flâneur

Arielle Lok

125 followers · 51 following · 4202 views

on the atlas — 227

highlights — 847

  • there is little evidence to support the idea that bringing supermarkets to neighborhoods that lack them has a measurable effect on what residents eat.
    The Myth of the Food Desert | Gazer Daily
  • Garth is a thoroughgoing critic of “racial capitalism,” but many of the activists she meets have more modest aims: they want to help a corner store sell vegetables, or they’re trying to interest city residents in working on a local farm. At one point, Garth concludes that some of these efforts “could actually be worse than charity,” a phrase she intends as denunciation.
    The Myth of the Food Desert | Gazer Daily
  • People say motherhood is clarifying. I think it is dismantling. It shatters your life and asks you to re-build it slowly, deliberately—stone by stone.
    I Am Not Enjoying Motherhood - Morgan Hoog
  • Beneath all of this lives the quiet but deeply rooted belief that once you become a mother there is no room left for other dreams. And yet, I am full of them. In each moment, I can feel myself holding space for two selves at once, both maiden and mother. Each version of me asking for breath. I live in the space between them and it is here that my sorrow takes shape.
    I Am Not Enjoying Motherhood - Morgan Hoog
  • To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. [132] To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits…
    Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
  • Prioritize your spouse over your children. I consider it one of the greatest blessings of my life to have seen firsthand, over and over, that for my dad, my mom comes not just before his work, but before me, my sister, and my brother.
    How My Father, Ben Sasse, Raised Me - by Alex Sasse
  • Humans define themselves through their relationships and their work. If your child’s focus is inwardly directed, they will be depressed, anxious, and profoundly disenchanted with life. When you look up and out, everything gets better. Teach your child that they are amazing and loved and of immeasurable value, but they are not God. They should know the difference.
    How My Father, Ben Sasse, Raised Me - by Alex Sasse
  • Did their parents teach them to be contributors, or consumers? Every single day of my childhood, my parents asked the same question at dinner. Not “What did you learn?” but “Who did you serve?”
    How My Father, Ben Sasse, Raised Me - by Alex Sasse
  • This concept can also be illustrated by the image of a multifaceted polyhedron, [19] in which the one truth of the Gospel is reflected from different angles.
    Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
  • 1. Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.
    Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
  • every Ministry of Education contributed funding to SFPs—except Ontario
    Canadian SFPs Summary 2023-24
  • Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. Because you don't have the alibi my class had—this is one of the great achievements and mixed blessings you inherit: Unlike us, you can't say nobody told you there were other options. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead. Twenty-five years from now, you won't have as easy a time making excuses as my class did. You won't be able to blame the deans, or the culture, or anyone else: you will have no one to blame but yourselves. Whoa. So what are you going to do? This is the season when a clutch of successful wo…
    1996 | Wellesley College
  • who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
    Howl by Allen Ginsberg | Poetry Foundation
  • who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
    Howl by Allen Ginsberg | Poetry Foundation
  • who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars
    Howl by Allen Ginsberg | Poetry Foundation
  • yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes
    Howl by Allen Ginsberg | Poetry Foundation
  • If it’s really the path, you’ll find it more than once.
    50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation. The powerful have their power. But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.
    Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, PM of Canada | World Economic Forum
  • if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.
    Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, PM of Canada | World Economic Forum
  • You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
    Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, PM of Canada | World Economic Forum
  • aphorism of Thucydides
    Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, PM of Canada | World Economic Forum
  • –Some reformers want schools to prepare the young for occupations in which there are currently too few skilled workers and managers (see here). –Some reformers re-create teacher-centered schools that inculcate students with basic content, skills, and civic virtues including patriotism (see here). –Some reformers seek schools where students interests, passions, and intellect are central to both the curriculum and instruction and their well-being is nurtured (see here) –Some reformers desire schools where students become adults prepared to work for reducing social and economic inequalities and i…
    Another Look at “Tinkering Toward Utopia” | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
  • Actually that was pretty funny.
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • Young scientists aren’t told they ought to keep their innovations incremental and their attitude to hierarchy duly deferential, as they might hear in Boston.
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • the gooner will open his eyes, find himself in a room filled with lube but void of love, and decide that the boredom of staying in that room outweighs the fear of whatever lies beyond it.
    The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
  • Squint very hard—to the point of risking permanent eye damage—and you can almost see in Goonworld the realization of the Nineties dream of the internet as an incorporeal, judgment-free, gender-fluid sexual playground. But I suspect what these gooners might really be after is—as one Questionnaire respondent put it—“the sense of community” that these spaces offer, this being “something [the] modern world has become increasingly deprived of.”
    The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
  • “I would like to shed some light on how the moral systems are failing some of the younger people.”
    The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
  • Within the operational context between founders and middle management, The Selected Works of Mao Zedong circulates more like a tactical manual than political doctrine. On Protracted War’s strategy of “encircling cities from the countryside” translates directly into capturing third and fourth-tier markets before ascending to first-tier cities — the essential playbook behind the rise of PDD (the parent company of Temu). “Serve the People” ( 为人民服务) becomes “Customer First” for consumer applications; “self-reliance” merges seamlessly with “avoiding technological bottlenecks” — vocabulary drawn dir…
    The China Tech Canon—Asterisk
