Day of Rest / Never On Sunday
Tim Berners-Lee: “I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever.”
Empty Nest? Or Open Door?
Last year, Gretchen Rubin wrote a widely circulated piece about trading the “empty nest” metaphor for something that “emphasizes possibility”: the open door. I somehow hadn’t read it when it came out, but being in the midst of emptying the nest/opening the door, it was unsurprisingly resonant for me to read now. Rubin writes:
I balked at empty nest’s connotations of futility or meaninglessness. No wonder so many adults, when and if they anticipate this stage of life, consider it with dread. I found myself searching for a different metaphor — one that could help me and parents like me not to languish but to see this new phase as a time of self-discovery, possibility, and growth.
What Makes for a Healthy Society?
In a 2014 preface for his 1978 book The Ohlone Way, a description of how the indigenous peoples of California’s Bay Area lived before Europeans arrived, Malcolm Margolin shared a list of what he thought constituted a healthy society:
- Sustainable relationship with the environment. In a healthy society, the present generation doesn’t strip-mine the soil, water, forest, minerals, etc., leaving the future impoverished and the beauty of the world degraded.
- Few outcasts. A healthy society will have relatively few outcasts — prisoners, homeless, unemployed, insane.
- Relative egalitarianism. The gap between those with the most wealth and power and those with the least should be moderate, and those with the least should feel protected, cared for, or rewarded in some other way.
- Widespread participation in the arts.
- Moderation or control of individual power.
- Economic security attained through networks of family, friendship, and social reciprocity rather than through the individual hoarding of goods.
- Love of place. The feeling that one lives with emotional attachment to an area that is uniquely beautiful, abundant in natural recourses, and rich in personal meaning.
- Knowing one’s place in the world. A sense, perhaps embodied in spiritual practice, that the individual is an insignificant part of a larger, more abiding universe.
- Work is done willingly, or at least with a minimum of resentment.
- Lots of laughter.
The world’s wind and solar farms have generated more electricity than coal plants for the first time this year, marking a turning point for the global power system.”
The trailer for Downey Wrote That, a documentary about long-time SNL writer Jim Downey. “Most of what makes us laugh is something that’s true, just you’ve never heard it put that way before.”
The Onion made a movie about Jeffrey Epstein and they’re airing it for free on YouTube. Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile airs Thursday, Oct 9 at 7pm ET.
