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Sunday, December 27, 2020

We The North: On Finding A Home In Canada, by Nathan Englander, The Globe And Mail

Riding that wave of relief, I let go of a bunch of other move-related concerns. When I look at the overloaded bookshelves in our apartment, and picture the boxes we have in storage, and flash back through all the apartments I’ve lived in over the years, all the dishes I’ve wrapped and unwrapped, the idea of moving again after getting settled, well, I even ditch my initial stipulation. I really am good with dying in Toronto. I tell Rach she can sprinkle my ashes in Lake Ontario and let the currents decide in which country I end up.

I’ve Enjoyed Talking To Celebrities From My Bed. Will I Want To Do It In Person Again?, by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian

I always thought of myself as a sociable person, the one who didn’t consider it a party unless there were 150 people invited. But perhaps lockdown has revealed my true hermitty self? I’ve certainly taken to staying in on the sofa every night like one who was born to it. This raises a potentially bigger problem than Covid: if I am permanently, if only psychologically, locked down, how the hell am I going to do my job in the future?

Facebook Is A Doomsday Machine, by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic

No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

Never Very Far From What Is Happening Right Now, by Steven Shaviro, Los Angeles Review of Books

The future is never predetermined; if we can imagine things being different, then we can make them so. But this openness, this potentiality, is not unlimited. It is ahead of us, but “never very far.” We do not imagine in a vacuum, but only in the form of an extrapolation beyond whatever is “happening right now.” In this way, Andrea Hairston encodes, within her own work of speculative fiction, a vision of what speculative fiction can and cannot do.