I’m doing a talk about bureaucracy and conflict in universities tomorrow, and found myself re-reading this gem from the Hitchhiker’s Guide:

“But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”
“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”
“But the plans were on display …”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.”

Yep, that’s going in the slides.

“Oh, what have we done! It’s a biblical question, and we do not seem able to pull ourselves out of its familiar—essentially religious—cycle of shame, denial, and self-flagellation. This is why (I shall tell my granddaughter) the apocalyptic scenarios did not help—the terrible truth is that we had a profound, historical attraction to apocalypse. In the end, the only thing that could create the necessary traction in our minds was the intimate loss of the things we loved. Like when the seasons changed in our beloved little island, or when the lights went out on the fifteenth floor, or the day I went into an Italian garden in early July, with its owner, a woman in her eighties, and upon seeing the scorched yellow earth and withered roses, and hearing what only the really old people will confess—in all my years I’ve never seen anything like it—I found my mind finally beginning to turn from the elegiac what have we done to the practical what can we do?”

Zadie Smith, Elegy for a Country’s Seasons.

“If white men are finding themselves adrift in an uncertain world, it is not the fault of feminism, or of anti-racism. Just because the rise of a new wave of feminist and anti-racist campaigning has coincided with the collapse of modern economic certainties, it does not mean that one caused the other. But instead of getting angry at the state or at the systems that deny working people of every race and gender the right to a decent living, some prefer to kick down – at women or minorities, who must surely have taken all the good jobs and safe places to live.” 

Laurie Penny: What drives the men who think feminists and foreigners want to wipe them out?

Listen: Hungarian singer-songwriter morningdeer.

“The Way Things Are,” David Fullarton, from exhibit “Things That Happened and Things We Made Up.”

For Gersande, jokes from robots:

“You have collectively reassured me that you are from Go Fuck Yourself. Because I am not familiar with this location, I cannot speak humorously on its merits and flaws.

Do you have factories in Go Fuck Yourself? I was made in a factory. The funny setup is that robots make new robots. You, as a human, are probably thinking, “I would love to spend all day making more humans because the sexual experience is pleasurable to my flesh.” However, the point of irony is that robots make new robots—but we do not have sex. We use lasers and molten metal. Am I right?”

From Michael Drucker’s “A robot peforms standup comedy to a lackluster response,” Mcsweeney’s.

“My final prayer is that people do show up to his funeral as a show of pageantry. I hope they show up with large, decorated signs and billboards. I hope they line the streets leading to the funeral home, and I hope that they make sure they are seen. Finally, I hope every one of those billboards and signs read, “We forgive you.”

Maybe that little sign of love will do something to the remaining members of WBC, and show them that a life filled with hate is really no life at all, but that a life filled with love is the only way to live.”

Brandon Wallace on the death of Fred Phelps.

On a word for responding to failure:

Many of us have a similar sense that these implausible rises must be possible, but the stories tend to stay strewn throughout our lives, never coalescing into a single dynamic concept… The phenomenon remains hidden, and little discussed. Partial ideas do exist — resilience, reinvention, and grit — but there’s no one word to describe the passing yet vital, constant truth that just when it looks like winter, it is spring.

Sarah Lewis, quoted here.

This song is on every playlist I listen to lately.

I found out about Future Voices through The Listserve. It’s an interactive, science fiction storytelling project that gets people to leave voicemails as though they’re being left for someone in the future (and intercepted in the present day). I’m going to leave one tomorrow.

Sarah Kenzior on Kyiv and disaster porn in Politico:

“One could charitably see the apocalypsticle as dumbing up. At least the pictures were of the actual people in the conflict, instead of, say, characters from The Hills explaining Syria. Western websites were giving Ukrainian activists what they wanted: foreign media attention. “I am a native of Kyiv. I want you to know why thousands of people all over my country are on the streets,” a Ukrainian activist said in a typical video pleading for coverage.

Unfortunately, the answer to the activist’s question of “why” is ignored in a clickbait competition where a picture is worth zero words. The only “wh-“ word that matters is “whoa”: Look at the fire, the water, the bullets, the blood. Look, but do not listen. Look inward, at the movie you watched that looked like Ukraine, at the painting you saw that looked like Ukraine. Look at Ukraine without seeing Ukraine.”