Jaclyn

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on the atlas · 607

highlights · 1739

The buyers absorbing these shocks without alternatives are the ones still using terminal markets which the consolidated system was not designed to serve.
Gassed Up - Offrange
The Fresh Produce Association of the Americas estimated losses to growers and distributors at more than $240 million over 10 days, before Abbott suspended the order under pressure from the produce industry.
Gassed Up - Offrange
Is life really so dichotomous - weight and stability through partnership, or freedom and meaninglessness through solitude?
I Would Rather Have Married Young - by Addy Davies
The grain company cut a hole in the side of the massive elevator bin so the lake freighters could pour oats into them, reversing the flow of grain from export to import.
My Dad Helped Build North America’s Oat Supply Chain: Can It Be Remade? - Offrange
After the trading day ended, traders would head to a bar near the Minneapolis Grain Exchange and trade until 11:00 pm. “Huge egos,” my dad said, “they’d get a few beers in them and they’d buy a million bushels.”
My Dad Helped Build North America’s Oat Supply Chain: Can It Be Remade? - Offrange
The entire System was struggling, and the stronger groups were understandably reluctant to try to shoulder impossible burdens.
Food System—Economic Unity / Political Fragmentation - FoundSF
“That never used to happen,” he said. “Philanthropy was something you did when you were retired, and you were working on your legacy, so the money went to the college or opera.”
The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog” | The New Yorker
without the novels my course omits something that I see as crucial to understanding death, or self-creation, or courage, or self-consciousness.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
there are times when the poet’s power to confront what the rest of us turn away from marks such a dramatic escape from the confines of ordinary humanity that we find ourselves drawn to describing them with the language of “a divine spark.”
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the sometimes exhausting and always blinkered project of leading a life.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
That is the insight behind Tolstoy’s opening sentence: it is true of fiction, even if it is not true of life.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
The positive has a secondary and derivative place in fiction, just as the negative has a secondary and derivative place in life.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
Art suspends our practical projects, releasing the prohibition against attending to the bad.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
We swim in an invisible sea composed of all that is irrelevant, unhelpful or downright wicked.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
You are the censor of your own reality.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
You permit a problem into your line of sight only insofar as you are looking for solutions to it;
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
Does our ordinary experience of life—both our own, and our close associates’—show us evil? No, not really. Life is censored.
Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
Print media gave the public access only to politicians’ polished remarks; video let Americans see their presidents sweat, sneeze, and stammer. Voters began to focus on “dating criteria” instead of “résumé criteria,” he told me.
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
Speakers can’t edit their words the way writers can, so they press on without admitting their mistakes. If they later contradict themselves, they don’t expect the audience to recall their earlier statements. Meaning depends on the identity of the speaker, not on any concept of objective truth.
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.
The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantic
Let’s add more flavour to our recommendations, all the pun intended. Don’t give me a Copenhagen guide, tell me about the afternoon at La Banchina and how it made you feel about rest and leisure.
The "Guides" are Killing the Vibes - by Abena Anim-Somuah
There’s a certain level of hospitality to it that feels like they are honoring the places they visit. Folks like Yolanda Edwards and coolstuff.nyc as well as publications like Monocle and the New York Times’ 36 Hours are brilliant at this.
The "Guides" are Killing the Vibes - by Abena Anim-Somuah
Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.
If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
Reality is a scarce resource.
If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
At the same time, our self-domestication may be something of a failure mode if it separates us too far from nature. We lose an appreciation of our place in the world and for the visceral parts of life in general.
Veganism and Moral Intuitions - by Simon Sarris
The modern cow cannot exist well in nature9, but neither can the modern man living who lives in Bushwick survive in the bush.
Veganism and Moral Intuitions - by Simon Sarris
how much better the life of a cow is than a life in nature, where fear and hunger dominate, even for many predators.
Veganism and Moral Intuitions - by Simon Sarris
In the United states, animal agriculture is just 4.3% of total emissions. That’s much less than travel for pleasure, which for Americans is around 7%!
Veganism and Moral Intuitions - by Simon Sarris
there is no harvest of any crop at scale that does not destroy animals, often intentionally.
Veganism and Moral Intuitions - by Simon Sarris
About a hundred UPS planes touch down in Louisville on an average evening. During the Christmas season, one lands every ninety seconds.
Out in the Sort | The New Yorker
While automation has de-skilled the sort from the human point of view, shrinking the population around the belts, it is at the same time burning the midnight oil of college students in order to overcome its blemishes. Automation alone will not do everything for eight million packages a week, and UPS is so needful of reliable part-time employees that it has embraced the field of education as if it were a private university.
Out in the Sort | The New Yorker
Of all workers in the hub, many are single parents, seventy per cent are female, and the median age is thirty-four.
Out in the Sort | The New Yorker
The lobsters go by moose to the UPS hub as living passengers e-ticketed on the eleventh-largest airline in the world, arriving at the UPS air terminal to be screened and scanned and sorted and to ride up escalators and on horizontal belts toward heavy aircraft nosed up to gates.
Out in the Sort | The New Yorker
He peers down into the bottom of the crates for signs of bleeding, which takes experience, since lobster blood is clear.
Out in the Sort | The New Yorker
On the eve of Christmas Eve, planes heading east for Paris have almost infinitely more lobsters in them than human beings.
Out in the Sort | The New Yorker
Lobsters were arriving at the rate of a hundred thousand a day, and each acceptable newcomer—its antennae waving, its carapace glistening—was given discrete space on a conveyor belt designed to advance its journey toward someone’s distant mouth.
Out in the Sort | The New Yorker
He was disciplined, unsentimental, willing to be disliked, and focused on a single, verifiable outcome. In short, Wolfson developed a theory of change and executed it for 30 years.
There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems
How do we navigate a minefield of risks associated with navigating the AI transition? And if we do that successfully, how do we ensure all of humanity can benefit from the abundance that AI could create?
The third wave of American philanthropy - by Nan Ransohoff
built the institutional substrate of modern civic life – the perpetual foundation, the research university, professional medical education, and the public library.
The third wave of American philanthropy - by Nan Ransohoff
Defining the problems we want solved is no small task, and vision is in short supply. We should all take it upon ourselves to think hard about the world we want to live in and what kinds of interventions would increase the likelihood that that world materializes.
The third wave of American philanthropy - by Nan Ransohoff
all economic abstractions—labor, capital, natural resources—boil down to actual human relationships.
Take a part of the world that you love and give it your care
It had the pretence of objectivity: outputs are measurable, credentials are legible, and “education, education, education” was a defensible rallying cry.
At least you’re likable - Julia Willemyns
Farming rewarded physical endurance; the factory rewarded the ability to tolerate repetition; the office rewarded cognitive horsepower. And people responded in kind.
At least you’re likable - Julia Willemyns
Status competition happens within fields, not across them.
At least you’re likable - Julia Willemyns
as AI automates commodity production and drives down prices, the scarce and valuable thing won’t be cognitive skill or even labor in general, it will be human presence itself.
At least you’re likable - Julia Willemyns
in part on meritocratic elites to realize the hellishness of their situation and relinquish their own ascendancy
The Hell of Meritocracy
On the other hand, meritocracy ensnares even those who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich children to run a gauntlet of competitive and grindingly intense schooling and rich adults to work with crushing industry, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return. Meritocrats may be wealthy, but they are not well.
The Hell of Meritocracy
If the elite did not exist, and if meritocracy did not marginalize the middle class and frame exclusion and subordination as a personal failure, then the politics of stagnation would be entirely different — and properly so.
The Hell of Meritocracy
This makes the future a source of fear, not hope.
The Hell of Meritocracy