"Forged of the dust of dying stars, we move through a universe of impartial laws with our dreams and desires, passionate pawns in the hands of grand-master chance, daily watching the world spin counter to our wishes, daily watching ourselves bend against our own will.

How, against the backdrop of this cosmic helplessness, can we muster the sense of agency necessary for conducting our human lives, much less fill them with the majesty of meaning?"
https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/29/nick-cave-helplessness-power/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-intl-en

"Guimard’s concern for working people took shape in his designs for the entrances to the new Paris subway system, the Métro.

Guimard saw the Métro as a source of freedom of movement for workers and a place where social classes would mingle. Today his entrances are icons of vintage Parisian charm, but when they were built around 1900, they were as bracingly modern as the subway itself."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/meet-the-designer-of-the-fanciful-subway-entrances-to-the-paris-metro-180981369/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-intl-en

"“Why I’m fighting so hard for a right to repair is that nobody is telling me I can’t sew a button,” Gordon-Byrne says. “Nobody is refusing to sell me a needle and thread. Where that’s exactly what’s happening with technology. It shouldn’t happen. That level of control should not be their level.”

There is hope thanks to consumer action, says Gordon-Byrne. New York was the first to pass a right-to-repair law."
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23529587/consumer-goods-quality-fast-fashion-technology

"Dangarembga herself has doubts that suffering writers produce greater art. Echoing her critics, she worries that she had developed blind spots by taking the measures she needed to survive. She posed the question to me: could a society become so repressed and so ashamed of itself that it becomes impossible to write truthfully about it?"

https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/01/03/are-great-writers-forged-by-repressive-regimes-or-crushed-by-them?utm_content=article-link-7&etear=nl_today_7&utm_campaign=r.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=1/3/2023&utm_id=1437590

"In its final state, the Universe may end up as an inert cloud of energy and matter, where everything is evenly distributed.

In this gray nothingness, "there is no future, there's no arrow of time anymore," she says. At that point time has no real meaning, she says. "It has no direction."

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/16/1139780043/what-is-time-physics-atomic-clocks-society?utm_source=pocket-newtab-intl-en

An interview with me on booksfirst.in. In which I talk about many things writing, and authors I love, bookstores you must visit.

https://booksfirst.in/2022/12/26/in-conversation-with-kiran-manral/

Wrote an opinion piece after years and years. Do read.

What If I Hadn't Escaped The Stalker I Had When I Was 21? https://www.womensweb.in/2023/01/stalker-early-beginning-of-violence-against-women-jan22wk1sr/ via @womensweb