š reading time: 5m 26s.
hi there. happy monday!
iāve taken two days off work and i still havenāt quite relaxed yet. what helps you to detach? š§
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š earworm:Ā listen to azizi gibson onĀ spotifyĀ orĀ apple music.
š word of the week:
ā
legerity
ā.
physical or mental quickness; nimbleness; agility.
alighting with the legerity of a cat, he swerved leftward in the recoil, and was off, like a streak of mulberry-coloured lightning, down the high.
- zuleika dobson, 1911
š§ brain candy:
š¢ do you find yourself struggling to hear dialogue in modern movies? youāre not alone. christopher nolanās latest epic, tenet, has brought muffled dialogue to the fore.
š missed your chance to watch david blaine fly to 25,000 feet using a bunch of balloons live? don't worry, it went well.
š± amazon has foreign plant sales in the us, after mystery seeds sent to households this summer led us officials to raise alarm over ease of e-commerce seed sales.
ā ļø a new investigation sheds light on the secret plan to reboot isis from a huge digital cache of 90k+ online documents that are still being used to actively disseminate propaganda on social media.
š» each year, some choose to 'disappear' and abandon their lives, jobs, homes and families. in japan, there are companies that can help those looking to escape into thin air.
š¤Ŗ mildly humorous:
š” longer reads:
š¢ office economy.
for a decade, carlos silva has been gluing, nailing, and re-zippering shoes and boots at stern shoe repair, a usually well-trafficked shop just outside the metro entrance at union station in washington, d.c. on a typical day, he would arrive at 7 a.m. and stay until 8 p.m., serving the crowds of professionals shuttling by on their way to work. but since the near-shutdown of office work and train travel, he has been closing the shop at 4 p.m. āthere is no traffic, my friend. the whole station is dead,ā says silva. ānow itās only a part-time job.ā
in the five months since the coronavirus forced a lockdown of u.s. businesses, economists have focused much attention on the devastation of mom-and-pop businesses, brick-and-mortar shops, bars and restaurants, and massive chains. but they have mostly overlooked a looming threat to a vastly larger and more consequential galaxy of businesses, one worth trillions of dollars a year in gdp and revolving around a single, much underappreciated economic actor ā the white-collar office worker.
as companies in cities across the u.s. postpone and even scrap plans to reopen their offices, they have transformed once-teeming city business districts into commercial ghost towns comprised of essentially vacant skyscrapers and upscale complexes. a result has been the paralysis of the rarely remarked-upon business ecosystem centering on white-collar workers, who, when you include the enterprises reliant on them, account for a pre-pandemic labor force approaching 100 million workers.
these workers shopped at small businesses like silvaās shoe repair shop: dry cleaners, gyms, food carts, florists, and pharmacies. but they were also among the most vital customers and source of revenue for a slew of larger, less obvious businesses ā food delivery companies like grubhub and uber eats, and companies like xerox, the maker of printing supplies. amid covid-19, workwear destinations brooks brothers and j.crew have filed for bankruptcy protection, with brooks brothers selling itself last month. and, on its quarterly earnings call in late july, starbucks attributed the loss of some $2 billion year on year to deserted urban office corridors. starting off their day at home, remote workers are simply not queueing up in the same numbers for a morning venti latte.
šĀ read moreĀ viaĀ marker.
š½Ā
escape pods
.
many of us donāt like who we have become in this pandemic but feel little freedom to choose otherwise. officially, we may be wearing our masks to protect others, but it sure does feel appropriate to hide our faces when weāre engaging in so many self-interested, survivalist activities in the light of day ā leveraging whatever privilege we may enjoy to stock and equip our homes so they can serve as makeshift bunkers, workplaces, private schools, and hermetically sealed entertainment centers.
sure, because iām still being paid as a professor at cuny (the city university of new york), i donated my government relief check to the local food pantry and am sending a significant portion of my income to friends who can no longer meet their basic expenses. but i also went and spent $500 on a big rubber pool for my daughter and our neighborsā kids to use as the basis for a makeshift private summer camp. and iāve seen similar inflatable blue bubbles all over town.
ādonāt tell anyone,ā one of my neighbors told me when he came over to borrow some chlorine tablets, ābut weāre thinking to ride this whole thing out in zurich, where the numbers are better.ā his wife still has her european passport, and they both have jobs that can be done entirely remotely. theyād be joining scores of people i know ā not millionaires, but writers and marketers and consultants and web developers ā who are resettling in canada or europe on the logic that their kids shouldnāt be sacrificed to their progressive parentsā sense of shame about escaping.
when i challenge him on the ethics of bailing, he snaps back, āat least the elementary school will have two less bodies to space at six-foot intervals. iām doing you a favor.ā he canāt resist showing me the photo on his phone from the rental site. it was a gorgeous, solar-powered cabin on a remote hillside with the headline āluxury eco-lodge.ā he smiled. āi always wanted the kids to get a waldorf education, and now they even have an online option.ā
it sounds idyllic. so much so that i canāt help but wonder if the threat of infection is less the reason for his newfound embrace of virtual insulation than it is the excuse.
itās certainly the message i got a couple of years ago when a few tech billionaires asked me to water test their doomsday bunker strategies. ostensibly, they were worried about āthe eventā ā the war, climate catastrophe, or, yes, global pandemic that ends life as we know it and forces them to retreat to their high-tech fortresses in alaska or new zealand. we spent most of the session discussing potential flaws in their scenario planning, such as whether the human security forces they were intending to hire could be adequately controlled once cash no longer had value. if only they could work out these last few kinks, they could safely escape from the rest of us.
šĀ read moreĀ viaĀ onezero.
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