"Either your workplace is a family or it’s not. It’s not, of course. The very concept of the workplace as family is a tool for exploitation. But if it’s not, where does that leave us in relation to each other? What does it mean to care about your colleagues, to love them?"

Mandy Brown on defeating binaries, and on oddkin. Resonated strongly.

Wonderful writing from Kate Wagner, on Primož Roglič, and cycling, and the arcs of careers, and change.

"… believing, Elbow says, is a separate muscle entirely, a willed and practiced capacity to assume some idea in a text, or some possible technical choice, or some inkling held before a group, is worth considering as if it were full of truth, for a set amount of time. It’s not just the “yes, and” approach that improv-style brainstorming is famous for. Believing is granting some interpretation of what’s at hand a provisional but deep sense of rightness. For a set amount of time. For that time—for the length of the believing game—your whole self is devoted to this idea, to see if the space and breathing room you give it helps you to see it in its full possibility."

Sara Hendren on the Beliving and Doubting games; reminds me a bit of critical reading, where – for the duration of an essay – you work to believe it as truth, and only outside the bounds of it do you then start to interrogate it.

"Here’s an important and (as far as I can yet tell) unaddressed question for Mare of Easttown criticism: when, exactly, did Mare Sheehan stop dying her hair blond?

This question may seem trivial compared to more pressing Mare of Easttown questions, such as “was that ending good?” and “is this copaganda?” However, don’t worry: all these are the same question."

Cracking writing about a cracking show, on the role of "femininity" in both the casting of drama and the plot of _Mare of Easttown_. The kind of essay that opens new doors without clsoing or criticising others.

"With static sites, we've come full circle, like exhausted poets who have travelled the world trying every form of poetry and realizing that the haiku is enough to see most of us through our tragedies." A line that particularly resonates in this lovely Craig Mod article on the solace of programming for yourself.

"As I have grown as a person and as a maker-of-things, that question has come back to me again and again. I have learned how and when to stop  talking and start doing. To other more-talker sorts of people, that can  look like a magic trick. I have better learned to recognize when someone is frustrated by communicating-in-words about a plan instead of performing the plan. These are learnable skills; and I have seen that there  are commensurate skills that have to be hard-won for doers.

Instead of an accusation or a challenge, it’s become a gentle reminder:  you’re more of a talker than a doer. Keep an eye on it."

Writing from Sam Bleckley on talking, making, thinking, and doing. Moving from one state to the other, and back again. This struck a chord.

February 1940. "Black cat in snow. Ross County, Ohio." Medium format acetate negative by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration.

“What we need as a nation, more than anything else I can think of, is a recommitment to basic competence, and, especially, a refusal to accept ideological justifications for plain old ineptitude. Too often Americans give a free pass to bunglers and bozos who belong to their tribe. We have for decades now operated under the assumption that our world will just function perfectly well on its own even if we cease to attend to it. It won’t.” And, also, in the UK.

I actually write READMEs a bit like Sam describes – onwards, never erased, first-person diary accounts of what I'm trying, where I'm typing it, and what happened. But the case for pen is a good one. (Also: I enjoy Sam's writing).

Paul Ford is writing again. It's a joy. And here, he explores Sting's _All This Tiime_, from back when multimedia CD-rom sets by artists were things we wanted to own (and back when David Bowie had an ISP, which I had forgotten).

It sounds _dreadful_

"It now makes absolute sense that this comes from a nation a non-trivial amount of which is below sea level and who’s storied history is in fact chock full of water engineering feats. It stands now to reason that this could only come from the Dutch. Or some kid from Nebraska who just loved water parks as a kid, ended up baked out of his mind on the streets of Amsterdam for nine years until he discovered his long lost passion and talent for making side scroller games. Chances are it was both." Jim is writing about games and it's a delight.

"While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire." Ted Chiang on what stories about change and revolution do (and what _actual_ change and revolution also do).