincts take longer to form.
Looking back, I see a number of points when my English considerably improved.
Learning well enough to read full books in English took years, but once I got there, my writing, speaking and understanding improved, too.
The next big jump was living and studying in the US for a year. Not only did I build confidence in speaking with native speakers, but improving my academic writing and presenting added another layer to my ability to navigate English. I learnt a slang, abbreviations, and all the shortcuts in communication you'd never learn in English classes.
Over the past few years, I've used English every day in my work. I've built upon my writing style, having published a number of articles in the language. People who edited my writing have offered invaluable insight and taught me where my writing feels cumbersome and unclear. Editing other people's writing has also been helpful: as a reader and editor, I now feel the hiccups, and have enough knowledge of the language to offer an alternative.
I believe that this goes for learning any new language. Surround yourself with it: if you can't be in the country where the language is spoken, watch movies, listen to music or YouTube videos in that language. When you can, read in the language and take your time translating word by word. If you have a chance, make friends with native speakers, and ask them for help.
In the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. election, a group of cognitive scientists and linguists conducted an experiment looking into how gender bias affects the use of language. In particular, they wanted to find out whether holding a belief that a female candidate will win, affects how people think of the word president. The results show that even those who believed Hillary Clinton would take over as the Commander in Chief, stumbled when reading about the president as a she. It literally takes people more time to process what they read if the president is presented as a woman.
In a recent interview, politician and public servant, Stacey Abrams, spoke about her gubernatorial campaign in Georgia: a race which made her a prominent figure among Democrats. Not only is Stacey a woman politician aiming ambitiously for the highest jobs, but she's an African-American woman politician. In this interview, she thoughtfully combs through the questions of why different groups of voters perceive her as (non)electable:
When I reached out [they said]: "You're qualified, but you're a Black woman." As if they gave me some kind of fatal diagnosis. [...] What I found was that it was less about me; it was more about how people perceived that combination of what I am—the electability. [...] People position themselves through the worst lens they can imagine. And sometimes it's because they want to look out for you, but sometimes it's because they want to justify their own discomfort.
So much of what growing as a woman in any male-dominated profession is about is stretching your own imagination to recognize that you can be in that role that no other person similar to you has occupied before.
And the second part is to recognize that you deserve it. Stacey puts this wonderfully in the interview as she discusses self-doubt:
We have to be intentional about it. [I]t takes practice to be able to shed thousands of years of indoctrination about our value.
Language becomes a crucial tool in stretching the imagination of the public. How we communicate about who does what job is crucial to creating new opportunities. The same group of researchers who looked into language and bias in the U.S., did research among British voters in 2017. They found that respondents were more likely to use "she" than "he" when talking about the next Prime Minister. At the time Theresa May was expected to win, and voters had already internalized the idea of a female political leader through the UK's first female PM, Margaret Thatcher.
I love the ending of the interview with Stacey when she proudly says that, yes, she believes that she will be elected as the first female African-American President of the U.S. in the next twenty years. There's power in her words, and you can see that she lives that belief every day.
The comment section is unfortunately filled with hateful language, but one comment stuck with me. It warns that electing a female African-American President would be a risk similar to electing Obama which strengthened the right and increased tensions along racial and economic lines. Fears of this kind don't recognize that the deeply ingrained origins of tensions predate the Obama era (thanks, Reagan). Fears of this kind also don't recognize that twenty years is a long time and that things can change. The idea of Bernie as President wasn't possible twenty years ago. Stretch your mind.
This reminds me of one memory from my childhood when I was about five years old. I used to tell my friends at the kindergarten that my mom was the President of our country. (It was Milošević irl). My mom worked at a big bank building with a guard at the door and fancy marble floors, and that for me meant power. And who could be more powerful than a president?
Imagination matters. Stories we tell ourselves and others matter. I believe that Stacey, indeed, will get where she is headed.
This angry ramble came into being a year and one month ago. As I procrastinated whether to publish anything, I forgot about this draft until now. The beauty of not publishing your writing in a reactive manner is that it can teach you what you really stand for. Are you still comfortable publishing what your yesterday's self wrote? Then, you either didn't learn much over time, or you hold your beliefs firmly. I want to believe that this quick post comes out a year later as a result of the latter.
In her NYT article addressing Apple's revisited earnings, Kara Swisher writes: This is a big issue not only for Apple but also for all of tech. There is not a major trend that you can grab onto right now that will carry everyone forward. The last cool set of companies — Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest and, yes, Tinder — were created many years ago, and I cannot think of another group that is even close to as promising.
[...]
Where is that next spark that will light us all up?
Wait, did Uber, Airbnb, Tinder and Pinterest light us ALL up?
Sure, these companies are cool; sure, they created accumulatively trillions-worth of financial value; and sure they've delivered value to their customers by changing the ways urbanites approach transport, dating, travel and inspiration... But if the future of the technology industry and "us" (a vague and indecisive way of addressing a collective) depends on the next set of companies extracting value by creating convenience by a button - we're screwed.
The spark that we need business leaders to respond to is the quick sand we're in: extractive capitalism is fostering climate breakdown, inequality and a worrisome decline of democracy globally. Perpetuating the convenience lifestyle which has helped get us here won't fix things. Thinking of the world as an aggregations of isolated worlds won't help us fix things.
Does the world need this now? Answering this honestly should be the guiding light for everyone starting a startup today. That's where the spark is.
Comment of 2020: A year later, I think that I better understand what Kara wanted to say. However, I still believe that a new Apple product won't make the world a better place—they already got us there, and are now only adding to the wasteland (think AirPods) on the plateau of giantism. It's the generations of people who worked for Apple, who cut their teeth at Uber and other high-growth startups who have a chance to transfer their skills into societally-beneficial projects. One of my favorite examples of this kind of skill transfer is Jack Kelly, previously a research engineer at DeepMind, who co-founded Open Climate Fix in 2019 to apply machine learning to tackling climate change.
