Kimberly Hirsh

🔖 Read What Is a Strike? Reflections from the Virtual Front Lines of the UC Academic Worker Strike by Mary Jirmanas Saba (LA Progressive).

🔖 Read Attention, trust and GPT3

“If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.

Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.”

🔖💀 Read If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body by Caitlin Doughty (New York Times Gift Link).

I hope we get human composting in NC eventually. For now, we can donate ourselves to Western Carolina’s body farm.

🔖 Read Creativity as Spiritual Practice by Rabbi Adina Allen (My Jewish Learning).

“Each of us is endowed with creative capacity simply by being human.”

🔖 Read Haunted by the Ghost of 2019, Helena Fitzgerald

“A return to 2019 is an attempt to erase all of the losses that happened between then and now, but those losses, like the monster in a horror movie, will devour us if we refuse to face them.”

🔖 Read How’d That Thing Go? by Kate McKean.

“I don’t want a schedule, I want a sandbox. I want a list of things that need to be done and a container of time to do them, and then I get to pick.”

Yes! Life as sandbox game! I needed this.

🔖 Read ‘Y’all,’ that most Southern of Southernisms, is going mainstream – and it’s about time by David B. Parker (The Conversation), h/t @benwerd.

As my Latin teacher said when teaching us the 2nd person plural, “y’all” is a legitimate contraction.

🔖 Read 1 in 4 hiring managers say they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants (ResumeBuilder), h/t @benwerd.

The convenience sampling used here is a significant limitation but these are still distressing survey results.

🔖 Read Taking on the Feminine Labor of Creating Holiday Magic by Sarah Hunter Simanson (Catapult).

This year will be the first Christmas that my mom has leukemia, that she can’t walk. I hope we will have more Christmases with her. I think her household is in for an awakening about this form of labor. In our household, everyone is responsible for a little of the holiday magic - we decorate together and bake together. I’m hoping it builds a connection for our son while it also makes the labor visible and reduces my holiday stress.

🔖 Read PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet by Jamie Zawinski. (h/t @manton)

At the moment, if I can’t do it in a browser, I’m not doing it. Which is why my Hive account is almost empty and I haven’t joined Post.

🔖🌲 Read On Mother Trees: What Old-Growth Trees Taught Me About Parenting by Kaitlyn Teer (Catapult).

A gorgeous essay in conversation with The Giving Tree, How to Do Nothing, the work of Suzanne Simard, and climate change. Read it.

🔖 Read What is Jewish Spirituality?

Mystics have their experiences, but what matters is what they learn from them…

🔖 Read The Eight Genders in the Talmud.

Super interesting discussion of how halakhah handles things that don’t fit a binary.

🔖 How to Write a Novel (Or Anything, Really) with ADHD

Lots of helpful ideas for people who, like myself, struggle to finish writing long things.

🔖 Read Instagram Makes Parents Feel More Clueless Than We Really Are by Elisabeth Sherman (Catapult).

Great piece. Every time I think I’m parenting M wrong, if I just listen to him & follow my intuition, I’ll beat anything influencers can tell me.

🔖📝 Read How to Finish.

Should I force myself to Make New Work or should I let the blank pages stay blank and sharpen pages I’ve already made? Should I go run or walk and shake the fog out? Could the fog be interesting, if I try not to have too much control? Should I read or go look at art or ride the subway back and forth with a notebook?

This is all writing.

🔖📝 Read This Machine Will Make You Write More: A Product Recommendation with a Twist.

I covet the Alphasmart/Freewrite, but I don’t think it’s the tool for me. Gonna try & figure out what motivates me.

🔖📝 Read “You Make the Space, You Fight for the Space”

“…every draft after the first draft for me is a kind of process of stripping away the stuff that I had to write for myself & happening upon the stuff that I want to offer to other people.”

“I don’t have the sort of life where I can write every day and that’s fine.”

“…so much of writing is not writing but you have to inhabit that not writing space as a writer and not as a mother or a teacher or the 3,000 other things you are.”