7/7/22

The 33 Project

Hello hello. It’s fully July and fully hot. Not mad about it. Especially because I’ve become one of those weird productivity-hack-bros that now takes cold showers in the morning. I know. I know. Shrug!

Snap I took while at Jacob Riis this weekend

This week, like many of the past few weeks has been a bit challenging when it comes to staying positive. There’s just so much horrible stuff happening, and seemingly at such a rapid pace, that I often feel like I just can’t deal. I know I’m not alone in feeling overwhelming, often scared, and angry all at once. I’m just taking it day by day, and remembering all the good and the humor in my life. I hope you can do the same. On to this weeks recommendations:

1/ Read this excellent article, “Anything Less is Less than Equal: The Structure and Goals of the Equality Act” by my colleague, Jenny Pizer at Lambda Legal.

2/ This was an interesting read on how the internet is destroying our nervous system and “beating the crap out of us”.

I am thinking of a writer named Neil Postman who in 1985 published a prescient book called Amusing Ourselves to Death; it was about the effects of television on everything, especially politics. I remember listening to an interview with him in maybe 1991 during a moment of pundit panic about whether or not violent movies, TV shows and songs were making young people crazy. I don’t remember everything he said, but what stuck with me is this, that he thought violent imagery was less the problem than the way it was conveyed. He thought the accelerated speed and rapid mixing of disparate images and subjects was goosing people’s nervous systems, making them incrementally more hyper regardless of the content of the images/subjects.

It is interesting to think about the pace of our lives, the pace of our consumption of things. Boundary creep is real and I don’t think we talk about it enough.

3/ It’s worth reading Rebecca Traister’s immediate take on the SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe.

Today is wretched and plain. And it is not the bottom, as many people may feel it is. It will get worse; we will go lower. As the Court’s dissent insists, correctly, “Closing our eyes to the suffering today’s decision will impose will not make that suffering disappear.”

And so, with all this laid out, ugly and incontrovertible, the task for those who are stunned by the baldness of the horror, paralyzed by the bleakness of the view, is to figure out how to move forward anyway.

Ok, that’s it for today. Thanks, as always, for reading and please share this newsletter with anyone you think may be interested.

Have a good Thursday.