Hello lovely email chums. Hope all’s well. I’ve been thinking about disruption. It’s been coopted into business-speak to mean any form of bullish change. But everyone has experienced genuine disruption this year, and that’s going to continue. So what does it take to be good at withstanding disruption?
💰 The Mysterious 60-Billion-Dollar Woman: Amazon’s first employee, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, and one of the world’s richest women is rewriting the philanthropy playbook.
🤳 The rise of a quiet Uighur counter-surveillance state: Uighurs in exile are fighting back against China’s techno-authoritarianism to locate their relatives who have been disappeared.
🛹 Idaho TikTok Star Who Sent Fleetwood Mac Sales Soaring: Nathan Apodaca’s video, in which he longboards to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’, has catapulted him to viral fame.
🎬 John Cusack: ‘I have not been hot for a long time’: Cusack talks about political activism, Hollywood, the his 30-year career.
🎛 Roland 808303.studio is a new online music creation platform created by Roland and sound artist Yuri Suzuki, emulating the sound of the original TR-808 drum machine and TB-303 bass synthesiser.
🤔 Rob Newman’s Half-Full Philosophy Hour - 3000 Years Of Bad Ideas: the masterful Robert Newman returns with a new radio series that plunges into the world of philosophy. In the first episode he reveals why James Bond is inspired by Nietzsche and why horny wood-wasps might take issue with Einstein.
🌀 Generative Music - Brian Eno: This talk was given by Brian Eno in 1996 at the Imagination Conference in San Francisco, which also featured director Spike Lee and performance artist Laurie Anderson. Each presented their work and ideas in their own way. Eno spoke about Generative Music; tracing its roots and the development of his ideas on it from the mid-Sixties.
♻️ Why Have We All Been Recycling Plastic For 30 Years? Last year, NPR ran a show about why it doesn’t make sense to recycle plastic. But if recycling most plastic is not working now, did it ever work? And why did it take us so long to learn the truth? Reporter Laura Sullivan sets out to find out who is responsible.
Can tradition be untraditional?
Even this early, it’s clear this coming Christmas is going to be disrupted. People that would usually come together will be prevented from doing so. There’ll be some for whom it’s an important family occasion that will have to spend Christmas alone. So in the face of the inevitable disruption in the bleak midwinter, it’s worth pondering how we might observe tradition in a non-traditional way.
I’ve spent Christmas alone by choice, twice, and it was good. Typically it’s the most peaceful day of the year for a walk, but walking alone isn’t all that cheerful if you’re used to something more social. So now, in Autumn, is a chance to form that habit. For what is a tradition, after all, than a long-held habit.
There are numerous ways to approach the festive period in a less social style. Take the opportunity to embrace the quiet if you can and, as Rachel Wilkerson Miller recommends in her excellent Buzzfeed article on the subject, be sure to plan your time. Adding resilience to disruption and self-care to your own tradition would be a highly positive outcome this year.
