Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
I am very privileged. Being born male, white and middle class in America in the mid 20th century is being the winner of a very big lottery. With that privilege came personal agency, free education, good libraries, the right to vote, safe streets, and an assumption of an even better tomorrow. In turn, my sense of an unknown future has more often than not been thrilling.
But most people on the planet, including many Americans, experience what I knew as birthright as luxuries. In turn, they see an unknown future as a threat. It's not too simplistic, then, to observe that a direct path to peace is paved with education and self-rule for all. Let's keep going.
Happy Friday.
Futures Thinking, Design Thinking
There are no neat solutions to the intertwined climatic, economic and political crises of our time. Introducing 'ancillary design'.
Anab Jain is the co-founder and director of Superflux, a design futures company and art studio, and a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Image Copyright: © Mark Cocksedge
Anab Jain rightly summarizes that design as practiced in capitalist economies has "a rich history of solutionism; it is a field overrun by proponents of ceaseless growth and endless products." So, she and a growing network of colleagues, is detouring away from solution-oriented thinking, "seeking out alternatives that can adequately address the crisis we currently face."
"Such interventions might at first seem out of step with traditional notions of 'design,' but they are gaining momentum, reframing (as the artist Sara Hendren is doing) the work of designers as impresarios, translators, radical generalists and believers. Given the scale and knottiness of the challenges we face, we see design playing a fundamental role as an intermediary, a joiner, working between the problem-solution dichotomy to uncover practices and tools and approaches that might offer entirely new possibilities.
"The practice I’m teasing out, or drawing together, is what I would like to call 'ancillary design.'" - Anab Jain
Article: Radical Design For A World In Crisis
TED Radio Hour: Anab Jain: Can A Glimpse Of Tomorrow, Change Our Decisions Today?
Learning
"What really matters is how smart the collective brain is."
"Throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is."
TEDGlobal: Matt Ridley, When Ideas Have Sex
Learning
"Education for work and education for life should be inextricably linked, with the arts in a connecting role."
American artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) spent a large part of her career championing the idea that the line of distinction between so-called ‘academic’ subjects and arts subjects is a false dichotomy. She observed that the process of making art uses all the skills that are necessary to grasp literacy and numeracy: identifying patterns, structures, thinking about scale and perspective, close observation, the process of describing, questioning, imagining, problem-solving. Here she works with a student at the public arts high school, 1993. Photo by Tom Wachs
"Last month the Gulbenkian Foundation published a report The Arts in Schools: Foundations for the Future, in which they made a strong evidence-based case for the benefit that teaching art, drama, music and dance to schoolchildren brings to productivity and the economy as well as to society more broadly. The authors argue that integrating the arts into the curriculum can help children understand STEM subjects more effectively. The arts also help children to develop relational thinking and empathy towards others, building the groundwork for stronger social cohesion. By enriching our human experience the arts have the potential to make us happier, healthier and more whole. And they reinstate the idea that education for work and education for life should be inextricably linked, with the arts in a connecting role." - Dr. Victoria Powell
Article: What's the Value of Teaching Art in Schools?
Related Article: Why Good Teachers Allow a Child’s Mind to Wander and Wonder
Civics, Libraries
Library boards, school boards and legislatures are becoming battlegrounds in a push to censor books. Communities are fighting back.
Ariel Aberg-Riger calls herself a visual storyteller. She uses collage to explore our history, to tell stories that serve as beacons that direct our attention to a hopeful future. In this story she outlines the threats libraries face today, their historical context and how activists are mobilizing to protect a diversity of thought.
Article: The Fight for the American Public Library
Learning
How 'all or nothing' thinking makes complicated realties impossible to understand
"Close examination of the arguments made by climate change deniers reveals the same mistake made over and over again. That mistake is the cognitive error known as black-and-white thinking, also called dichotomous and all-or-none thinking. Black-and-white thinking is a source of dysfunction in mental health, relationships – and politics.
"People are often susceptible to it because in many areas of life, dichotomous thinking does something helpful: It simplifies the world.
"Binaries are easy to handle because there are only two possibilities to consider. When people face a spectrum of possibilities and nuance, they have to exert more mental effort. But when that spectrum is polarized into pairs of opposites, choices are clear and dramatic.
"This mental labor-saving device is practical in many everyday situations, but it is a poor tool for understanding complicated realities – and the climate is complicated." - Jeremy Shapiro Ph.D.
