Worth reading: “The IKEA Humans” by Samuel Biagetti

Jennifer and Jason are drawn to IKEA because it reflects who they are: they too are modern, movable, and interchangeable, their wants satisfiable in any neighborhood with a food co-op and a coffee shop. More fundamentally, Jennifer and Jason are untraceable, a “composite material” made from numberless scraps and pieces. They have a long catalog of home towns, and their accents are NPR neutral. They can probably rattle off the various nationalities in their family trees — Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, and Jewish, maybe some Venezuelan or Honduran for a little color. From these backgrounds they retain no more than a humorous word or phrase, a recipe, or an Ellis Island anecdote, if that. They grew up amidst a scramble of white-collar professionals and went to college with a scramble of white-collar professionals’ kids. Their values are defined mainly by mass media, their tastes adorably quirky but never straying too far from their peers’, and like the IKEA furniture that they buy in boxes, they too cut themselves into manageable, packaged pieces and market themselves online. They are probably “spiritual but not religious.” They have no pattern or model of life that bears any relation to the past before the internet. For all intents and purposes, they sprang up de novo in the modern city.

Peter Larson, A Year and a Day on Just a Few Acres:

Every place on the Earth has its own, unique energies. When I was an architect, I learned how to sense these energies, define them, and put them into terms others could understand. Healthy, living places were made, or most often grew, via working with, not against, their underlying energies. I think people used to sense these energies of place more than they do now, and used to value them more than they do now. The loss of this sense had increasingly allowed economics to dictate the qualities of places, and resulted in the creation of more and more “dead” places: shopping strips, placeless housing subdivisions, whole centers of communities blown out for corner drug stores and parking lots.

Really illuminating post by James Shelley (via @patrickrhone):

Whether papyrus or the internet, humans doggedly write for influence, status, wealth, conviction, and pleasure. But the so-called sanctity of “authorship” is only a very recent idea. These “rights” of authorship are only true if they are enforced. They are a kind of fiction that only make sense in occasional times, places, and cultures. For the next chapter of the human experiment, I wonder if “authorship” will again recede into the background, as it often seems to do in times of disruptive changes in communication technology.

But the banishment of the author doesn’t mean writing ends. Writers still write even when “authorship” functionally means nothing. And what they write still influences their world, with or without the universe dutifully paying homage to their bylines. In the long arcs of history, what is written typically goes on to mean much more than who wrote it. The future, like today, is built on ideas, not on the people who had them, because people die but ideas never stop evolving.

As we used to say, read the whole thing. I’m particularly struck by his invocation of ancient anonymous and pseudonymous works. It’s the ideas that matter, less so the author.

Adam Kotsko, “The Information Environment: Toward a Deeper Enshittification Thesis”:

The near-total context collapse we are now experiencing was already baked into the workings of the Mosaic web browser and the dream of the “information age” that it encapsulates. Information does want to be free, as it turns out — free of context, free of pleasure, free of empathy, even free of comprehension. The effort to just cut to the chase and give us the information has actively destroyed the conditions for understanding and using that information in an intelligent way.

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter:

There can be places in this world, and in human hearts too, that are opposite to war. There is a kind of life that is opposite to war, so far as this world allows it to be.

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter:

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room [of love]. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

… No big happiness came to me yet, but little happinesses did come, and they came from ordinary pleasures in ordinary things: the baby, sunlight, breezes, animals and birds, daily work, rest when I was tired, food, strands of fog in the hollows early in the morning, butterflies, flowers. The flowers didn’t have to be dahlias and roses either, but just the weeds blooming in the fields, the daisies and the yarrow. I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.

Catching up on @dwalbert’s “Road to Jockey’s Ridge” this morning. Loved this from “The Changeable Woods":

I walked the same acre of woods every day for seven years, and a trail by a river almost every week for about that long, and the light of each discovery was, like the stars in the sky, one more pinprick in the vast darkness of my ignorance. I learned enough to feel my way along familiar paths; I had an idea what to expect and when to expect it, but I was often enough surprised. And that was one place. Give me a different forest on a given day, say spruce pine forest on a mountainside in early June, and it’s just a pretty picture again. Having come to know one place over months and years, you may at least sense the changeability of another, merely in passing, even if you don’t understand it. You know, at least, that the snapshot is only a snapshot. You know enough to wonder. But even to know that much requires sustained attention.

Wendell Berry, “It All Turns on Affection”:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong to a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

In this house we say Happy Holidays because even though we celebrate Honda Days, others may celebrate Toyotathon or Lexus December to Remember.

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (p248):

All I can answer is that I did love her all her life—from the time before I ever saw her, it seems, and until she died. I do love her all her life, and still, and always. That is my answer, but in fact love does not answer any argument. It answers all arguments, merely by turning away, leaving them to find what rest they can.

That’s certainly one of the most beautiful things you’ll read all week.