seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Portugal
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from Malaysia
seen from Maldives
seen from Portugal
seen from United States
seen from Taiwan
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from South Korea
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Venezuela
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from Iraq
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Czechia
I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending, no less than creating. — Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Complicate the narrative. Don't boil down history, and historical figures, to saints and sinners. Be open to being wrong. Regularly revisit all the things you think are so obviously true you take them for granted.
Helen Lewis on Twitter
To find truly interesting ideas, step away from the algorithmic feeds of Big Tech
A real danger lurks in the sincere attempt to carry out the teachings of Jesus in a literal manner—namely, the danger of absorbing his way of living in excess of the law back into the law. The radical way of Jesus provides a more difficult challenge than that which is demanded by the law. For while the law gives us a bottom-line way to live, the way of love calls us beyond the law. Love pushes us beyond duty, rather than stopping there, and acts when we don’t know for sure what the ethical thing to do is. If the ethical question is 'What must be done?' love adds 'I will do more.' If our ethical compass is not able to give us a clear direction to travel, love sets out anyway. The way of love provides a way when ethical demands have their say or do not know what to say. Is this not what Jesus was calling us to do? To live beyond the law, so as to fulfill it?
Peter Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic (Chapter 8: The Third Mile)
I was enthralled by the severity of our winter, in its astonishing powers of change. I wanted it never to end. Try as I might, I can’t product the adult hardness towards a snowfall, full of resentment at the inconvenience. I love the inconvenience the same way that I sneakingly love a bad cold: irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside your normal habits. I love the visual transformation it brings about, that recoloring of the world into sparkling white, the way that the rules change so that everybody says hello as they pass. I love what it does to the light, the purpleish clouds that bloom before it descends, and the way it announces itself from behind your curtains in the morning, glowing a diffuse whiteness that can only mean snow.
Katherine May
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
We speak with author and educator Bill Burnett about how adopting a designer’s mindset can help you through your current challenges if you’re searching for work, how grit and perseverance map to happiness at work, and how setting aside time for reflection can help you understand what changes you need to make to find a better job (which may even be in your current company).
We’re stealing from the best; we’re stealing from Angela Duckworth and her model of grit. Grit predicts success more than IQ, more than almost anything. Just perseverance working hard at something to master it with the hope that you’ll get better. Grit predicts who’s gonna pass the worst physical fitness test in the military academies, grit predicts who’s going to be the best salesperson, grit predicts a whole bunch of things. And grit can be developed.
If I have one gentle critique of the current generation, and really of the last two or three generations, I think because of the internet, I think because of the way things change so quickly, a lot of my students have become addicted to novelty over mastery. [describes former student flitting from job to job and asking for his advice and saying “The jobs just aren’t interesting.”] The common pattern here as you might notice, young person, is you! You get bored any time the job isn’t novel. And that’s fine, but what you’re giving up is the ability to develop mastery. And this is what Duckworth is talking about. The real satisfaction comes from getting gritty, from getting down and dirty. And yeah, I launched that one product but eh if you really looked at it it was a little lumpy, and there were some mistakes made. I could get better. And once I mastered launching that one product, what if I built a product launch system that was bullet-proof for the whole company? And if I did that, maybe I could then build something so that everyone in the company would have a path to follow to get to a good outcome. So you don’t get to those deeper levels of satisfaction if you say “I’m going to do everything once,” you know, because it’s fun to be novel. …
At the end of the day, your job experience is the five or six people you work with, and how you show up. And if you show up willing to work hard, get the hard stuff done, and you show up with an open mindset and designer’s curiosity, you can make any job interesting at least for a period of time. …
That’s why we’re the anti-passion guys. Everybody says “Oh, what’s my passion? I wish I knew what my passion was.” Well the research says that only 20% of people have any identifiable single passion (that’s Bill Damon’s work over at the Center for the Study of Adolescence at Stanford) so 8/10 people can’t tell you their passion … And the evidence shows that passions evolve after you’ve worked really hard at something and you realize “Hey not only am I good at this but I’m making a contribution; I think this is my thing.” But you can’t get there if you keep quitting every time you get bored.
So I’m not saying stay in a crummy job or do things that aren’t challenging, but Dave and I would reframe the passion question: passion’s not the end point or the destination (“I’ve found it; now I’m here; I’m done”) even a passion will burn itself out over time. What you want to learn to do is to live with curiosity and your ant to live passionately. It’s not an endpoint; it’s a way of being. —Bill Burnett, Author and educator, Stanford University via the Design Better podcast
(via How I found solace during the summer of Covid-19 - Vox)
This whole piece is really beautiful.
This is all gold, but start around 39:20 if you have a little less time, because that’s where he starts talking about “vapor management,” one of my favorite concepts. And why pain and tragedy are actually what give joy its purpose and punch.
