Lindy Links (06/14/21)
Historical Map, Voices in Time, Motherf**cking Website
Hi everyone,
Writing to you from San Francisco, CA.
I’m here this week for an offsite with my team. It’s hard to believe, but this is the first time we’ve all been able to get together since the pandemic started. Many of us have never actually met in person, despite working together for almost a year.
The funny thing is, I suspect this type of working relationship will become more common, even after the pandemic. It’s never been easier to find someone whose ideas you agree with online, connect over email, and setup a Zoom call.
With that being said, I still believe that getting together physically, even if it’s only once or twice per year, is crucially important. These types of events build relationships in a way that is hard to do via video conferences and chat apps.
From me
What I would tell myself if I were 18: Every year I visit my high school to spend a day with the graduating seniors and talk to them about their plans. This is the transcript for this year’s talk.
In defense of boredom: You can read this, or you can watch Bo Burnham’s Welcome to the Internet. Both convey the same point, although Bo’s is much better.
From the web
If you’re a history buff, you’ll love this interactive map. It allows you to travel through time to see how borders evolved. It’s striking how different our political landscape looked just a few decades ago.
This is a kind of Lindy test for countries — and a reminder that things that seem permanent in the moment are often anything but. The median age of countries with democratic governments is just 27 years.
Originally published: N/AThis is the magazine I didn’t know I needed. The website describes itself:
Lapham’s Quarterly embodies the belief that history is the root of all education, scientific and literary as well as political and economic. Each issue addresses a topic of current interest and concern—war, religion, money, medicine, nature, crime—by bringing up to the microphone of the present the advice and counsel of the past.
I have been digging into old issues like Technology, Death, and Lines of Work. Better yet, each issue has a “Voices In Time” section which includes Lindy content.
The texts are drawn from authors on the order of Aristotle, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Thucydides, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Edward Gibbon, Mahatma Gandhi, Confucius, Honoré de Balzac, Jane Austen, Jorge Luis Borges, Matsuo Bashō, Henry David Thoreau, and Joan Didion. Abridged rather than paraphrased, none of the text in the Quarterly runs to a length longer than six pages, others no more than six paragraphs.
Originally published: 2008; Lindy score: 2033The web has become bloated with sites that are filled with crap and take forever to load. This page is a refreshing take on what is actually necessary to get your point across.
I’ve also noticed a trend: as sites become more bloated, having a barebones website has become cool again.
have a great week,
phil