✽ Conspiracy theories aren't new: "The news desks at ABC/NBC/CBS stuck to the mainstream version of events, unless they had clear evidence that the official were lying." The internet doesn't. It's a good time to remember that modern nations are imagined communities. Besides our close family and friends, most communities are shaped by what we consume. Since I can't know my neighbors the way villages knew each other in the past, I have to have a common past and future in my head. Preferably, one based on truth. ⬇️
"If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis"
Barack Obama
✽ Anne Applebaum on complicity
✽ Legibility on the web: part history, part appreciation for eyes still preferring printed material
✽ On why your professional writing sucks: Ease up on trying to sound smart and to expect the reader is as clever and sophisticated as you.
✽ Nature sounds: Bird out on your next walk 🐦
✽ The big here and long now: "Now" is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It's ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows."
✽ How to be a good ancestor: It's easy to discount the future. An idea toolkit helps.
🪕 Emma Swift - One of Us Must Know via No Depression, a journal of Roots Music