“Gentle on the ear you whisper softly, rumors of a dawn so embracing. Breathless love awaits darkened souls; soon will we know of the morning.”

The point of art is encounter, experience– if you’re continually framing that encounter as primarily a function of your own brand or politics, you’ll lose the track on what makes art important in the first place.

“I get ideas in fragments…it’s as if in the other room, there’s a puzzle; all the pieces are together. But in my room, they just flip one piece at a time into me. The first piece that I get is a fragment of the whole puzzle, but I fall in love with this fragment…and … read more

You’ve heard of “Elf on a Shelf.” Now get ready for:

Combatting the desire to spend the rest of the day watching Camelot and lying on the couch.

What is “enough screens?”

ChatGPT is pretty good at explaining rhetoric— if I could get it to emotionally abuse me, I could have skipped going to graduate school!

Small thought: Twitter might be “the hellsite,” but one observation– the layers of performance both cushion the blatant status-seeking and encourage an obfuscatory “I just care so much” attitude. But I’d take that in a heartbeat over LinkedIn, where everyone also … read more

Christmas Trees Trimmed in Irony, NYTimes “American consumers’ spending on winter holidays including Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa has grown, rising from some $567.6 billion in 2012 to around $889.3 billion in 2021, according to data from the National Retail Federation, a trade group. Among … read more

It’s the time of year to break out my favorite Christmas record– George Winston’s December. It’s an instrumental holiday album you really need to hear. Spotify YouTube December is a masterpiece, a collection of twelve delicate piano solos. Some are original compositions, and … read more

Counter Culture’s new winter blend “Iridescent” has arrived! I’m excited to put this one into circulation— right after this bag of Foundry from Mad Goat. Notably, Counter Culture isn’t in line with my goal of only buying coffee from roasters less than “2 hours away” from my home in IL, but one … read more

“Rent control policies seek to ensure affordable and stable housing for current tenants; however, they also increase the incentive for landlords to evict tenants since rents re-set when tenants leave. We exploit variation across zip codes in policy exposure to the 1994 rent control referendum … read more

The Canadian Press Newsroom, Toronto- U.D.

The writer’s room at The Awl, circa 2015

From The Verge

“The Courier” newsroom, April 1950, Urbana, IL

Subjecting our mental health discourse to the whims of an advertising-based content economy was probably a very bad idea.

Reading at lunch today: [Local politics]

www.news-gazette.com/news/my-t…

Morning Music:

Young Gun Silver Fox, “Ticket to Shangri-La”

A new album from YGSF is always welcome.