Hine again:

Some of this was little more than the playacting of the privileged: long before Covid, the urban middle classes had acquired a taste for simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence, as embodied in the handmade aesthetic of a Whole Foods store, its fixtures and fittings carefully disguising the concrete box into which it is built.

😆 Of course, it’s not even the tiniest coincidence that Whole Foods Market, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon. Sometimes I think we should be more grateful when they say the quiet part out loud.

Dougald Hine:

Two possibilities arise from this newfound sense of vulnerability. It can be a humbling moment in which, brought down to earth, we are able to hear at last what those on the receiving end of Western projects of colonisation, salvation, modernisation and development have been trying to tell us for generations. Or it can be the licence for the grandest version of that project yet: an attempt to turn our planetary home and all those we share it with, our human kin and our more-than-human kith, into an object of global management and control, and all in the name of ‘saving the world’.

I’m only half way through, but Hine’s At Work in the Ruins has a solid place in my “this should be mandatory high school or undergrad reading” list.

Douglad Hine:

In its attention to whatever is missing or taken for granted, art can lead us upstream.

“The power of art to reveal the dominant consciousness and challenge it.” — This subtitle done gimme goosbumps.

One of Dougald Hine’s more hilariously good lines is when he admits not having any idea how to respond to someone who I can only describe as having outrun the use of meaningful conversation: “I couldn’t even find the energy to reply with a link to a talk that might give him a clue where I was coming from.”

I could take that in a few different ways for a fair amount of time. But for now, I’m thinking of Thomas Merton:

Light Phone asks, “How much is you time worth?”. Refreshing. Excited for January

Headline o’ the Day

I confess I have never gotten around to reading Jedediah Jenkins’s books. But Meghan has loved them, and she sent me this screenshot about his new book, which I believe should be shared.

(I also confess to being jealous. I too would like to be shut up in a cabin. Not because of the election, but just because I like being shut up in cabins.)

Eli Lake’s short dive into Democratic Party history is a decent start on the kind of thing I meant with the Noonan post.