Welcome to week 23 of Internet of Literal Things. The weird, wacky, wonderful, and wild of the world wide web seems to be several-too-many “w’s” and a perfect place for me to start. I’m Sara Nason, a fellow person on the internet, who happens to have many hours on hand to read random articles that are tucked into multiple crevices in my phone.
This summer, in a move upon life transition upon chapter closing, I found the boxes full of memories that I packed as a senior in high school, when my family moved homes. Emotional wounds fresh on my heels, I wasn’t able to get rid of anything. Literally anything. My first iPod shuffle, that is a literal USB with the string you looped around your neck; every single stuffed animal that had a memory attached to it; rows and rows and rows of photos I took during my artsy hipster phase of freshman year. I happened to dig up an insert that went into my camp trunk — the heavy metal kind that took two college-age camp counselors to lift — chock full of a camping bowl, a set of utensils, a camping poncho, and a neon-yellow hand-crank flashlight.
And while the lost remnants of my… *cough*… extraordinarily awkward phase of puberty can stay buried in the depths of the attic, I’m finding joy again in being. Which is to say, I’ve gotten back outside. I don’t mean that I’m returning (yet) to my days of backpacking at farm camp when I was in middle school, porting my bright pink trunk alongside me for all to see. [For the record: I still find farm camp cool]. I’ve been walking: in parks, on paths, in the city, in preserves, on the beach, in the mountains, in the valley, by the river, and on and on and on. I usually work out with headphones and a loud playlist of pseudo-pop music, but I’ve liked not having any music with me on my walks/hikes. I can hear crickets and cicadas, brooks babbling and leaves whispering. I feel more whole. Maybe, I’m walking through another life transition; maybe, I’m just being; maybe, it’s Maybelline.
So, strangers of the internet, here we go. on walking for the Internet of Literal Things #23
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What I’m Reading
Planned Parenthood will withdraw from a federal funding program because of an abortion “gag rule” (Buzzfeed)
Neil Young’s lonely quest to save music (NY Times)
The world’s oldest webcam is shutting down after a quarter of a century (The Verge)
Nipsey Hussle understood cities better than you (StreetsBlogLA)
Ikea is quietly changing its brand again—for a very good reason (Fast Company)
Why can’t I take public transit to the beach? (CityLab)
Fears of white supremacy at the farmers’ market (NY Times)
Netanyahu banned Omar and Tlaib because the occupation must be hidden to survive (The Forward)
When ICE leaves a small town in Mississippi (Slate)
Orangutans teach the need for creative space (Medium)
Hong Kong protesters unify in a human chain across the city (Quartz)
How Hong Kong’s leaderless protest army gets things done (Bloomberg)
Rockaway Beach is disappearing and resurgent all at once (CityLab)
How an e-bike changed my life (NY Times)
In defense of reading the same book over and over again (VOX)
Why the Amazon is on fire (CityLab)
More fires are burning in Angola, Congo than the Amazon (Bloomberg)
The age of comfort TV: why people are secretly watching Friends and The Office on a loop (The Guardian)
The untold story of America’s brilliant national parks branding (Fast Company)
What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot. (NY Times)
The 1619 Project (NY Times)
What I’m Visually Experiencing
"Restaurant of Mistaken Orders" (YouTube)
What I’m Listening To
Taylor Swift’s new album, Lover (Spotify)
summer19 (Spotify)
🏆 A Photo of An #UglyDogs Related Thing On The Internet 🥇
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