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There’s something cruel in how our culture treats the in-between times. We have words for achievement and words for burnout, but we lack vocabulary for the necessary pauses that precede new growth. If you tell someone you’re “taking a break,” they hear that you’re recovering from something bad. If you say you’re “between projects,” they assume you’ve been cast aside.
The biggest lie industrialization ever sold us: creativity and prolific work can follow a factory schedule, just like a machine. We know so little about what drives us to build and create and why we all go through fallow periods of indeterminate timing.
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The Los Angeles Metro is currently building more miles of subway and light rail than anywhere else in the nation. But in the grand scheme, these are not new miles as they’re advertised, not really. Metro is slowly restoring some semblance of the old Red Car system that dutifully served the city and its surrounding areas until automobile manufacturer and property developer schemes and shenanigans dismantled it.
/via Matt Haughey
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It’s easy to forget when a technology was new. And it’s even easier to assume things became The Way They Are™ through some sort of mystical process of the best concepts winning out in the marketplace of ideas. We forget that there are always those with a vested interest in the outcome: putting their thumb, their hand, and sometimes our tax dollars right down on the scale with as much weight as possible.
Given this context, it should not surprise me—and yet it did—to learn that the California Division of Highways—a historical precedent to Caltrans—a division in the California Department of Public Works, used to publish a magazine celebrating their transformation of California into full-blown Car Dependence. No mountain could not be moved, no valley unabridged, and no neighborhood would not be leveled (except, maybe, don’t level the rich, white ones), as they celebrated the creation of motor highways for a new technology: the automobile.
/via Doug Wilson