📖 reading time: 3m 21s.
🐶 hi there. happy monday!
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as always, feel free to skip any section that doesn’t interest you or reply directly to this email. a special thank you to my paid subscribers — i really appreciate the support.
👂 earworm: listen to jean dawson’s dreamy track on spotify or apple music.
🧠 brain candy:
🏠 i’ve been spending some time looking out of stranger’s windows this week. you can do the same at window swap, a website where you can view self-submitted quarantine views. it’s quite cathartic.
🖥 did you notice some of your favourite websites going down for a period on friday night? cloudflare — who handle internet requests for ~13% of fortune 1,000 companies — had a brief outage that was noticed worldwide.
🤑 companies like deloitte and ibm have made millions building u.s. state unemployment websites that didn't work, yet they seem to keep getting contracts to fix them.
💀 an interesting look at startups that provide end-of-life services, from estate planning to online forums for grieving virtually, amid a surge in interest during the pandemic.
🐦 twitter have published their post-mortem on the widespread hacking of verified “celebrity” accounts on july 15th. it appears hackers were able to gain access by means of social engineering, rather than brute force.
🐀 pest-control is not the most glamourous of industries but david royce has built a track record of building pest-control businesses, selling them to a consolidator, and repeating.
💥 seventy-five years ago, the first nuclear bomb, nicknamed “the gadget,” was detonated in the new mexico desert. three weeks later, two more were released over hiroshima and nagasaki, killing at least 140,000 civilians.
🤪 mildly humorous:
💡 longer reads:
☕️ bitter brew
.
the scary part is that you think you can do better.
i never realized how ubiquitous the dream of opening a small coffeehouse was until i fell under its spell myself. friends’ eyes misted over when my wife and i would excitedly recite our concept (“vienna roast from vienna! it’s lighter and sweeter than bitter italian espresso—no need to drown it in milk!”). it seemed that just about every boho-professional couple had indulged in this fantasy at some point or another.
the dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one’s own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. the small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. to a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. which is good, because they’re going to lose a lot of it.
👉 read more via slate.
🎹
parked piano
.
mr. huggins faced a lean day ahead. that afternoon, just a few people slipped $1 and $5 bills into his donation buckets as he played chopin and philip glass, whereas normally, mr. huggins can make a decent sum in a couple of hours.
for the last 15 years, mr. huggins, a slender and studious-looking man with tattooed hands, has been a superstar busker in washington square park, performing to big crowds who fall under the sway of his balletic playing and the striking sight of seeing someone perform outdoors on a 900-pound steinway. with his classical piano act, mr. huggins has earned enough money to survive modestly in new york for years, but that livelihood is held together by a delicately calibrated system, and the pandemic has obliterated it.
mr. huggins is now facing the stark uncertainty that every street performer in the city is reckoning with: no tourists, and the audiences that do show up are thin, hesitant, and socially distant.
👉 read more via the new york times.
📚 word of the week:
“adamantine”.
utterly unyielding or firm in attitude or opinion.
and the moment of commitment came with the special force that was central to his character: an adamantine, unshakable conviction that what he was doing was unequivocally right
- the spy and the traitor, 2018
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