Shovelling the snowbanks

Whew!

• This morning, I pre-shovelled the driveway as the storm started to intensify, listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer in conversation with Krista Tippett—I started by shovelling the yard, evening out the piles to make room for more snow.
• After getting partway through an article on rest, I went to the couch to write this, only for Arthur to jump on me and me to drift into a long nap.
• Now Pema’s in my lap and there’s even more snow on the ground—clearing that will be a job for later.
• All this caps off a weekend (and week) full of lovely time with friends and family—thanks to everyone who helped make it a special one, but especially, of course, to T.

Oooookay, some links!

• Erin Kissane on obstruction and protection in troubled times. With this great line: “It’s very hard to think or act when you can’t tell if you’re about to lose your job, have your research killed off, have your healthcare terminated, witness unstoppable crimes, or just experience extended and apparently unescapable moral injury.”
• Miriam Eric Suzanne on the myths of tech and the (enduring) promise of the web. (This link is, incidentally, quoted in the next link!)
• Jeremy Keith tracks a conversation across the blogosphere about large language models and the ethics of using present-day “AI”. (I +1 the observation that it was delightful to track this discussion through a simple reverse chronological feed reader!)
• Michael Karlin with a call for the public service to seize the opportunity of a crisis and prepare for all that could come next.
• Sam Burton’s research report, How can civic tech help improve government service delivery? offers some lessons that those following Michael’s call could heed. (I goofed in not sharing this a few weeks back, but I was very glad to see this come out—huge props to Sam and everyone else involved.)
• Gina Trapani’s My Life in Weeks visualization. This one inspired some conversation:
  • Sameer reflected on the past week, and on reflecting on weeks in general (with a kind nod to this newsletter), and referenced Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which sits in progress on my nearby table.
  • Ben Werdmuller shares why he won’t share his own Life in Weeks, for a similar reason to why I grew less comfortable tracking time (among other, more practical reasons): privacy. (I wasn’t just tracking my own time, but also that of those spending time with me. That felt weird!)
• Speaking of Burkeman, Annie Mueller with notes from Four Thousand Weeks.
• Winnie Lim on our ability to lose and regain habits and skills, including attention.
• Susan Jean Robertson on a week (mostly) offline.
• Profile of Nadia Odunayo, creator of The Storygraph, a Goodreads alternative that’s much more than simply “not owned by Amazon”.
• Paul Butler delightfully takes advantage of one of Unicode’s many quirks to embed arbitrary data in a (usually) invisible way in any string (including an emoji emojo). See Niki at tonsky.me for more (so much more) Unicode / emoji fun. (My favourite, learn how Unicode flags work! [aka the “regional indicator symbol”])

Ah, writing that out always feels good. Now, back to the snow. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas