Interesting Links: Week 1
I invite you to join me on my jaunts through the latest rabbit holes that have caught my attention.
I read more than books. Sometimes I exclusively and obsessively read articles on the internet to the point of hyper-fixation. There is a part of me that just enjoys scrolling through the archive of an online publication and pointing out each article that I have read, another part of me enjoys the looks of complete confusion on people’s face when I tell them about a random topic I read about recently. I know someone who reads so much that he says “I’ll send you an article about it.” in the middle of almost every conversation. I aspire to be such a treasure trove of trivia at some point.
But till then I decided to collect in one place links to articles that I find interesting every week. In the hopes, that you might like to read about obscure, fascinating things like I do!
What to think about the next time you’re at H&M?
My Indian upbringing means that every article of clothing I own goes through several identity changes before being used as a dishcloth or rug. A little part of me believes that gets me off the hook when it comes to shopping from fast fashion brands. But things aren’t as black and white (shameless plug?) as I’d like them to be.
What fast fashion costs the world by Ryan Lenora Brown
Since 2000, the global production of clothing has doubled. Today, the average American buys about 68 new items of clothing a year. Plunge your arms elbow-deep into a pile of jeans at the dunusa, and you’ll find that the thick, un-stretchable denim of vintage Levi’s 501s and ’90s mom jeans is easily distinguishable from a pile of jeggings as pliable as Silly Putty. In the blouses, the silky polyester of ’70s button-downs feels a world away from the gauzy fluff of a Forever 21 blouse.
But quality is only the beginning of the challenge. Westerners now consume clothing at such a ferocious pace that our own secondhand shops cannot begin to absorb our discards. Today, although we donate only about 15% of our used clothing to charity, domestic thrift stores are still overwhelmed. They can only sell a sliver — about 10% to 20% — of what they receive. The rest is sold to textile recyclers, who turn the lowest-quality items into rags and insulation and press everything else into bales, which are sold to traders across Asia and Africa.
People found different ways to cope with Covid.
Olivia Laing is one of those authors that I’ve always meant to read but I just haven’t gotten around to it. Reading this piece by her, even though it was about a show that I haven’t watched and nor do I intend to, made me want to rectify that immediately. It is a nostalgic read and one that encapsulates the ways in which all of us sought comfort in unusual things during the pandemic.
True Detective- An investigation by Olivia Laing
I’d started watching detective shows as a way of managing anxiety, not that I could have articulated it at the time. By the end of the first year of the pandemic nothing felt safe: not a tea party or a train. Storms of panic kept blowing through my nervous system, setting off alarms so powerful it was all I could do not to throw myself to the floor. Hardly any wonder I was addicted to watching scenarios where jeopardy was exposed, then tidied away. There were many procedures I used to bring myself back into working order, the most effective being therapy. By the time I got to “Columbo”, I was getting better. I understood at least some of what had spooked me, and so I could see why this particular show soothed me so much.
Women in the Workforce and Remote Work.
Women are expected to be the primary caregivers to children. (The sentence would have been just as true if I had stopped after caregivers but in this context the last two words matter.) This means that despite cultural changes, technological advancements (like the birth control pill), and changes in workplace culture (hybrid working), women still bear the brunt and their careers are the first to be affected. (It is almost like the system is actively working against us!)
The Remote Work-Fertility Connection by Stephanie H. Murray
The digital divide is only one of many factors driving a shift in who is having children. For most of the 20th century, women with the highest level of education—that is, those with the best career prospects—have had the fewest children. But this inverse relationship between education and female fertility is weakening, and some demographers suspect that it will flatten out or even reverse in the coming decades. In some Nordic countries, it already has. To some extent, this shift simply reflects rising education levels; although it was unusual for women to attend college a century ago, it’s the norm now in high-income countries. But the shift is also spurred by rising economic inequality, in which the digital divide plays a part. “The world seems to be moving toward a situation in which affording to have children is for those who are privileged,” Billari said.
I Tried to Live Like a Tradwife for a Week: Here’s what I Learned by Anne Helen Peterson
She and her boyfriend have an agreement: He’ll make the money, and she’ll “take care of the house.” And that’s what Kendel films herself doing. She makes the bed. She pops big ice cubes out of one of those silicone trays and into her Stanley cup, then fills it with filtered water. She meditates, runs the dishwasher, and makes a smoothie. She ice-rolls her face, puts on a lot of serums, then dresses in exercise clothes and does a strength workout on the balcony of her luxury apartment. The top comment on one video: “I love your life.” Kendel does all the things you’re supposed to do to look the way women are told they’re supposed to look. But unlike most women her age, Kendel does all these things and she doesn’t have to work. Or, more accurately, if there are some women who are working two, three, or even four jobs—some paid, some unpaid—Kendel is only working one. The job of very hot girlfriend to a very rich man.
The Other Work Remote Workers Get Done by Stephanie H. Murray
The appeal of remote work is all too often glossed over as a matter of “quality of life” or “work-life balance.” Those are, of course, important. But that framing also ignores the uncompensated caregiving that Vigil and millions of others provide for America’s young, sick, elderly, and disabled. Their efforts are not just a quality-of-life issue; they’re an enormously important and overlooked part of our economy. For a lot of caregivers, telecommuting allows them to manage a workload that is, if anything, way too big. Remote work, then, isn’t just a question of work-life balance; it’s a question of work-work balance. The traditional conception of “productivity” doesn’t account for this.
A Nobel for the Story of Women in the Workplace by Noah Smith
To see how this works, let’s consider that paper, which is entitled “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women's Career and Marriage Decisions”. In general, if you see a correlation between A) increased birth control use, and B) women getting more education and getting married later, you might wonder which way the causation ran. Maybe women started using birth control because of feminist cultural values, and started getting more education and getting married later for the same reasons? Maybe education would make women want to use birth control more? How do we know that adoption of a technological innovation led to social changes, rather than vice versa?
Musings about Solitude.
Here’s a list of ideas that have always peaked my interest: solitude, seclusion, cancel culture, fame, and exile. Who knew I shared these interests with Rousseau? I don’t pretend to be a very philosophical person but reading this and realising that some of the thoughts that have flitted through my head flitted through the political philosopher’s mind too was quite amusing.
What Rousseau knew about Solitude by Gavin McCrea
Rousseau’s expressed distaste for fame and fortune masks an obsession with those whom he believes possess the authority to apportion such fame and fortune. His disregard for the opinion of others is actually a susceptibility to those opinions, a susceptibility of an acuteness that today would be called neurotic. Looking at himself through the eyes of society, he is “a monster,” “a poisoner,” “an assassin,” “a horror of the human race,” “a laughingstock.” He imagines passersby spitting on him. He pictures his contemporaries burying him alive. Rumors about him are, he believes, circulating in the highest echelons: “I heard even the King himself and the Queen were talking about it as if there was no doubt about it.” There is simply no one left in society who does not harbor “some secret animosity” toward him, who does not “take part in the universal conspiracy” against him.
Responding to these imagined attacks, in the course of his protestations of innocence, Rousseau makes a second discovery. Human judgments, he realizes, are made not about a thing but about one’s perception of a thing: “[I]nstead of me they will never see anyone but the Jean-Jacques they have created and fashioned for themselves so that they can hate me to their heart’s content. I should be wrong then to be upset by the image they have of me; I ought to take no real interest in it, since it is not me that they are seeing.”
Not the most Appetising Read.
There is a story in my family from when I was young that has been narrated so many times that I almost feel like it is a memory now. When I was a toddler my parents once took me to a restaurant and on being served a salad I confusedly declared, “This isn’t food, this is what food eats.” I think I can safely assume that this story reveals that I’m not vegan. But I have always been curious about the green politics of veganism, as well as the ways in which this theory like any other becomes a pawn in the hand of capitalist corporations.
Open your Mouth to Unicorn Meat by Annie Lowrey
Until recently, few people were fooled by vegan burgers or expected a cultivated-protein nugget to taste better than chicken. Meat was meat—delicious, ubiquitous, all-American. Fake meat was fake. The bean burgers and not-dogs that began appearing in American grocery stores and on restaurant menus about half a century ago were generally aimed at vegetarians, hippies, and/or health nuts. In many cases, they were not meant to taste like meat; in even more cases, they were not that tasty at all.
The deepening catastrophe of climate change has made fake meat a matter of moral urgency. By some estimates, 15 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions come directly from animal agriculture. In the late aughts, a number of entrepreneurs cottoned on to the idea of reducing emissions by producing fake meat that carnivores could love. Venture capitalists have pumped billions of dollars into companies such as Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Eat Just, which set out to bring advanced materials science to bear on sausages, meatballs, and eggs.
The Joyful, Punk World of Plant-Based Eating by Lily Meyer
To say that No Meat Required contains no judgment wouldn’t be quite accurate. Kennedy never blames readers for their present choices, but she has harsh words for big systems: agribusiness, factory farming, the subsidies that hold beef prices down, and the Jones Act provisions that contribute to grocery stores in San Juan that are stocked with expensive imports instead of local products. And although she does not scold her readers, she does want them to see themselves as active participants in improving the way we all eat. In a recent Eater interview, she said that her goal “isn’t converting people to veganism or vegetarianism” but making them aware that addressing climate change—among many other things—“requires the end of industrial animal agriculture,” with its outsize carbon emissions. This awareness prompts another difficult recognition: Early in the book, Kennedy writes that although one person’s consumer choice may currently mean little given the power of the American meat and dairy industries, attending to our eating habits has real value. After all, she argues, if and when food corporations do get forced to emit less, our diets “will change, whether we like it or not. I believe there’s meaning in changing before it gets that bad.”
The Era-Defining Aesthetic of “In the Mood for Love” by Kyle Chayka
This article is a work of art, just like the movie it talks about. I loved the design of it. I loved reading it and I loved its analysis of a movie that has stayed with me for years after I first watched it. The article perfectly describes what makes the ‘vibes’ of In The Mood For Love phenomenal and memorable. It also puts into words, more eloquent than I could have, the Main Character Energy Su and Chow embody. Experience the article! Watch the movie!
Wong Kar-wai is one director that has always intrigued me. His films are unique, beautiful, and sometimes confusing masterpieces, that reveal new secrets every time you watch them. Why Are Wong Kar-wai Films So Dreamy? is a video that really encapsulates this genius of the director’s work.
Let me say it before anyone else does: I am aware that 6 feels like a weird number to stop at but if I don’t stop myself now I’ll probably keep listing all the interesting articles I have reading recently and this blog will be impossibly long. I hope you have as much fun falling down these rabbit holes as I do!