At first, the experiment didn’t have a name. Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics. Donald Trump’s victory shook him. Badly. And so Mr. Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan. He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016. “It was draconian and complete,” he said. “It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.”
It takes meticulous planning to find boredom. Mr. Hagerman commits as hard as a method actor, and his self-imposed regimen — white-noise tapes at the coffee shop, awkward scolding of friends, a ban on social media — has reshaped much of his life.
- NY Times
It is past time we rediscover the lost art of leisure. Doing so, however, will also mean teaching people how to find fulfillment in their free time.
Over the past few years, publications, consulting companies, and think tanks have been wringing their hands with increasing urgency over the “the future of work.” Politico Magazine recently dedicated an issue to it, whereas Quartz has dedicated an entire vertical. McKinsey and Co. routinely releases new reports about it. Even Nature has published a series of essays on the topic. For two years running, The Atlantic has convened an annual “Future of Work Summit,” and it has now been joined by The New York Times, which hosted a swanky “New Work Summit” at a Ritz Carlton in California last month. It would seem that we have the future of work covered. The future of leisure? Not so much.
- Democracy
Death, in the view of many theorists, is a good thing, at least for a society that aspires to be creative. When you’re on the clock, you accomplish more. Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death, called mortality “a mainspring of human activity.” If you want to invent a light bulb or paint a Mona Lisa, you’d best get started, because checkout time is coming.
- Time
Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, is awash in small-town trappings: tree-lined roads, rolling lawns, and street signs at every corner. On this Wednesday midsummer morning, the familiar routine of loss plays out across the acres. A yellow taxi waits at the end of a row of graves for someone paying their respects. Men and women clad in church clothes line up their cars along the curb and make their way to a grave site. A backhoe digs out some earth, another spot for another resident.
This is the textbook way we treat our dead. Someone passes, they’re buried, a headstone marks their place out among the rows in the borough of the departed. But today I’m bound for a different part of the cemetery, one fewer people see—though that fact is rapidly changing.
- Popular Mechanics
On a recent evening, I was having drinks with a male friend — a single and actively-looking-for-a-long-term-relationship friend — when he asked me why there seemed to be so many married women on Tinder. According to him, they appeared on the app, boldly describing themselves as “married” or “in an open marriage.” Were they actively looking for sex, he wondered? Did they just want to flirt?
- The Cut
« Ça a été une belle leçon d’humilité et un rappel à l’ordre quant à la façon de dresser le portrait de femmes qui sont défavorisées économiquement, mais qui ne sont pas épaisses pour autant. Écoute, je me suis inscrite à des groupes BDSM sur Facebook. Des préposées aux bénéficiaires qui participent à des lundis d’orgies, ça te brasse les préjugés que t’as sur la vie sexuelle des gens. »
Les phrases que prononce Marjolaine Beauchamp pendant qu’elle fume une cigarette et vous raconte sa vie ressemblent parfois, lumineusement, à certains de ses poèmes. « J’ai eu le goût de partir vite, j’ai planté des arbres, j’ai menti dans mes CV, je n’ai jamais voyagé super loin, mais je me suis promenée en criss », débite-t-elle par exemple à propos des années de bourlingue de la fin de son adolescence, alors qu’il lui fallait quitter, comme on fuit une maison en feu, son Buckingham natal. Ne suffirait-il pas de placer des sauts de ligne entre chacune des parties de cette citation pour obtenir une page digne de son plus récent recueil, Fourrer le feu (L’Écrou, 2016) ?
- Le Devoir
Quelque part autour de 2009, Frédéric Beigbeder partage un repas avec Iggy Pop, parrain du punk et fidèle représentant du chaos. « Je m’imaginais qu’on allait boire deux bouteilles de vodka, se droguer à mort, sortir en boîte, draguer des top-modèles et finir dans le caniveau à 7 heures du matin », raconte au bout du fil l’auteur de L’amour dure trois ans et de 99 francs.
« J’en garde un bon souvenir, mais en même temps, j’ai connu des soirées plus rock’n’roll. Iggy Pop est aujourd’hui un homme très calme qui s’intéresse à la poésie, à la littérature. Il mange du quinoa, des légumes verts, boit de l’eau minérale. Il ne s’est pas mis torse nu sur la table, il n’a pas cassé de verre, il n’a pas dit qu’il avait envie d’être mon chien. »
- Le Devoir
Here is the “Antisocial” project of the American designer Mike Campau, who looks at the fall of the giants that have become Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or Snapchat. A reflection on loneliness and our solitary publications, lost in the middle of an ocean of information, but also on the first signs of decline of these famous social networks.
“Social Media is starting to get some pull back, and rightfully so. Each platform has it’s own problems, but all have had a large impact on society as a whole, both good and bad. Each image takes place in an empty parking lot which is a symbol of our singularly isolated posts, but placed in a location where it can be easily seen by many,” he wrote.
- Design you Trust
The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears.
When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman's account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with "takes" arguing that the #MeToo movement had finally gone too far. "Grace," the 23-year-old woman, was not an employee of Ansari's, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they "slow down" were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave.
Why didn't she just get out of there as soon as she felt uncomfortable? many people explicitly or implicitly asked.
- The Week
