Sunday Skies
Instead of going to church, artist Byron Kim paints the sky almost every Sunday for the past seventeen years. He also writes a short comment on his work. Vinson Cunningham has written a nice piece about it.
Why Did Trump Paid Stormy?
Check out eight totally hilarious reasons from Chase Olivarius-McAllister.
Ursula K. Le Guin Dies at 88
Just read Le Guin’s excellent No Time to Spare last December and found out she passed way on Monday. RIP.
On Democracy
Max Fisher and Amanda Taub explain democracy in a short, well-executed video.
Tonya Harding’s Story
A short, insightful interview with Tonya Harding on “The Daily.” Worth listening on your commute.
Dark Stock Photos
Want to see some extremely fucked up stock photography? Follow @darkstockphotos.
Success Stories
I have been listening rigorously to NPR’s “How I Built This with Guy Raz.” Episodes I have binged through include LinkedIn, Kate Spade, Instagram, Chipotle, Teach For America, Starbucks, and Kickstarter. So many inspiring stories. Love this podcast.
The Vanishing of Freedom and Fun From the Internet
Blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic, entirely about sensibility: they can only be run by workhorses who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience, and they tend to publish like-minded writers, who work more on the principle of personal obsession than pay. The result is editorial latitude to be obscure and silly and particular, but the finances are increasingly hard to sustain; media consumption is controlled these days by centralized tech platforms—Facebook, Twitter—whose algorithms favor what is viral, newsy, reactionary, easily decontextualized, and of general appeal.
Blog still provides freedom and fun for me. I am just not getting paid doing it and that’s OK with me. I don’t expect to get paid for freedom and fun.
Publications Redesigned
Slate has a new logo, types, and design. Read Julia Turner’s “Slate’s New Look” and Jason Santa Maria’s “Redesigning the Way We Work.”
The Guardian has a new masthead. Read Brand New’s review.
A Bad Date
With the recent Aziz Ansari sexual allegation, the fiction essay, “Cat Person,” by Kristen Roupenian in the New Yorker has been mentioned. Just read it this morning and loved it.