"A thought came into my head, momentarily paralyzing me: these might be your last few minutes. My clumsy gloved hands scrabbled uselessly at the edges of the neoprene trapping me in the boat. As I realized I couldn’t release the spray skirt that way either, panic, regret, and sorrow flooded my brain." For @longreads, Maggie Slepian relates her near-death experience and its aftermath.
"As I watched Max walk off with a group of foreign strangers into an unknown land, it felt like a glimpse of my future, and his. I was slowing down, and he was speeding up."
"I made a wish on a monkey’s paw for more and better work and some capitalist fairy godmother granted it to me. With it came a new problem: Showing up wouldn’t cut it anymore. I would have to be productive."
"And this is the point: first came Adderall, then came the Internet. We didn’t get on Adderall because the Internet was too good. The Internet was good in the particular way that it was good because we were on Adderall."
A @pluralistic instant classic. I was familiar with many of the concepts he articulates from previous pieces of his I'd read, but not "schismogenesis," which I admit I was guilty of concerning the COVID vaccine. A must-read if you're not acquainted with Doctorow's brilliance. #essay#recommendedreading
"I wasn’t quite sure it would make me into a true adventurer or even a better, more confident person, but there were dogs. They also said no one had ever died on one of their expeditions. I was sold."
Here Be Dragons or: NUCLEAR YINYANG (sub-subtitle: "her love became a nuclear bomb")
8000 words inspired by #BreathOfFireIV covering: friendship, renting apartments, envy, #WorldWarII, and the #ethics of death. also several #music references to the point where the footnotes are practically a playlist of my time writing this #essay
"In 2020, we heard that the pandemic’s silver lining would be all the inequalities it had highlighted; at the dawn of 2024, it’s clear those inequalities are just as entrenched, or worse, than before."
"We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from."
'Bullshitten' omdat het kan, door Dilan Yesilgöz #VVD
Debatteren en beargumenteren zonder je erom te bekommeren of wat je zegt wel waar is. Praten zonder je wezenlijk te interesseren voor de waarheid - @SheilaS
"If anything is novel about UATX’s model, it is the creation of a rightwing monoculture in the form of a university, rather than a thinktank or policy institute."
For The New Inquiry, Noah Rawlings writes about the University of Austin's Forbidden Courses program, or what he describes as “a sort of anti-woke summer camp."
"Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable, we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting."
Book 11, 2024: On Trampolining by Rebecca Perry. A sports memoir with a difference. Poet Perry writes about falling in love with trampolining as a girl, the pain and delight the sport brings her, and how her time as a young athlete resonates with her as a grown-up. #sport#books#essay#nonfiction@bookstodon
In this moving #essay Laura Leigh Abby recounts how the experience of having a child needing critical surgery taught her what it means when people really show up for you.
Hey Fedi!
I'm writing an argumentative essay about why cats should not be allowed outdoors unsupervised. If anyone of you have some cool papers relating to this I can read about and add, that'd be very helpful :D