Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless
[…] obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”
What Chinese corner cutting reveals about modernity
If what you’re making represents a world utterly out of reach to you, why bother to do it well?
via reddit
An embress of textistence and embiddyment aflight
[…] the nature of the book means that there will be two types of reviews of it. The first type will come from comics and geek-culture websites, whose reviewers have rarely read anything more taxing than X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills. A 1200+-page literary novel is, pretty much by definition, going to overwhelm them, and they’ll say so.
The other type of reviewer is the writer for the arts pages of the broadsheets, and they will compare it to books like Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, Lanark. They’ll mention the chapter written in the style of Finnegans Wake. They won’t say “this is a big, hard, book” explicitly, but they’ll only refer to it in the context of famously-difficult works.
The fact is that Jerusalem does merit comparison with all those other books — like them it is a monstrously clever, awe-inspiring book, an omnium gatherum that uses different literary styles and genres, that ties together all the author’s thoughts in one massive explanatory, exploratory, novel.
When had astrology become our irrationality of choice? Probably sometime around 2012, when things were not so good for us. When you’re feeling stuck, one way to convince yourself change is in the near to middle distance is to read a horoscope. It didn’t matter that the mechanism by which it worked was dubious: cosmic forces emanating from the ordered motions of celestial bodies, wiggling down through the atmosphere in invisible rays to be inspired by human lungs. A broken clock is right twice a day, and weren’t there plenty of things we took to be true without understanding how they worked—GPS, menstrual synchrony, gluten? Our horoscope, at least, gave us something to look forward to. We weren’t idiots, just a little depressed, and comforted by this garrulous pseudoscience that advised, encouraged, cautioned.
Why Canadian bands (sometimes) can’t make it in the States
“It doesn’t fucking matter that The Hip had limited success in the U.S.,” wrote music journalist and broadcaster Alan Cross in the days after Downie’s diagnosis went public. “There’s only one reason why things didn’t work out: bad record contracts. It had nothing to do with the band being ‘too Canadian’ or the inadequacy of their music.”
The Berenstein [sic] Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe
In 1992 they were “stEin” in 1992, but in 2012 they were “stAin” in 1992.
Some explanations have been proposed.
via A.V. Club
The Friday Poem: “Monica”, by Hera Lindsay Bird
And to be able to maintain a friendship
Through the various complications of heterosexual monogamy
Is enormously difficult
Especially when you take into consideration
What cunts they all were
[Almost a year since i’ve used this. Facebook is too comfortable.]
Priced out of rental market, Simon Fraser students sleeping on campus – The Globe and Mail
“There is a lot more going on, with people who just want to keep their kids in school. We’ve all lowered our expectations. I don’t know anybody who wants a house. These parents aren’t bad parents. There’s just no end in sight, and it pisses me off when people say this is a first-world problem.”
The end of capitalism has begun | Books | The Guardian
New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself.
I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.”
The ideological roots of Stephen Harper’s vendetta against sociology
So what does Harper have against sociology? First, Harper is clearly trumpeting a standard component of neo-liberal ideology: that there are no social phenomena, only individual incidents.
[…]
But there’s yet another reason this ideology is so hostile toward the kind of sociological analysis done by Statistics Canada, public inquiries and the like. And that has to do with the type of injustices we can even conceive of, or consider tackling, as a society.