In sentimental fiction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems that feel unresolvable in real life. Berlant held that American popular culture had been built, layer by layer, from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “The Simpsons,” upon the assumption that identifying with “someone else’s stress, pain, or humiliated identity” could change you. “Popular culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this aspect of sentimentality—that ‘underneath’ we are all alike,” she observed.
Everyone has heartstrings. Over time, she wrote, we had grown addicted to having them pulled, rather than focussing on what the pulling could accomplish by way of political change. We’d replaced tangible action with affective experience. “What does it mean for the theory and practice of social transformation,” she asked in a 1999 essay, “when feeling good becomes evidence of justice’s triumph?” Somewhere along the way, doing good had come to seem irrelevant—or maybe just felt impossible.
Empathy is, in a word, selfish. In his bracing and persuasive 2016 book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom writes, “Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now… Empathy is biased… It is shortsighted.” Bloom helpfully distinguishes between the more useful cognitive empathy—understanding what’s happening in other minds and bodies—and emotional empathy, trying to feel like or even as someone else. With a simple thought experiment—you pass by a lake where a child is drowning—Bloom shows that emotional empathy is often beside the point for moral action. You don’t have to feel the suffocation, the clutch of a throat gasping for air, to save someone.
In the nineteen-eighties, Apple called its headquarters the Robot Factory. “To understand the electronics industry is simple: every time someone says ‘robot,’ simply picture a woman of color,” [Louis] Hyman advises. One in five electronics companies used no automation at all, and the rest used very little. Seagate’s disk drives were assembled by women in Singapore. Hewlett-Packard hired so many temporary workers that it started its own temp agency. The most important technology in the electronics industry, as Hyman points out, was the fingernail.
Every single one of us—every single one of us—has the same power at the polls, and every single one of us has something that, if done in numbers too big to tamper with, cannot be suppressed and cannot be denied.
ABC
I’ll never find out nowWislawa Szymborska, 1923-2012.
What A. thought of me.
If B. ever forgave me in the end.
Why C. pretended everything was fine.
What part D. played in E.’s silence.
What F. had been expecting, if anything.
Why G. forgot when she knew perfectly well.
What H. had to hide.
What I. wanted to add.
If my being around
meant anything
to J. and K. and the rest of the alphabet.
My clients don’t want a “handcrafted look.” What they want—what they have the ability to appreciate—is something that truly is handcrafted. It really is artistic, not a facsimile of something that “looks” artistic. Calligraphy has the potential to be alive in a way that typesetting can never be.Bernard Maisner, interviewed.
One thing you must not borrow nor never give away,
For he who borrows trouble will have it every day.
But if you have a plenty and more then you can bear,
It will not lighten yours if others have a share.
You must learn to be contented then will your trouble cease
And then you may be certain that you will live in peace
For a contented mind is a continual feast.
Typography work from George Lewin:
match / mismatch. two typefaces based on communication and miscommunication.in match (pictured), each letterform comprises of two shapes that fit inside each other, whilst in mismatch the shapes deliberately do not.I love the illegible quote in mismatch:
It reads: 'If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.' - Ludwig Wittgenstein.