Article: The Thinking Error That Makes People Susceptible to Climate Change Denial
Related Article: The Allure of Conspiracy Theories in a Time of Complexities
Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Messaging
A beauty brand takes aim at the cost of toxic beauty.
This is Mary, with her mom. Mary is in recovery from an eating disorder. This beautifully crafted film opens with home movies of her as a proud, confident and happy-go-lucky kid. Then there are frames of her as a teen opening the gift of her first phone. Then there are successive scenes of her tumbling down the increasingly frightening rabbit hole of social media, which convinces her that she is fat and ugly. Finally, we see her hospitalized for anorexia.
The film is so stark that it comes with a warning: "This film features real stories about body appearance that may be upsetting to some viewers." It is upsetting to me, it made me cry. And it is brought to us by Dove, a brand that has made a sincere commitment to being very real about beauty and what it means in our culture.
"New research by the Dove Self-Esteem Project found that social media is harming the mental health of 3 in 5 kids. Join us, along with Common Sense Media and Parents Together Action, in supporting legislative change to make social media safer." - Call to action on Dove's YouTube channel
Video: Cost of Beauty: A Dove Film | Dove Self-Esteem Project
Advice
Kevin Kelly on clarity.
"Anything you say before the word 'but' does not count." - Kevin Kelly
Book: Excellent Advice for Living. Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
One-liners
Article: School librarian sues for defamation after N.J. residents complain about ‘pornographic’ books
Article: Most CMOs lack confidence in their sales and marketing model, study finds
Article: This former paper mill now turns t-shirts and jeans into new fabric
Article: Loneliness poses risks as deadly as smoking: surgeon general
Playlist
Willie Nelson turned 90 on Saturday, April 29th. Tomorrow he is being inducted into the rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He's still going. In fact he's on tour right now. Google his name and you'll find numerous audience phone videos of the pair of kick-off birthday concerts he hosted last weekend at the Hollywood Bowl. Here's one: Willie Nelson & Keith Richards - Live Forever (Willie Nelson 90 - Hollywood Bowl)
But his longevity, as incredible as it is, is just a small part of his amazing story. Far more meaningful is the timelessness and soulfulness of his writing and performing. This rendition of an old gospel song performed thirty years ago with his sister Bobbie Nelson accompanying him on piano beautifully captures his soft and gentle spirit.
Video: In the Garden - The Gospel Roots, 1993
Related Article: Willie Nelson at 90: Country Music’s Elder Statesman Still on the Road Again
Another incredible thing about Willie is his guitar playing, and his guitar. Unusual for any country or blues artist, his is a nylon string guitar. And like BB King's Lucille, Willie's guitar has a name, too: Trigger.
Article: The Story of Willie Nelson’s Trigger, the Most Famous Acoustic in the World
In other news
I'm sure by now that you know that Gordon Lightfoot died this week at the age of 84. Bob Dylan said about him the singer-songwriter died “without ever having made a bad song”. He said that every time he listened to a Lightfoot song he “wished it would last forever”. Rick Beato, who is one the world's greatest teachers of contemporary music, posted a wonderful appreciation.
Video: Gordon Lightfoot 1938-2023 R.I.P.
Weekly Mixtape
Regular readers know that I am a sucker for a good cover. And Willie is on the top-ten list of artists whose songs have been covered the most. I'm guessing that you know that he wrote Crazy, a song Patsy Cline made famous. But did you know that Al Greene, Cake, Tom Jones and Tom Waits covered him, too? Pinch me.
Mixtape: Night Life. Songs that Willie Nelson wrote.
Image of the Week
Iolande and Floss, photograph, by Julia Margaret Cameron, about 1864, copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
"Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering female photographer of the 19th century, known for her portrait photography and her experimental use of light and composition. She pioneered the close-up and took photographs deliberately out of focus because she found them more beautiful that way.
"Despite her success as a photographer, Cameron was not universally popular. Her unconventional approach to photography, particularly her use of soft focus and intentional blurring, was criticized by some as being unprofessional and amateurish. However, Cameron was undeterred and continued to push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in photography. Today, Julia Margaret Cameron is remembered as one of the pioneering photographers of the 19th century, and one of the first female photographers to achieve widespread recognition.
"Arresting Beauty, now on view (through Sept. 5) at The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, exhibits an extensive collection from the pioneering portraitist criticized in her own time but now admired for her innovative and unconventional techniques." - Juxtapoz
Article: Rediscovering the Beauty and Depth of Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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