Links #136

Katherine Rundell’s five audio essays on the power and politics of children’s fiction. So far I’ve listened to the first two and have loved them. Worth your time.

Erin Kissane says the big platforms like Facebook are dead on their feet. “The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs.” Agreed.

Ash Huang on tidying up her consumerism. “I can’t vote away billionaires who have no connection to common people and are obsessed with going to space instead of paying workers. But I can alter how much of my day-to-day cash goes to their war chest. I can reduce how much money I’m giving to dangerous people, and punish companies focused on algorithmic blood sucking and extractive practices. Even if they’re not billionaires yet.” Yes. I feel the need to do better at this.

Maxwell Neely-Cohen on how to store something for a hundred years. Published by the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, and the page design by Shelby Wilson and Alex Miller is really quite lovely. The topic, too, is something I think about often.

David Moldawer on technique, particularly this quote from Stravinsky: “I’ve … learned to distrust the future. If I have an idea, it’s crucial to work it out now, while it still makes sense in my head, rather than jot a half-baked notion down to be resolved later. With this stuff, there is no later. Get it right, right now.” Part of my mind insists that this can’t be true, but at the same time I do find that ideas fresh at inception can and often do go stale. That might be a good thing, though? (Some ideas seem good initially, but later on, not so much.)