life

One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic, a rivalry spiraled into a first-of-its-kind lawsuit. Can the legal system protect the vibe of a creator? And what if that vibe is basic?

the immediately sharable dressing-room selfies, appetizer snapshots, and view-from-the-hotel-balcony landscapes that aren’t meant to be art works but are, instead, “about developing and conveying your view, your experience, your imagination in the now.”

In response, the Department of Premier and Cabinet’s State Planning Office said in the report that it had deemed the job numbers “reasonable” after using Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant.

Jesus fucking christ.

Like a lighthouse that helps sailors avoid crashing into rocks, Lighthouse Parents provide firm boundaries and emotional support while allowing their children the freedom to navigate their own challenges. They demonstrate that they trust their kids to handle difficult situations independently. The key is learning when to step back and let them find their own way.

The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice.

If I had to pick one trait, it would be the ability to be comfortable with “the struggle”. That part of the day/hour/minute where the code isn’t doing what you expected, things aren’t looking like they should, or where things are going wrong and you don’t know why. The times where you’ve planned out a system, realised you’ve screwed it up and missed something crucial, again. The times where you swear at the screen, let out a massive sigh or hit rest your head on the desk in exasperation.

You might feel you can trust your gut to tell right from wrong, but the friction of social change shows that you can’t.

Exercise uses energy, burns calories, perhaps maintains a certain level of fitness. Training aims at definite improvement. “The difference between a workout and training,” she writes, “is a smart, predictable increase of intensity.”

• Admitting that “I don’t know” at least once a day will make you a better person.
• If you think someone is normal, you don’t know them very well. Normalcy is a fiction. Your job is to discover their weird genius.
• There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at it. This is your play time, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it.
• Never accept a work meeting until you’ve seen the agenda and know what decisions need to be made. If no decisions need to be made, skip the meeting.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Years ago, when I was in my 20s, a bold and artistically daring older friend who has since passed on gave me what I often think was the best advice I have ever gotten. I was worrying what ‘people would think’ of a decision I had made, and she said, “Amanda, There is no audience.”

Random parks, one minute at a time.