Documenting Life

“It takes effort to remember that the figures and outfits in the paintings were just what was around at the time, not some remembered or imagined history. The frocks and suits were the equivalent of today’s cardigans and crop tops and baggy jeans and chore coats. (There’s a genre of 21st-century painting that I’ve taken to thinking of as Brooklyn Impressionism, IYKYK.) In the paintings, these are people just walking around in the park upon an afternoon, taking their dogs out, drinking glasses of wine. (I would love to see an Impressionism show focused solely on meals and tables.) The normalcy was radical, the banality was modern”

https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/paintings-of-your-friends-and-nice

“Nature takes babies by the bushel, sending decent and vulnerable career women to the bathroom at work, bleeding, weeping and inconsolable, telling themselves they’ve got five minutes to get it together and head back to their desks so that no one knows. Once you understand that you live in a world where atoms make up cells that make up tissues that make up organs that make up embryos that end up as clots in the toilets of people who desperately, desperately want to have children, you can’t take the idea of a “right to life” seriously anymore”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/all-the-little-unborn-babies

“farmland in the UK, up until the last budget, was not subject to inheritance tax. This made it popular as an investment for very rich people, which pushed the price up markedly. It’s quite tricky to precisely model the value of the tax shield, but the marginal rate[1] of inheritance tax is 40%; if you’re close enough to the Grim Reaper to be thinking seriously about estate planning, you might be willing to accept a really quite low annual rate of return in order to avoid that.

Which is what happened – in the thirty or so years since Agricultural Land Relief was brought into the tax code, the price per acre of farmland has gone up roughly fourfold, and according to credible numbers I’ve seen, there are plenty of farms which, considered as businesses, are earning a return on assets of less than 1%”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/things-you-do-which-youd-rather-not

“Now, Kalshi – riding the wave of those accurate predictions, millions of new users and billions of dollars in trades – is expanding the range of what its users can bet on. Polymarket is courting political influencers like Nate Silver and ZeroHedge to pose questions that users can bet on. Robinhood and DraftKings plan to throw their hats in the political betting ring, too. Will every public event soon be freighted with billions of dollars in online wagers? Will the Oscars become a new type of speculative financial market? Would you stake your life’s savings on whether egg prices will go up during Trump’s first month in office, a real bet you can make on Kalshi?”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/19/betting-markets-come-for-everything-and-the-fbi-comes-for-a-betting-market

“there is a cult of learned helplessness at the core of most American institutions, one that Trump punctured by appearing to be a man of action. And the Democratic Party in 2024, with its associated law firms, think tanks, elected officials, donors, and media outlets, was rejected by voters precisely because the core value on the left, center, and right is about embracing powerlessness. This pervasive belief has an intellectual and political origin, and it conflicts directly with the anti-monopoly framework”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/on-the-democratic-partys-cult-of

“this is definitely just me following my mind down a certain set of possibly logical steps. And longer term, one can’t but think that the publishing industry per se needs to contract, if its most loyal constituency is dwindling. It should become harder to get a book contract. There should be fewer jobs in publishing. There should be fewer creative writing programs. Monographs should not be required for tenure. Etc, etc—topics, again, that are not new, and the shifts have been in place for awhile. A certain kind of book—say those reviewed in the NYRB—will become like opera, or theater, or ballet, and their readers like their patrons. It’ll be an increasingly minor art”

https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/my-friends-arent-reading

“These songs and more (“Infinity,” “If the Earth Is Spinning” featuring Sia) may have you contemplating the sanitized way Las Vegas lobby culture changed dance pop; the centrifugal pull of corporate raves are one thing, but something about the chlorine smell of a casino has wafted too heavily into the studios where many such songs are being crafted”

https://www.hearingthings.co/paris-hilton-infinite-icon-review/

“It was impressed upon me regularly that ‘scapegoating’ – the practice of laying blame for a society’s woes upon an identifiable minority – was one of the great recurrent evils of mankind’s history, and a moral failing that pretty much meant you were responsible for Holocaust-level evil. Is this no longer a term of shame and disgrace in our society? The GOP, and others, have never fully stopped scapegoating of course, but it was so clearly shameful one had to be coy about it”

https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/i-know-what-happened

“I would actually be quite interested if any of the current objections to flexible work ever get repurposed for the AI revolution. “If all these tasks are done by AI, how will our junior staff serve their apprenticeship?” “This is a relationship business and you can’t build trusted relationships with AI content”. Will we ever get CEOs sending all-staff emails saying “It has been a valuable experiment and I appreciate that some colleagues feel that AI has improved their productivity, but we work best when we work as a team, and that means a team of human beings. So, allowing six months notice for those colleagues who need to adapt their arrangements, we will be a no-AI company once more starting from Labor Day”. I have an intuition that they won’t”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/a-more-subtle-cost-disease

“Just as smell, our most nebulous, non-literal sense, has the ability to take an indefinable scent and trigger precise memories, there is something specific about certain images that are so imprecise that they pull from our entire consciousness to organize meaning”

https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/our-camera-rolls-our-selves