Michael Kimmelman / Bill Harmon

Years ago I met Bill Harmon, who traveled over 400 miles a week to pour concrete for some of the scupture's curbs. Harmon told me how Heizer would angrily rip up a 78-by-240-foot slab because it was off by a sixteenth of an inch.

I asked Harmon why he put up with it. His answer seemed like a definition of art.

“Mike is demanding,” he told me, “but I’ve worked in concrete all my life, and I’ve never had the time or money to do something to the best of my ability. Everything is hurry up. It’s about making money. That’s the American way.” On the other hand, Harmon said, Heizer asked him “to produce something that has more to do with accuracy than I’ve ever been allowed even to imagine. This here is my chance to do the best I can.”

- Michael Kimmelman, NYT "It Was a Mystery In The Desert For 50 Years" about Michael Heizer's 'City'

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/19/arts/design/michael-heizer-city.html

John Lennon

I love commercial music. I like Olivia Newton-John singing "Magic," and Donna Summer singing whatever the hell it is she'll be singing. I like the ELO singing "All Over the World." I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/olivia-newton-john-rob-sheffield-1394426/

Piet Oudolf

A garden is never ready. 

--"Piet Oudolf, Garden Designer." T: The New York Times Style Magazine, April 24, 2022, p. 74.

Delia Ephron and Peter Rutter

Rutter, silver haired but schoolboy youthful in a button-down shirt and a sweater, has the quiet intensity of all good therapists. He spoke of his beloved’s ordeal in Jungian terms.

A stem cell transplant is a profound identity shift, he said. “The miracle, and the trauma, in crossing over from death to life is of equal stature to a heart transplant. The simplest way to explain it is Delia was restored to herself, but she had to go through the gates of death to do it. It deepens anybody who has been close to that.”

Ephron shrugged. “You end up in the situation, and you just do what you do.”

Rutter said gently, “Actually Delia, that is the essence of being heroic. You persist even if it seems impossible.”

--Green, Penelope. "Delia Ephron Writes Her Way Through Cancer to a Happy Ending." New York Times. April 9, 2022.

Lauren Groff

A voice in her says that she will never again see the city that burns so darkly at her back. She is glad of the release of it. Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. Skins are shed, and left at the roadside for the new young to pick up and carry on.

--Gross, Lauren. Matrix (New York: Riverhead Books, 2021), p. 177

Diane Ott Whealy

Q: With all the plants and animals on your farm, I bet you make great compost.
A: We have the most diversified compost pile in the country, I think, because we have manure from chickens and White Park cattle. We have heirloom tomatoes, peppers, and squash in every color imaginable thrown onto the pile, and volunteer sunflowers and kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate blooming on the edges. It's really beautiful.

Q: You have a beautiful compost pile?
A: We do.

Q: Do people tell you that?
A: No. Nobody has.

interviewer: Steve Aitken, in Fine Gardening Magazine, Feb 2010
subject: Diane Ott Whealy, co-founder of Seed Savers Exchange

Roxane Gay

[T]his is a defense of thin skin. It is a defense of boundaries and being human and enforcing one's limits. It is a repudiation of the incessant valorizing of taking a joke, having a sense of humor. It is a rejection of the expectation that we laugh off everything people want to say and do to us.

I think a lot about how we are constantly asked to make our skin ever thicker. Toughen yourself, we're told, whoever we are, whatever we've been through or are going through. Stop being so brittle and sensitive. Lighten up.

I'm not talking about constructive criticism or accountability but, rather, the intense scrutiny and unnecessary commentary people have to deal with when they challenge others' expectations one way or another.

Who is served by all this thick skin? Those who want to behave with impunity. If the targets of derision only had thicker skin, their aggressors could say or do as they please. If we all had the thickest of skins, no one would have to take responsibility for cruelties, big or small.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/opinion/culture/will-smith-oscars-roxane-gay.html?referringSource=articleShare

Mhairi McFarlane

The combination of alcohol and incredible, soul-flattening misery has given me a malign superstrength. Every other expression of anger in my life, I realize, always came restrained with concerns about how it made me look, or how it affected the other person, or if I could get fired. Consequences, basically. 'I don't care' is often said but rarely fully meant. But I don't. I have nothing left to protect or worry about. From where I'm standing, I've already lost everything. I'm the origins story of a dangerous comic-book villain.

- Mhairi (vah-ree) McFarlane, Just Last Night

Sharon Owens

Dangerous Coats

Someone clever once said
Women were not allowed pockets
In case they carried leaflets
To spread sedition
Which means unrest
To you & me
A grandiose word
For commonsense
Fairness
Kindness
Equality
So ladies, start sewing
Dangerous coats
Made of pockets & sedition

Matt Haig

Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.

-The Midnight Library

Shira Ovide

An estimated 150 million Americans are members of Amazon Prime's shopping club, making it one of the most popular paid technology services in the United States. Most Americans are members, and many can't imagine giving up the ability to order stuff on a whim and have it delivered quickly for no added cost.

Shipping still costs Amazon a fortune, but Prime members mostly shop online exclusively at Amazon. An analysis last year by Morgan Stanley estimated that households that are Prime members typically spent more than $3,000 a year with Amazon. Those that didn't belong to Prime spent half as much on Amazon.

Prime is one of the ways that Amazon has bent America to its will.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/technology/amazon-prime-price.html?searchResultPosition=1

Peter S. Goodman

Why was the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth dependent on the charity of a profit-making software company to outfit medical personnel with basic protection in the face of a pandemic?

Individuals like Mr. Benioff [CEO of Salesforce] had benefited from public goods financed by taxpayers — the schools that educated their employees; the internet; roads, bridges and other infrastructure enabling commerce. Then they deployed lobbyists, accountants and lawyers to master legal forms of tax evasion that starved the system of resources. He and his fellow billionaires could crow about giving back in part because of how comprehensively they had taken.

Billionaires have snapped up real estate, shares of stock and other companies at distressed prices. They have applied their lobbying muscle to turn gargantuan, taxpayer-financed bailout packages like the CARES Act and a perk engineered for real estate developers into corporate welfare schemes for the wealthiest people on earth.

Laurence D. Fink, the world’s largest asset manager, has broadcast his own dedication to stakeholder capitalism and social justice while squeezing poor countries to pay impossible debts in the midst of the pandemic.

Jeff Bezos has amassed enough wealth from his e-commerce empire to blast himself into space, as the employees left behind on earth spent the first months of the outbreak laboring in Amazon warehouses without adequate protective gear.

Between March 2020 and the middle of October 2021, America’s billionaires saw their collective wealth soar by 70 percent, exceeding $5 trillion, according to an analysis of Forbes data by Americans for Tax Fairness and the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies. That mountain of money was controlled by a mere 745 people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/business/davos-man-marc-benioff-book.html?searchResultPosition=1

Brittany Archibald

[R]efusing to monetize a hobby is inherently anti-capitalist. Pursuing a hobby takes privilege, yes, but it also takes a huge amount of determination to carve out personal time in our high-pressure, high-velocity culture. Capitalism compels people to monetize their time, their talents, their joys, often rewarded only with small returns exhausting burnout. By participating in a hobby for your own joy you reclaim your time and refuse to feed into the more, more, more mindset. In this way, cultivating free time is radical. It is the mark of an intentional life. Sewing not only brings my life more in line with my personal values and allows me to participate in the larger fashion dialogue in a more ethical way, it is also a cherished creative outlet.

Ashley M. Jones

Surely, heaven is a place where men can't make anyplace
a dangerous corner—

surely, there, a smile is a smile and not a taunt.

-excerpt from "Oil Change," published in Reparations Now! Copyright © 2021 by Ashley M. Jones

In an email newsletter from the Washington Post: "Ashley M. Jones has been appointed the Poet Laureate of Alabama. She is the first Black person and, at 31, the youngest poet to hold the position since Alabama created it in 1930. Her new book, "Reparations Now!," offers a diverse, complex collection of poems in response to historical and contemporary racism. In a few lines, she can slip from weary to witty to wary – but never defeated."

Mireille Silcoff

"In a consumer culture, minimalism was always a somewhat fancyland ruse. It was domestic anorexia sold as health; materialism repackaged as its opposite; perfectionism hawked as peace. It was the perversion of labelling a home curated down to zero the ultimate luxury or, worse, virtue."

https://thewalrus.ca/more-is-more-the-end-of-minimalism/