The dream of Pilate’s wife according to DLS. This is a pretty long one.
Paying for Apple Music or Adobe Acrobat is relatively harmless, but an economic model that is progressively turning more and more things into subscriptions — and renting is certainly a form of subscription — is creating conditions that are antithetical to human life freed for public life…. What was once the animal laborans is today homo subscribens, man the subscriber. The possibility of a 50-year mortgage would only confirm this reversion back to the life process, ensuring that people today are no freer than laborers bound by endless necessity.
I'm blessed to have many friends who write beautifully, and I especially love it when I hear their voices in the written words. This whole essay by Sara Hendren is like that:
You think Hyde’s telling you to give your gifts, like “giving back,” I say. But it’s weirder than that. Gifts precede you, mark your life. They invite you to imitate the pattern. This truth is hard for all of us to hear.
And this from Charles Marsh on “making anxiety great again”: “Receive anxiety as an opportunity…. Accept anxiety as an awakening…. Acknowledge anxiety’s capacity to instruct.”
Much wisdom in these two reflections.
That may be the worst “win” in the history of the Arsenal.
So thorough was [Frank] Gehry’s reorientation of architecture as an art form rather than an adjunct of engineering that it’s hard to recall how the high end of his profession was perceived before him, when technocrats in big architectural firms seemed indistinguishable from any other business executives. In the mid-1970s, as he approached fifty, Gehry resolved to throw over his profitable relationship with one of the most enlightened developers of the day—James Rouse, best known for his humanely planned, racially integrated new town of Columbia, Maryland. There Gehry designed several structures, including the Rouse Company Headquarters of 1969–1974, followed by a number of other Rouse projects on both coasts, including his Pop-inflected Santa Monica Place shopping mall of 1972–1980. He then reinvented himself as an artist who used architecture as his medium, a move as risky as Andy Warhol’s decision a decade earlier to abandon his lucrative practice as a commercial illustrator and take up fine art.
Austin Kleon’s newsletter is one of the best things on the internet. Today’s edition is especially great.
me rolling up to campus
The great Gary Saul Morson on Solzhenitsyn:
Vera realizes that intellectuals profess beliefs that “had been implanted from outside.” In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn used this phrase to describe the moment when he realized that he did not really believe what he thought he believed. Recognizing his convictions were not his own but had been “implanted from outside,” he began the arduous process of rethinking. He asks his readers to understand that once one professes whatever one is supposed to, one has agreed in advance to literally anything. The result was the totalitarianism of the twentieth century, a horror that threatens to return unless people learn to resist the spell of approved opinion. In both The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel, the supreme value is individual conscience.