worth reading: april 30-may 9, 2024

good season for links!

“What if We Replace Guns and Bullets with Bows and Arrows?” by Kris De Decker
- from Low-Tech Magazine, which has a really interesting website and ethos! definitely recommend poking around and reading some of the other pages, like this one.
“Traveling at the Speed of the Soul” by Nick Hunt
- "As a travel writer, my attention has always been on the “away,” on setting out into the desert — or the mountains, or the woods, or the streets of unknown towns — rather than grubbing about beneath the soil of home. The treasure has always been elsewhere; home is where I bring it back to. [...] The fear that I had dropped my treasure on the road or jettisoned it from the plane turned out to be misplaced. It was there waiting for me — I just had to dig for it."
“Escape from Noma” by Adam Roberts
- unparalleled schadenfreude!!! the food photos are also gorgeous but I can't believe this man got served not one but two extremely intact whole fish heads.
“Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America” by Matthew Olzmann
- poem surprise! an oldie but a goodie
“Swing Sets Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore” by Alexandra Lange
- great visuals and use of gifs in this one
“The children who remember their past lives” by Caitlin Gibson (unpaywalled link)
- a lil spooky, really empathetic and well-written
“The Battle for Attention” by Nathan Heller
- starts off kind of milquetoast (“wah wah phone bad”) but quickly reveals itself to be a profile of this secretive group called the Order of the Third Bird (!!!). mystery and magic and the humanities are alive in the world!
- p.s. if you run out of New Yorker free articles, clear your cookies and refresh the page; repeat until it forgets your initial session.
“The Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000” by the New York Times Book Review (unpaywalled link)
- linking this less as a book recommendation list and more as an abridged journey of the past 20+ years of mainstream book cover design. (look at the books from 2000 - half of them look dated but the other half look like they could come out tomorrow!)