On gems and fluff
I was recently chatting/commiserating with a friend regarding our media consumption habits, which for each of us involves more NYT homepage scrolling than we’d like. The trouble wasn’t where we were scrolling but rather that we were scrolling at all. I suspect this goes deeper than the lure of smartphones, the always-on internet, and the desire to be informed.
While I waste a lot of time snacking on content that serves almost no purpose (e.g., Pence opposes invoking 25th amendment), I also find my share of incredible writing—moving, thought-provoking stuff that I want to file away in my brain forever. I rarely find anything worth reading on news media homepages, and what’s good is often too long to read while killing time.
In a better world of content, it would be easier to avoid fluff and easier to find real gems. I’m trying to stop filling spare moments with filler content, and I thought I’d try sharing the best of what I’ve come across recently:
NYT: A Mother and Daughter at the End
“I could not get enough of watching them sleep — because, of course, a northern white rhino nap was never just a regular nap. Every time the girls closed their eyes, all the northern white rhino consciousness left on planet Earth temporarily blinked out. And when they woke up, it blinked back on again.”
The Atlantic: Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us
“And a nation that has begun to return to normal will have to decide whether to remember that normal led to this.”
Tim Harford: In praise of the humble products all around us
“[W]e are surrounded by products we barely understand, produced by people we never meet, often at a quality so high and a price so low — relative to our wages — that our ancestors would be staggered.”
Does monoculture still exist on the internet?
“If you want a vision of the future of culture, imagine an infinite playlist of lofi hip hop radio – beats to study/relax to, in all media — forever. Picture the ambient-music YouTube channel’s aesthetic applied to everything else: anodyne, blameless, meaningless, boring, designed only to occupy time. Form will outweigh content’s authorship, originality, or artistry. The future will be to the present as TikTok is to prestige television.”
What’s the best thing you’ve come across recently? I want to know :-)