Across the alley from my house there’s a sprawling fig tree. It’s abundant with fruit in the summer — once, I was walking to the bus stop and wondering how it could be that everything smelled like honey when I realized that it was coming from the bottom of my shoes; I’d stepped in fallen figs. There’s a blackberry bush entangled with the fig tree. This makes getting the figs a bit of a (sorry) prickly proposition, but it’s worth it. One year, my neighbor whacked the fig tree right to the ground and I was devastated, but it’s back with a vengeance now; the pruning did it a world of good. The figs are all coming into perfect ripeness now.
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I’m so frustrated by what we’ve done with our own free press. I’m not against entertainment — let me know if you want to talk about Adventure Time, my recent addiction — but when I look at what the web has become in our hands I think, really? Our goal was to create hundreds of thousands of marketing hacks? But this guy did jail time in Iran for speaking out, for using the free press as, you know, free press. He has way more cred on this issue than I do.
[dropcap]Seven[/dropcap] months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central neighbourhood of Tehran, and I did something I had done thousands of times previously. I opened my laptop and posted to my new blog. This, though, was the first time in six years. And it nearly broke my heart.
— The Web We Have to Save by Hossein Derakhshan
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I know a handful of people who are proud to call themselves permanent travelers. I really don’t get it; I love having a home to come back to, but whatever, to each his or her own, right? Until I read this Rolling Stone piece about a guy who’s been flying nonstop for a year, I never considered that the backstory to all that constant motion might be quite sad. It’s worth reading past the bits where the guy just seems like a tiresome obnoxious nerd — he’s no Clooney, that’s for sure. But it’s an interesting read all the same.
[dropcap]For[/dropcap] the next year, Ben refused to go to preschool, and when he did, the teachers couldn’t stop his screaming. Eventually they told Barbara to keep Ben home. On the worst days, Barbara did the only thing that seemed to calm her son. They drove to the airport and sat together in silence, watching the airplanes take off and land. “His eyes were all sparkled,” she says, remembering their daylong outings.
—Up in the Air: Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
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I love Instagram, both as a person who likes to shoot photos and as one who enjoys social media. A friend tipped me off to the Bureau of Land Management’s photo feed recently and wow, this boring government agency is just owning it. (I’m on Instagram too, here.)
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I re-read The Hobbit recently, and now I’m about a third of the way through the first book of Lord of the Rings. I’m finding LOTR a bit of a slog — all that lyric poetry and tangled backstory — but The Hobbit? Fast and wildly entertaining. I remember it being such an adventure to read it as a kid, but it’s very different as an adult. I did not remember that Bilbo was well into middle age for a hobbit when he started his adventure, and Frodo was the same. Also, Gandalf, who was so intimidating as a character the first time through turns out to be kind of a blowhard know-it-all. I mean, he does know it all, after all, he’s a great wizard, but it’s not like his knowledge made him humble. Anyway, pick up a copy of The Hobbit (if you don’t already have one) and read it again. I don’t know why it’s not listed on those “Classic Summer Reads” lists. (Here’s an Amazon link
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What did you find this week that you liked enough to share?
Such a rich round up – so different from the usual link-bait of prettiness. Exactly what Hossein is railing against. That article made me really think about how much of my day is spent doing things to feed ‘the stream’. Thank you so much for sharing.
That Hossein piece is amazing. I’m glad it was food for thought for you, too. But you can’t deny the prettiness of the BLM photo feed, right?