  • Decisions that are made one by one across hundreds of school districts and towns — the model for how curriculum planning happens in most of the U.S. — will not be as good as decisions made at the state level based on strong evidence, with implementation funded and accountability for results. During our conversation, White argued that while most state constitutions envision that they will have a strong role in education, in practice they’ve tended to devolve power to local districts. Many governors and legislators never wanted the responsibility of enforcing accountability standards that were e…
    Illiteracy is a policy choice - by Kelsey Piper
  • with good instruction, almost every single student can learn to read. Until we are reaching rates like those nationwide, we are condemning hundreds of thousands of children to a life of limited opportunities completely avoidably.
    Illiteracy is a policy choice - by Kelsey Piper
  • There’s also just a pervasive sense of complacency about schools in blue states and cities, where, at least until recently, local school boards have been more interested in issues around equity than measurably improving learning outcomes.
    Illiteracy is a policy choice - by Kelsey Piper
  • Mississippi required schools to notify parents when their child was off track and to craft individual reading plans for those with reading deficiencies. In other words, the threat of retention may have shifted behavior in important ways.
    Illiteracy is a policy choice - by Kelsey Piper
  • In Mississippi, a child who isn’t capable of reading at the end of third grade has to repeat the grade — a policy called third grade retention.2 Alabama and Tennessee have implemented it too. Research has found that third grade retention doesn’t harm students in non-academic ways and tends to help them academically — but, of course, it’s upsetting for kids, frustrating for families, and unpleasant for educators. Unfortunately, that’s probably part of why it works.
    Illiteracy is a policy choice - by Kelsey Piper
  • Billions of dollars are spent — and largely wasted — every year on professional development for teachers that is curriculum-agnostic, i.e., aimed at generic, disembodied teaching skills without reference to any specific curriculum.
    Illiteracy is a policy choice - by Kelsey Piper
  • “There was such a high level of connoisseurship, of everything. That made the culture better. A very discerning audience…is as important to the culture as artists. It’s exactly as important.”
    everyone wants to be a DJ, no one wants to dance
  • please, please, please — please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please — decide what to do with your life based on the concrete particulars of the real actual life you are really actually living. Look in your fridge. Look! In! Your! Fridge! You cannot cook a meal with ingredients you do not have. You cannot eat food you cannot…
    Twitter
  • The shape of the green transition is being rewritten, too. If dirt-cheap green tech can enable developing nations to declare a kind of energy independence, they can extract themselves from exploitative relationships with petrostates and protect themselves from inflation and punishing debt.
    It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics. - The New York Times
  • The historian Adam Tooze has taken to suggesting that the entire history of global modernity should be rewritten with the rapid recent development of China as the core analytic prism and narrative center.
    It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics. - The New York Times
  • China will be “the global clean tech hegemon,” whose ability to confer cheap clean energy has already become one unmistakably valuable source of soft power.
    It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics. - The New York Times
  • In certain ways, the story is one that moderates and skeptics long predicted: that decarbonization could not be reliably imposed from above on moralistic terms and would have to be powered instead by market forces, private investment and the informed consensus of a price-conscious public. These are familiar and somewhat simplistic neoliberal bromides, and if they now look prophetic, it is also a strange kind of prophecy: Global policymakers may be leaving climate increasingly to markets, but they are doing so even as in other realms they are embracing a new language of muscular state capacity …
    It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics. - The New York Times
  • In the years that followed Paris, you would often hear the phrase “World War II-style mobilization,” invoked to inspire climate action of the same scale and urgency. Instead, we have gotten a real re-militarization
    It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics. - The New York Times
  • In the years following Paris came more and more talk of climate justice, the ways that rich countries were choking the futures of the poor with carbon and temperature rise. This was just one of many similar reckonings with systemic social inequities in those years, and a green transition may have looked to world leaders like a more appealing and forward-focused way of expiating white guilt than, say, portioning out reparations for centuries of slavery or colonialism. Indeed, politicians and their appointees routinely dismissed calls to even discuss climate reparations, preferring to promise tr…
    It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics. - The New York Times
  • You can either be the kind of person who accepts the challenges and figures it out, or the kind of person who complains. And it’s a lot easier to accept the challenges when the kid train is pulling you through them.
    Having Kids Has Been Far Easier and Better than I Expected
  • Many of the best changes you can make in life are on the other side of some cost you’re painfully familiar with, but where the payoff is a kind of joy you can’t yet comprehend.
    Having Kids Has Been Far Easier and Better than I Expected
  • The use of any lubricating powder in crokinole is controversial, with some purists reviling the practice.
    Crokinole - Wikipedia
  • But the other fun fact about the zhongkao is that there is a physical education component that is part of the scoring. And it is not easy.
    China Travel Blog - by Charles Yang - Rough Drafts
  • When I talked to my uncle in Shanghai about how Taiwanese social norms seem stronger than in China, he said this: “Yes, in many ways, the Taiwanese are more attached to “Chinese culture” than we are. It is because they didn’t have Mao Zhedong and the cultural revolution, which uprooted many of these long held traditions”
    China Travel Blog - by Charles Yang - Rough Drafts
  • “We are going to build this pilot plant and deploy these smart windows to show their value to real estate developers. Then we will sell this manufacturing equipment and build smart window factories to sell to real estate developers, once they see the benefits of this technology”.
    China Travel Blog - by Charles Yang - Rough Drafts
  • Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational. This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond eve…
    Laudato si' (24 May 2015) | Francis
  • The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.
    Laudato si' (24 May 2015) | Francis