Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Consciousness is a miracle, truly, and remains the deepest of mysteries, yes, but it is also so very simple that it can fit into a sentence: I open my eyes and a world appears.

— Michael Pollan / A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness

Our world has been flooded by a deluge of digital platforms, their ceaseless flow submerging our daily lives. From the planetary infrastructures of Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple, WeChat, and Alibaba, to the on-demand labor of Uber, Didi, Upwork, and Deliveroo, we’ve become networked datums in digital portfolios. The infrastructures of capitalism now flow through cables and cloud servers that states have been slow and economically disincentivized to regulate. We are all paying rent in the internet of landlords. This is an evolving machinery in which datafication facilitates dispossession.

— Matthew Cole / “The Digital Economy is Destroying Our Lives and Our Planet—and AI is Only Going to Make It Worse” / lithub.com

Nowhere is a person free when men cage other men. Nowhere is America. Nowhere. Maybe a gap between a boy’s baby teeth. Maybe a legion of milkless mothers. A lit match. An unbolted cage.

— Jeanann Verlee / “Peril, Ignored”

Thousands of cities are decoupling economic growth from the burning of fossil fuels. Researchers compared levels of the greenhouse gas nitrogen dioxide (NO2) with information on gross domestic product (GDP) to track the green development trajectories of more than 5,000 of the world’s biggest cities. About 2,000 cities showed improvement in both metrics between 2019 and 2024 — most of them in China.

— Flora Graham / “The cities getting ‘richer and cleaner’” / Nature Brief

a garland
for the body
forming a garland
for the body . . .

— John Giorno / “Lucky Man”

All I see in hindsight is the chaos of history repeated, over and over, reenacted, reinterpreted, the world, its fucked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again as it winds its way around a sun. And in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure.

— Valeria Luiselli / Lost Children Archives

I think cycling and my cycling mental state are very closely linked to the mental state that I want to be in for writing … Both require the motivation to practise over and over again, even if you’re struggling with the messy middle or terrible weather.

— Hannah Marais / “The Tandem Qualities of Writing and Cycling” / Cycling

What I’m Listening To:

He says, “Only the strong survive”
You don’t get to decide what strength is
Not today
I’m a daydream unbeliever

— Shearwater / “Daydream Unbeliever”

The Cycling Front

Today I’ll be riding the gap in from Worcester, MA and closing the gap here in Massachusetts.

I’ll also finalize plans for the final push to Lubec, Maine later this week.

And enjoy the comforts of home, while hopefully being kinder to my cranky right knee.

Read about it here tomorrow.