I loved this article. I feel guilty about keeping my cat inside - he stares out the windows all day and rushes to attempt escape each time I open the door. I also felt guilty when I lived in a place that allowed me to let him outside because he's SUCH a hunter and always killing things (birds, rabbits, even snakes). The author is so empathetic toward animals - I wonder if South Africans are especially attuned to the animal world because their country is full of such amazing animals.

My two cents: you shouldn’t be afraid to take a bigger percent! Readup wouldn’t exist without you. And you pour everything into it.

So happy you're finally doing this. I'm in.

I'm reading a book called The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie. Stegner wrote the foreword. I love being a Reader so much more than a user!

You both have a lot to be proud of. I trust you!

Whoa. Reminded me of the Bible story about Joseph.

There is no centripetal force, dialing you in, pulling you home. It’s centrifugal force, flinging you outward, away from your true nature.

Keep writing these articles!

Or maybe you’ll have the best eulogy of all time. Maybe every single person in the room will be changed forever because of something that’s completely out of your control. Maybe at the exact right moment a bolt of lightening will shoot through the stained glass above the altar and shards of colored glass will rain across the entire congregation and people will shout “Hallelujah!” and smear blood across each other’s faces.

This is an excerpt from Freedom! Bill, remember when you read that book in the car on the trip with my parents to Utah and Arizona?

Of course Blake has an F-250 pickup.

Great reflections on gentrification.

Sad to watch the Berglunds descent into unhappiness - how the mighty always seem to fall.

Classic Franzen. No redemption. I just finished Purity which, like Freedom and The Corrections, I devoured. How does he do it?

Love this glimpse into the modeling world, which I know nothing about. Reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and makes me miss New York. Beautiful reflections on compromise, childhood, growing up. If I ever have children, I hope they don't want to be models.

He's like, 'Why do you want to do this?' And I said, 'Because I want to be a star.' It didn't mean that I want to be famous. It didn't mean that I wanted everyone to know me, it just meant that I want to be a star to myself. That I wanted to be successful to myself, that I wanted to go somewhere with my life and I wanted it then, I wanted it now.”

I first read this poem in a bookstore in DC during the summer of 2017. I'm so happy I rediscovered it.

your hair coming down you / wanted to explode out of / what was holding you

she was finished—finally, for good—with trying to please people she didn’t care about.

they looked at all the world as though they were eating it up and it was the most delicious thing they’d ever tasted

I didn’t mourn for any of it, because you can’t mourn for a dream.

Whoa, I just read two books that perfectly relate to this article. Susan Sontag wrote On Photography in 1975, but so much of it seems to be about Instagram. For example:

Technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs.

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.

In Permanent Record, Edward Snowden primarily writes about the mass surveillance system built by the NSA, but he also mentions that technology companies use our data to advertise to us. I love this from the article:

But what is there to say? We know it, we know it, we know it. Still we keep scrolling, deeper down the well of our bottomless need.

I'm just so excited to be reading articles like this about cannabis companies. People are taking the industry seriously.

Of course, we cannot talk about cannabis without talking about social justice and the highly racialized history of cannabis in the U.S. In 2018, I attended the first ever cannabis conference held at a U.S. business school (Yale School of Management). In the U.S., 75-80% of cannabis arrests are people of color. Ebele Ifedigbo cofounded the Hood Incubator, a nonprofit focused on making sure black and brown communities are included in the industry. The communities devastated by the War on Drugs have taken the risks, so they should reap the rewards. Ebele said, “We’re not doing business as usual. We’re doing business better.” All of the speakers were excited to set a precedent for other industries to be oriented toward social justice. Shaping the cannabis industry offers the opportunity to change the rules of engagement for how business is done in the U.S., which is very exciting.

Part of me wants to move to Canada and work in the legal cannabis industry.

Such a fun read. I love apples! Interesting that crispness is more important than taste when it comes to apples - I never thought about it before but think it’s true for me as well. I was tickled to read about apples as intellectual property - as someone who worked in the patents department at Google, I think of hardware and software as IP but not fruit! It’s wild that the Honeycrisp was named one of 25 innovations that changed the world.

The “prescription cascade” is so scary - doctors prescribing meds to their patients and then meds for the side effects of those meds - yikes!

I had never heard the term “de-prescribing.” I’m happy people, including doctors, are talking about this.

There’s a quotation from my yoga teacher training: We have so much to unlearn here.

I have struggled with anxiety my whole life and would never even consider taking pills for it, especially after reading this!

When benzodiazepines have severe withdrawal symptoms, what was once a relief from anxiety becomes its source, and so the person becomes enslaved to the substance that was meant to offer freedom.

I'm so sad this beautiful island cannot get a break :(

I traveled to Puerto Rico for a couple weeks in October 2019. One day, I went to the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, a museum that displays works exclusively by Puerto Rican artists. I saw a lot of art with hurricanes as subject matter. They conveyed fear, death, loss, unstoppable motion. But they also portrayed disaster bringing people together. Tropical cyclones, as well as earthquakes, test the strength of Puerto Ricans and make them protective. The author of this article writes that "suffering can produce perseverance", and I definitely saw that in the people I met there.

It's so scary and sad to think that, the longer a catastrophe lasts, the more it becomes normalized and the easier it is to forget. If a disaster isn't sudden but drags on, we learn to live with it. The focus required to address climate change is antithetical to the way our attention spans work now.

The author writes that he expected more media coverage of the fires because the U.S. usually pays more attention to countries like Australia than to the developing world:

I would have expected the same prejudices would bind the sympathy and empathy of millions across the U.S. and Europe to the plight of a mostly white, English-speaking “First World” former colony like Australia.

I can't decide if I would be even more disappointed if we did care deeply about what was happening in Australia while completely ignoring poorer countries.

Iran makes me realize that 1. concepts like right and wrong are meaningless and 2. it's impossible to really know about another country until you go there. I don't agree with the author's conclusion that, "Everything Fareed Zakaria and Roger Cohen knew, or at least believed, was wrong."

I'm concerned the assassination of Soleimani will help Trump get re-elected.

By continuing to associate with a known sex offender, these men from the worlds of higher education and tech are complicit in his actions, even if they didn't directly participate in sex-trafficking. Someone I know recently said, "You are who you hang out with."

I'm scared the world is about to watch a bunch of high-profile men get off scot-free.

I’m not at all one of those people who follows the Royal Family, but it’s cool that Harry and Meghan are becoming financially independent.

I wonder for how much longer England will be a monarchy. Seems like it might crumble once Queen Elizabeth dies.

Harry and Meghan are adopting a new media strategy to "engage with grassroots media organisations and young, up-and-coming journalists". This could be an opportunity for Readup!