2023-07-29 Links

Bob Ewing has a great collection of [Ideas Worth Exploring](Ideas Worth Exploring)

Terence Eden: Big numbers are difficult to contextualise

Colin Newlyn on Working to live vs living to work

Heather Bryant on Trusting News Organisations. Love this.

Hanif Kureishi on life, death and dreaming of returning home

A question worth asking every day: "So, what makes you feel alive these days?”, thanks to Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Quote of the day:

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light Fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break Faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”_ – James Baldwin

Poem of the week: “Small Kindnesses,” by Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”