My hot take before I put my phone back in the woodshed is that almost every tech-ish person theorizing about the role of (quasi-)spiritual belief in our moment has the causality backward and needs to go hang with the scholars of religion for a year or two.
I reread Waking the Moon (Elizabeth Hand) for the first time in ~20 years after reading it obsessively as a kid and it was such an uncanny jolt. So many of my lodestone figures and curiosities are just right there on the page. Who would I even be if I hadn’t found that book the year it came out?
I’ve been off most networks so long that I didn’t know people were still doing those top-down photos of books/steaming tea/artistic class-signifiers and I just saw one here and threw my phone like it was a snake
When I finish my spiritually toxic explaining work today and then unwreck part of my kitchen-exploded house I want a whole stack of Pope Leo Explainers to read, please send me your *very finest pope reads only* (theology welcome)
Preorder books when you can, always but especially now. Or ask your library to do it. It's a tiny but meaningful way to keep the art & artists who sustain us alive.
RE:
In better news, our kitchen—which has looked like a set from Outbreak (1995) since we tried to install a new dishwasher two weeks ago and discovered a Situation—is now DRY. It's missing most of its flooring, some wall, and the sink and appliances, but the industrial fans are off!! I celebrate.
The deal here, btw, is that there was a Day One 90-day hiring freeze with carve-outs for immigration enforcement, etc., which just got re-upped through mid-July, and an *indefinite* hiring freeze at the IRS. *After* the big layoffs, it's going to be 1 hire in for every 4 feds leaving their jobs.
RE:
*Without looking anything up*, what do you know about the federal hiring freeze and what happens with hiring afterward? (Did you know there was a freeze?)
No feds or fed-adjacents, please, you'll blow the curve.
