same language = same story @wordsinbooks - Tumblr Blog

I don’t particularly care to have my awareness raised; I’d rather view art that tears open my consciousness, that opens portals into the mysterious. I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing, or otherwise when its beauty or strangeness transcends its subject. Stop making so much sense. Art should do more than communicate: it should move us; it should make us weep; it should bring us to our knees. It is, along with music, the purest expression of the human spirit.

The Painted Protest, by Dean Kissick

“You see a lot of statistics about the 65 percent of caregivers who make some change at work, or the $300,000 in total lost wages and benefits for women, or people who take time off or switch to a less demanding job or quit altogether,” O’Donnell said. “But there’s also a lot of just hanging on. Women know how dangerous it is to leave the workforce, and we know it’s not something that many of us can afford. The average family caregiver is a woman in her late 40s and early 50s. If that woman takes her foot off the gas pedal in her career, does she ever get back in?” The care itself is exhausting, O’Donnell said, but the additional anguish over what the care has taken from your life and from your future? That’s debilitating.

Anne Helen Petersen, Elder care is expensive and exhausting for millions of American families - Vox

Is he a political radical, or just a rich boy with daddy issues?

I asked if he missed his family. He said, “There is always sentimentality regarding one’s parents.”

One superstorm could send walls of water sweeping through populated areas. There’s not much time to act.

Blackbird Spyplane: It’s amazing that you still have these. Every object we love has a piece of us in them, and when we lose something we love, I think there’s a part of us that goes away, too. Stuffed animals are a really potent example of that. Porches: “It feels important to have a reference point, to help yourself remember that your life is longer than yesterday or the next day. It makes me feel less claustrophobic to have these little marks of how long my life has been, and where I’ve been, and how I’ve changed.

Cut holes in yr clothes! - Blackbird Spyplane

There’s also a less successful version of the phenomenon in humans, known as the “first-night effect,” which occurs when the left hemisphere of our brains refuses to fully rest when we’re sleeping in a new, uncertain environment for the first time, causing us to wake up tired.

Did Covid Change How We Dream? - The New York Times

it can seem that energy, more than talent or luck, results in extraordinary outcomes.

Energy, and How to Get It, Nick Paumgarten (The New Yorker )

To mentor does not mean showing another woman how to navigate your path. It’s highlighting what was broken about the path you had to navigate, and then using your accumulated power to try and make sure that others don’t have to replicate the suffering.

The Subtle Look and Overwhelming Feel of Today's Misogyny - by Anne Helen Petersen - Culture Study

Very often style or coolness, particularly white style, is about rejecting beauty norms and wearing things that are insistently ugly to show that you are beautiful enough or thin enough to get away with that.

Kristen Richardson, The Problems Solved by Debutantes - by Anne Helen Petersen - Culture Study

#kristen richardson #anne helen petersen #culture study #debutantes

“it matters, how we assemble things, how we put things together. Our archives are assembled out of encounters, taking form as a memory trace of where we have been.”

Sara Ahmed, “The Promise of Happiness”

#sara ahmed #the promise of happiness

Not sex but romance should excite the swimmer, as Miss Kellermann implied. The deeps are infinitely more seductive than a topless beach, where the once excited gentlemen today pick their way indifferently among scrawny brown thighs

Iris Murdoch, Taking the Plunge (The New York Review of Books)

#iris murdoch #the ny review of books

The waters of death have gone over my head, as the Bible says. Swimming, like dying, seems to solve all problems: and you remain alive.

Iris Murdoch, Taking the Plunge (The New York Review of Books)

#iris murdoch #taking the plunge #nyreview of books

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say "bless you" when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. "Don't die," we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don't want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, "Here, have my seat," "Go ahead—you first," "I like your hat."

Small Kindness, Danusha Laméris, (Girls Night In Issue #161: staying home for each other 💗)

#poem #email #danusha lameris

These roles can be thankless on a normal day—the Los Angeles Times once described customer-service agents as a “punching bag for airline passengers”—but when problems get complicated enough to push people away from companies’ websites or apps and onto the phone, things get really bad for those answering calls. “That customer is at a point where they’re pretty angry,” says Tiffany Apczynski, a vice president at Zendesk, which makes customer-service software. “They tried the other tools that don’t require them to pick up the phone, and this time they have to, so the problem has gotten really intense. It takes a toll on agents.” Research has consistently shown that the emotional labor often performed by people in customer-service jobs—the smiling through rudeness, the calming of nerves, the constant control of one’s own emotions—has what one widely cited study described as “uniformly negative effects on workers.” It has also been linked to an array of physical and mental-health problems, including depression and high blood pressure.

Amanda Mull, Customer-Service Workers Are In Charge of an Epidemic (The Atlantic)

#the atlantic #covid

Disasters, whether they’re mysterious illnesses, extreme weather, or the result of man’s cruelty, tend to illuminate the cracks in societies. Amid the panic shopping and refund seeking, the coronavirus has already started to illuminate a particular weakness of the U.S. in this crisis: Surviving a disaster in America is something people are expected to work out on a personal basis, with the employees in their local big-box store or the representative on the other end of the phone, whose time and energy is largely taken for granted until everyone needs it at once.

Amanda Mull, Customer-Service Workers Are In Charge of an Epidemic (The Atlantic)

#the atlantic #covid

I always knew that when the end came, New Yorkers would watch it from a bar. But this was not the end any of us had imagined. Crowding together, not just a survival skill but an engine of the city in normal times, was the most dangerous thing of all.

Pete Wells, A Frantic Few Days for Restaurants Is Only the Beginning (The New York Times)

#pete wells #nyt #coronavirus

They look at everything you have on, And then smile tolerantly

Dorothy Parker, Our Office: A Hate Song (Vanity Fair)

#dorothy parker #vanity fair #poem

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same language = same story