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Zak Smith Sabbath’s Victory Speech Upon Not Winning an Ennie

Zak Smith has things to say to people who want to create things other people enjoy, and it boils down to a couple of simple formulas:

Kevin Crawford lays out a second model here and I don’t think I’d get any disagreement from Kevin when I say his model is:

-Make things for a broad audience
-Make a lot of things
-Work hard year round
-Don’t worry about being inspired, just work

Kevin is an honorable man who knows what he’s about. What I am saying here is that Red & Pleasant Land proves a totally different and third model is also viable in 2015:

-Ignore what the audience wants
-Put all your effort into that one thing
-Work hard for a few months
-Keep your team small
-Put out a thing that is exactly and only the thing you are inspired to work on

Yup. I’ve seen it work for others, too.

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You Are Worth All The Soup

It’s one of my favorite parables explaining the idea of growth and self-care. There’s a table. You and all your friends and family are sitting around this table. You’re all starving. From the ceiling descends a bowl of soup. It lands right in front of you. You are the only one who’s allowed to dip your spoon into the soup. No one else can have any soup.

Here’s the big question: Do you eat the soup?

Yes. You eat the soup.

Many of us fight this concept, especially if we’re accustomed to believing that others are more important than we are or that belonging is more important than our own wellbeing. In some ways, it stems from a good place. We care for others. We want to be with them, we want to understand them, we want to feel connected to them. We all have a deep-seated desire to belong. Historically, we know we need to be part of the herd to survive. Stragglers get eaten by peckish mountain lions, after it chases you around for awhile to get you nice and salty.

You starving to death doesn’t help your friends and family. Not even a little bit. Your pain doesn’t remove their pain. You being in pain only adds to the pain of the room.

Yes, there’s some guilt associated with taking deep and tender care of yourself. Because suddenly you’re feeling better than people around you. But the guilt isn’t because you aren’t taking care of those people – you can’t take care of them. They can only take care of themselves. The guilt stems from taking care of yourself when those around you aren’t.

I find Amber Adrian very inspirational.

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On Wyatt Cenac, ‘Key & Peele,’ And Being The Only One In The Room

The Stewart-Cenac exchange illustrates what those of us who are often The Only One In The Room tend to know: It sucks. But it turns out that being The Only One isn’t simply burdensome and annoying on an individual level. There’s evidence that when people feel like they’re The Only One in a group, even a group that professes to care about diversity in its ranks, it actually gets in the way of everything said diversity was supposed to achieve in the first place.

 

We have to do better than just “diversity”. We can do better, and one of the first and most important things white people can do at this point is just fucking listen to what people of color and women and gays and everyone else is saying.

Just fucking listen.

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The Myth of the Ethical Shopper

But in the past 25 years, the apparel industry, the entire global economy, has undergone a complete transformation. The way our clothes are made and distributed and thrown away is barely recognizable compared to the way it was done in the ’90s. And yet our playbook for improving it remains exactly the same.

This year, I spoke with more than 30 company reps, factory auditors and researchers and read dozens of studies describing what has happened in those sweatshops since they became a cultural fixation three decades ago. All these sources led me to the same conclusion: Boycotts have failed. Our clothes are being made in ways that advocacy campaigns can’t affect and in places they can’t reach. So how are we going to stop sweatshops now?

Read the whole story to find out what Michael Hobbes’ proposed solution is (hint: it’s something that Brazil has been working on for 30 years). Excellent analysis and reporting.

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The secret history of Portland’s weirdest neighborhood

Ralph Lloyd came from a family of Welsh ranchers. But he wanted to be a singer.

Born outside Los Angeles in 1875, Lloyd worked his way into college in San Francisco in the 1890s. He studied geology but tried making a living on his voice in the city. Lloyd stuck with it until a letter arrived from his father, saying he was needed on the ranch. At age 21, he moved back home.

He helped run the ranch for nine years. Then one day in 1905 Lloyd told his parents he was quitting to take a job at a wood-pipe factory.

His mother was baffled, but it turned out that Lloyd’s new boss was grooming him for management. Lloyd and his wife moved to Olympia, Wash., in 1907, to investigate an unprofitable factory and successfully turned it around. The next year, he was promoted to senior vice president and relocated to Portland.

The Lloyds fell head over heels for their new town.

Ever wonder who the Lloyd District was named after? Go read Jonathan Mann’s fantastic story about early Portland history (but start with Part 1, and keep an eye out for Part 3, still to come, and explains how this part of Portland is set to become a model for bike culture and transportation).