Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
This is the sixth birthday of this letter. 6 x 52 = 312 letters so far. I love this project. I love riding with you. Thanks for taking the ride with me.
Happy Friday. Happy Birthday.
Learning
"Could we let ourselves be led by what we already know how to do, and by what we have it in us to save?"
ayanaelizabeth.com
"Amidst all of the perspectives and arguments around our ecological future, this much is true: we are not in the natural world — we are part of it. The next-generation marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson would let that reality of belonging show us the way forward. She loves the ocean. She loves human beings. And she’s animated by questions emerging from those loves — and from the science she does — which we scarcely know how to take seriously amidst so much demoralizing bad ecological news." - On Being
On Being Podcast: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: 'What If We Get This Right'?
How We Live
The concept of 'restriction' is a promise of possibility, pleasure, and connection, not to mention a foundation of bigger, needed, change.
Alicia Kennedy via CirlcleAround
"Consumption as we know it, based on the endless growth that capitalism demands, attempts to abolish alternate possibilities for regionalism and new ways of living. While the crisis of climate change has undoubtedly been caused by fossil fuel companies, it is also the responsibility of those living especially in the United States and other rich nations to change our lifestyles to fit in with the environment’s clear demands for us to tread more lightly. And it’s ever more important for those who have economic ability and cultural capital to model behaviors that make treading lightly seem easy and desirable, to show that what has been proffered as 'restriction' actually houses possibility for pleasure and connection, as well as a foundation for bigger change." - Alicia Kennedy
Article: Restriction as Possibility; Lifestyle as Politics
Psychedelics, Learning
"On key metrics, a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable from subjects who took medium doses of LSD or magic mushrooms."
David Glowacki is an artist and computational molecular physicist. He has developed a VR experience called Isness-D that shows the same effect on four key indicators used in studies of psychedelics as a medium dose of LSD or psilocybin (the main psychoactive component of “magic” mushrooms), according to a recent study in Nature Scientific Reports.
"Isness-D is designed for groups of four to five people based anywhere in the world. Each participant is represented as a diffuse cloud of smoke with a ball of light right about where a person’s heart would be.
"Participants can partake in an experience called energetic coalescence: they gather in the same spot in the virtual-reality landscape to overlap their diffuse bodies, making it impossible to tell where each person begins and ends. The resulting sense of deep connectedness and ego attenuation mirrors feelings commonly brought about by a psychedelic experience." - Hana Kiros
Article: VR is as Good as Psychedelics at Helping People Reach Transcendence
Community
“Relationships and communities are created between people who move together.”
Messages of community … participants do the Electric Slide during the Dance For George protest for justice in New York in June 2020. Photograph: Shoun Hill/Alamy
"It’s been observed that during times of significant world change, the popularity of house music peaks as people look for a way to release all their pent-up stress and energy on the dance floor. Think of the German youth dancing during the fall of the Berlin Wall, inspired by the tunes that came out of 1980s Detroit and Chicago, or LGBTQ people finding a family in the face of marginalisation in society.
"House music and dance have accompanied recent protests such as the Freedom to Dance rally in London in the summer of 2021, to encourage the lifting of Covid restrictions in the music and hospitality sectors. At the global Black Lives Matter demonstrations against police brutality and racism in 2020, people sometimes danced to the Electric Slide, a 22-step sequence incorporating the grapevine move. Such dances bring forth messages of community to those who are thought of as outsiders.
“'The way we communicate on the dance floor is non-verbal, and this is part of why it’s so important to society as it provides other ways of being together than our day-to-day lives allow,' says Ruth Pethybridge, a senior lecturer in dance at the University of Falmouth. 'Relationships and communities are created between people who move together.' Pethybridge believes that house dance, a form of social freestyle dance, enables people to create their own signature styles through its high levels of improvisation and wide variety of stylistic influences. These include African dance (the rhythmic sounds of the drums, footwork and movement of the torso in harmony with the music); Caribbean and Afro-Latino dance; and Brazilian martial arts capoeira with its graceful acrobatic movements. Other influences include jazz, tap and voguing combined with fast and intricate footwork, jacking, lofting and floorwork similar to breakdancing. This mixture “'s part of what makes it a community that can welcome difference and is often associated with ideas of freedom,' says Pethybridge." -
Article: ‘People Who Move Together’: the Social Power of House Dance
Futures Thinking, Urbanism
Green, friendly and clean: how we could reimagine urban life after the pandemic.
© Alamy
"The world’s cities are changing. Paris’s Champs-Élysées, one of the most gridlocked roads in the world, is going to become a giant garden. Barcelona has closed off its oldest quarters to cars. And now Milan is on the path to becoming the world’s first 15-minute city.
"It seems the pandemic, for some, became a moment to reimagine how we see the future of our oldest cities. Why? Well, there was a small exodus out of our urban spaces during the pandemic. It was the slightest of pauses in the net migration from rural to urban areas that has taken place for decades. Those who could afford to leave left. For those who remained, the lockdowns and restricted movement shone a harsh light on most cities’ biggest flaws: clogged roads, polluted air and a dearth of green, communal spaces.
"Now, it seems that pause has inspired the world’s urban planners to rethink how cities around the world can evolve to take a different course." - Ian Evenden
Article: Future Cities: How the Pandemic is Driving us to Build the Metropolises of Tomorrow
Brand Identity
Cadbury adds a sonic logo to their well-known visual identity.
"Composer Guy Farley wrote the score for the sonic logo on a Steinway piano from 1895, immediately adding the sense of history and gravitas necessary for such a historic brand. The sound is already in place in TV adverts." - Georgia Coggan
Article: Cadbury Now Has a Sonic Logo – and It's Kinda Perfect
Packaging, Circular Economy
Packaging that behaves like conventional plastic materials but has the same end-of-life as organic materials
"Atlapac and TIPA will work together to revolutionize the standard in fashion and retail spaces to inspire brands to take sustainable steps without the additional costs." - Chloe Gordon
Article: Atlapac and TIPA Announce Partnership To Produce Compostable Retail Packaging
One-liners
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