jesse friedman

There's something that gets lost between a screen and your eye.

Not the idea — the ideas make it through fine — but something else. The weight of it. The sense that someone actually made something.

So I'm trying something different.

I write essays. Long ones, about cities and open source and the way technology changes how we move through the world. And if you go to jesse.blog/mail, you can subscribe and add your mailing address — and I'll send them to you. On paper. With a stamp.

You can read it on your porch. Fold it up. Spill coffee on it.

And if something moves you — a thought, a pushback, a story of your own — you can write me back. And I'll write back.

It's slower. That's sort of the point.

༺ Recommend ༻ Continue reading Churchill by Paul Johnson

༺ Recommend ༻ Continue reading 4 Hour Work-week by Tim Ferriss

Banana

Times Square has an unnatural resonance, one you cannot become attuned to.

It hums from electrified currents pumped into sky-high advertisements.

It buzzes from worker bees shuffling across cement pathways.

It aches as black and yellow caravans ebb and flow through its arteries.

But there is nothing natural here.

Nothing grows here. It is a completely artificial hive colonized by none whom belong to it.

You’re surrounded on all sides by marvels of human creation. While bees race to capture portraits of themselves amongst showcases of capitalistic modernity. Characters in a play happily portray their own disconnect.

Across Broadway, coming towards me is a young man and his friends. The small tattoos his face and his short curly hair are an obvious display of confidence in it’s defiance to cultural norms. In his hand, a banana.

He peels the banana, extracts the fruit and drops the peel to the ground. He laughs, though not about the banana. It’s a natural laughter, a display of the connection he has to his friends.

I look down at the banana peel. It grew out of the earth, traveled across the globe, and was carried to this spot to adopt its new station as a natural element in an unnatural world.

Litter.

I make eye contact with the young man. He senses my response and prepares for a delivery of defiance.

“Have you never seen a cartoon?” I said.

The tension in his hands fade. His jaw unlocks. He smiles. I subverted his expectations, using humor to explain the dangers of a banana peel on a busy walkway.

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