Personal

This week's reads (Jan 6, 2020)

On technology, ethics, surveillance capitalism:

One small way to get our independence and agency back from exploitative platforms is to build personal websites to share on instead. Of course, it’s a tiny tiny step. But it’s a step to taking back control, and building a web that neither relies upon, nor feeds, the harms of Big Tech.

From It's Time To Get Personal, by Laura Kalbag

Poems:
Brokeheart: Just like that, Patrick Rosal, via the Slowdown
Scary Movies, Kim Addonizio
Pentatina for Five Vowels, Campbell McGrath, via the Slowdown

On Little Women, motherhood & rage:

The prospect of becoming a Marmee, “Little Women” tells us, is simultaneously an aspiration and a threat.

From Little Women and the Marmee Problem

On life as a poet laureate:
Tracy K. Smith's Work Diary: The ‘Nonstop Rush’ of a Poet Laureate
(Hard not to feel surprised at how familiar it all is, except poetry is at the heart of everything. And hard not to feel jealous.)

On pain:

…when you bump your head and instinctively rub that spot, you are overriding the nerves that register pain with the nerves that register rubbing.

From A World Without Pain

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