The Promantic Era

we are living in the Promantic era. Much like the Romantics gave primacy to inspiration and individualism, the Promantic era elevates the professional self across the whole self. There is no longer a separation between “professional development” and “personal development.” All skills, experiences, and practices can be brought to bear on our professional and private lives. Who we are in work is who we are.

— Brian Dell in the latest issue of Little Futures

Why do I blog this?¹

With work-from-home just becoming work this seems relevant. Also, as someone whose downtime is spent reading “work related” things — a habit from years in academia — I feel seen.

Also (also) — subscribe to the newsletter I write in my spare time which is about things that are relevant to my work!

What if technology but for people?

At the end of my reflections a few years back, I suggested that a humanist critique of technology entails a preference for technology that (1) operates at a human scale, (2) works toward human ends, (3) allows for the fullest possible flourishing of a person’s capabilities, (4) does not obfuscate moral responsibility, and (5) acknowledges and respects certain limits inherent to the human condition.

Michael Sacasas in his newsletter, The Convivial Society

Holly White: City Spaces, Human Places

A different forever situation

Rands:

Everyone desperately wants to return to normality. I am a professional optimist, but we are not returning to normal. Ever. This is a different forever situation, and the sooner we realize that and start to plan accordingly, the sooner we will feel unstuck.

Lock me in a room

I love a real-life meeting. There, I said it. They’re theater, and I’m a ham. You plan and prepare, you make a deck, you try to surprise. Meetings, well run, are alchemy; you can turn words and pictures into large checks or people agreeing to work for you, or convince a big company to do something it hates to do. An hour? Two hours? Stop crying. Lock me in a room for three days with a team of five strangers and a stack of sticky notes as high as your eye.

Paul Ford

Sarah Cooper’s Trump lip-syncs

James Poniewozik in the NYT:

This is another theme of her Trump, the insistent confidence betrayed by microexpressions of terror. From Ms. Cooper’s lips, the president’s sentences become plywood bridges he’s trying to nail together, one shaky plank at a time, over a vertiginous Looney Tunes canyon.