Snowy brain

Hello!

T and I spent the day in Montreal with family—a last minute decision, but a nice change of scenery (even if much of the scenery was obscured by blowing snow). It’s been a lovely weekend, spent happily with people I love very much. (Montreal friends, I’ll be sure to come for longer next time, and give you a heads-up!)

To the links!

• Anne Helen Petersen paints a compelling portrait of the “layoff brain”, a generational psyche borne of constant precarity. I’ve been thinking about this essay all week. (Including, for reasons the section on “Consultant Layoff Brain” and the excerpt about McKinsey. What a broken world.)
• A story of a week spent with Ursula K. Le Guin—on meeting our heroes (gods?), writing, and facing it all with good humour. May we all have something of Le Guin’s clever grace. (via Mita Williams)
• Vass Bednar’s most recent newsletter does some characteristically clever policy thinking with Canada’s anti-spam and (federal) privacy law, imagining versions of control over technology well beyond our current paltry offering. What I perhaps appreciated most, the imagining aside, was Bednar’s pointing out the potential already inherent in the legislation, missed due to lack of enforcement efforts.
• Tom Critchlow points out a web publishing gap: it’s relatively easy to get a webpage online; it’s relatively hard to get a small database online, particularly one that people can contribute to collaboratively. (via Simon Willison)
• The South Pole is a constant process of snow management, to the point where decades-old buildings, though still fully functional, are buried under many feet of snow.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas