More from Naz Hamid — Journal + Links
We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere, all while showing us how happy we should be with the limitations imposed on us. — Den Delimarsky A long, weighty one, but very worth the read. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED — Steven Soderbergh Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of 2024. It's fascinating to see how many movies he watched multiple times, and the reverse watch of the original Star Wars trilogy. Phantom of the Menace twice too? Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
I’m including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works of—creative genius, or something, that I’ve encountered this year. I’m not a critic; I am mostly just talking about things I liked. These are tremendous to me. I hope they can be tremendous to you, too. — Anh The list is great, but this one is also visually gorgeous. Best experienced in a browser near you. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
It’s idealistic and very millennial of me to reminiscence the early days of Web innocence, unbound creativity it hosted and wonderful lack of monetisation of virtually every aspect of being online. We can’t turn back time. But, individually and collectively, we can strive for better as the Web evolves as a home for work, knowledge, community, and love. We can resist the ongoing enshittification and corporate capitalism. So I jotted down an non-exhaustive list of what I’d love the future Web to be. — Karolina Szczur A great list. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
More in literature
Left in a hefty anthology titled The Faber Book of War Poetry (ed. Kenneth Baker, 1996) was a postcard from O’Gara & Wilson, Ltd. Booksellers in Chicago. More than forty years ago I visited that shop near the University of Chicago and purchased a partial set of Conrad for a decent price. They bundled the books and I carried them back to Ohio on the train. The card suggests a seriousness of purpose often missing from bookstores today: “Chicago’s Oldest Bookstore Established 1882 200,000 Titles in Stock Used Books Bought & Sold Small Collections or Complete Libraries No Quantity Too Large – House Calls Made” Smaller copy says O’Gara & Wilson carries books “in almost all fields, but we are especially interested in American history, art, Balkan and Central European history, English and American literature, Greek and Latin classics, medieval history and literature, military history, philosophy, religion & theology.” In other words, a serious bookstore for serious readers. This is not Harlequin Romance country. Joseph Epstein’s great friend, the late sociologist Edward Shils, who taught at the University of Chicago, published “The Bookshop in America” in the winter 1963 issue of Daedalus. In it, Shils calls bookshops “an almost indispensable part of life. Like libraries, one goes to them for what one knows and wants and to discover books one did not know before.” He continues: “I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time just because I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence.” He speaks for me. I have gone to bookstores I knew from prior sad experience were lousy, just to wander among the shelves, hopelessly hoping for treasure. In such places, I have been tempted to buy books I already owned just to salvage something tangible out of disappointment. Shils formulates a theory of good bookstores contrary to conventional economic sense: “A bookshop, in order to be good, must have a large stock of books for which there is not likely to be a great demand but for which there will be an occasional demand. This means, unlike the retail trade in groceries, or the practice in industry to produce on order, a bookshop must render its capital inert by putting a lot of it into slow-moving lines.” Shils is writing, of course, long before the Age of Amazon. I looked online to see if O’Gara & Wilson is still in business. It is, but relocated to Chesterton, Ind., fifty miles southeast of Chicago. I wish I could visit. More power to the new owners Doug and Jill Wilson. Shils writes: “The wonder is, given the unremunerativeness of the business, that bookshops exist at all. It takes a special kind of person, somewhat daft in a socially useful and quite pleasant way but nonetheless somewhat off his head, to give himself to bookselling. Why should anyone who has or who can obtain $10,000 or $20,000 invest it in a bookshop to sell serious books when, if he were an economically reasonable person, he would do better to open a beauty parlor or a hamburger and barbecue shop, or put his money into the stock market? The bookseller must be one of those odd people who just love the proximity of books.”
Italy's Matera as a case study for revitalizing small governments and creating a future of interconnected villages.
When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father’s shoulders among the thousands of people on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament singing protest songs to take down the Communist dictatorship, my parents got us a hamster. I would say got me a hamster, but they were still in their twenties and delighted in him just as much — a handsome caramel fellow with a confident curiosity about his tiny world. Resentful that I had to answer to a name I had not chosen, I refused to perpetrate the same injustice… read article