🏠 isolation.
on the agenda this week: a note from me on a month in lockdown, no more protests, & undefinable concepts.
📖 reading time: 4m 57s.
on the agenda this week:
a note from me on a month in lockdown, no more protests, & undefinable concepts.
⚡️ tag me on instagram or follow me on twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain!
📝 a note on: a month in lockdown.
👋 hi, it’s been a hot minute!
i miss my dog. i miss my family. but otherwise, i’ve thankfully had a safe time locked down in dublin.
i’m very conscious that this has not been a good time for many & so i will refrain from talking about sunshine & happiness too often.
that being said, humans are remarkably resilient & focusing on the positives will drive us forward, together.
a lot has happened since my last newsletter:
we entered a new decade
i failed miserably at maintaining a weekly cadence of writing
i took a month off work & travelled across australia
i moved out of home (second attempt) at the start of the pandemic
i’m about to celebrate 1 year at stripe
the world awaits an exit strategy
i thought it would be apt timing to sit & write something — i missed this.
in my last newsletter, i wrote:
i’m not quite sure how to feel about the fact that this decade seems to have passed by in just a blink of an eye.
the past month has felt like an interminable wait but we wait nonetheless in the hopes that acting decisively now to distance ourselves from others will flatten the curve.
thanks for sticking around & reading my rambling words, especially during this uncertain time.
it means an awful lot.
- sam.
📚 word of the week:
“panacea”.
an answer or solution for all problems or difficulties.
that could help provide a financial lifeline for the difficult weeks ahead — but it isn’t a panacea ….
- the new york times, 03/20.
🤪 mildly humorous:
outtakes from the twitter-sphere.
🧠 brain candy:
🏛
thou doth not protest enough
.
thousands of public demonstrations led to 2019 being dubbed the “year of street protest,” but covid-19 is now having a chilling effect on opposition movements everywhere.
algeria’s protest movement seemed unstoppable.
after forcing the country’s president of 20 years to step down last year—and the arrest of dozens of the country’s leaders—the protesters continued into 2020, demanding a total upheaval of the political system.
then came the novel coronavirus, and the sudden end to 56 consecutive weeks of protests. on march 17, the country’s new president banned protests for more than a year under the pretext of stopping the spread of the virus. so far, protesters seemed to have acquiesced to the demand, with the streets of algiers reportedly empty.
read more via quartz.
📚
untranslatable words
.
this is a wonderful piece by david shariatmadari on the allure of undefinable concepts.
goya. a small word, but one that contains multitudes. it is one of those mythic beasts, the “untranslatables,” the foreign words that supposedly lack any equivalent in english. lists of them spread virally online. someone may have shared one with you on social media: it might have included utepils, sgrìob and saudade—of which more later. but for now, let us examine goya.
urdu speakers know the meaning of goya in their bones; for the rest of us it is a mystery. when a native son or daughter of pakistan hears it, whole worlds are conjured—scenes of tales told around a fire as the smoke rises into the crisp air of the hindu kush, of being dandled on a grandmother’s knee, of being told a cautionary tale by a village elder as a child and remembering it for the rest of your days. “goya,” as one breathless internet account has it, “is an urdu word that refers to the transporting suspension of disbelief that happens when fantasy is so realistic that it temporarily becomes reality . . . usually associated with good, powerful storytelling.”
goya. almost a mystical experience in itself. but look it up in a dictionary and you’ll find “as if,” “as though” and “as it were.”
read more via lithub.
🤑
the public ledger
.
venmo (paypal) may not be a familiar word to many of you who read this but it’s one of the most popular peer-to-peer payment methods in the u.s. (at least among millennials).
by default, transactions are set to public. in the beginning, being able to see your friends’ activity is part of what venmo helped stand out from competing payment apps like square’s cash app.
unless you change the settings yourself, the stuff you do on venmo is publicly visible—and anyone can dig into the application’s public api and see everything they’re up to, including usernames, comments, and date.
what do thi duc found was a soap opera-worthy set of stories, with a few specifically standing out: there were what seemed to be couples fighting and flirtingy, sending messages along with payments and requests like “you don’t love me,” and “i’m waiting for the sugar daddy.” she watched what seemed like a drug dealer, based on tree and pill emojis, send and receive regular payments. for a married couple, she was able to piece together the specifics of their lives, complete with a dog they took to the vet, grocery trips to walmart, and takeout dinners, down to the specific types of food they ordered.
“the moment when i went, ‘wow this is just unbelievable,’ is when i discovered the stories of the lovers,” do thi duc told me in an email. “just the intimacy of those conversations—this was definitely not mean to be public. but that also applies to all the stories, this information shouldn’t be that easy accessible.”
read more via vice.
👂 earworm: odie.
“look up look up look up
the sky is falling
she's falling
for you.”
stream now:
“little lies” opens with soft guitar melodies that are accompanied by drum sounds as the song progresses. self-awareness and introspection make us question our beliefs, over the instrumentals, odie sings, “what if all this was a little lie/ what if all my sins never met a god”. odie’s “little lies” makes listeners wonder if the fear of tampering with the concept of faith and purpose of human existence could be making the world worse; perhaps, “only then would you realize, the sky is falling”.
- nativemag.
listen to odie on spotify or on apple music.
🦶 footer:
it’s nice to say hello again.
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twitter: @sammcallister
email me: smcallis[at]gmail.com
website: sammcallister.me
👋 read one of my last 5 posts:
🖼 the art of money laundering.
🏡 cul de sac.
or click to see them all.