Ingrid Burrington @ingrid@everything.happens.horse

Grateful for croissants for giving me a way to eat an entire stick of butter without getting my hands quite as greasy

The thing is there is actually a really good critical book on commodity trading by an extremely posh British journalist (guy literally named RUPERT who went to HARVARD) but he used his posh credentials to basically get industry assholes to tell on themselves?? It can be done!!

To be clear it doesn't seem as though Corbyn actually outed this guy as "posh" or uh, personally judged him, feel like the defensiveness here is saying a lot

Hahahahaha I was looking up past bylines by this author and in 2018 he wrote an op-ed for the Sunday Times titled "Jeremy Corbyn Has No Right to Judge My Background" basically saying that talking about class is "divisive"!! this explains how an economics editor can write a book that provides an incorrect definition of capitalism and barely acknowledge colonialism in COMMODITY HISTORY

You can also see the skeleton of the book proposal very transparently in the text bc each section has a sentence along the lines of "If (x activity) is what makes us human, (y commodity) is key to doing (x)." I am probably extra annoyed by this bc I just think "what makes us human" is not an interesting question but it's annoying!

I've absolutely been prey to lazy "we" language in previous work and I get the appeal but it also feels wildly arrogant in a book about histories of commodities that draws heavily on prior pop science and history writing. Saying that "we" don't really think much about salt and then citing a bestselling book about salt by a James Beard Award winner is sloppy!

This book I'm supposed to be reviewing is really attached to framing stuff as what "we" take for granted or "our" way of life and I am having flashbacks to teaching industrial designers with @sparks bc we used to drive the students insane by insisting they be specific w/r/t the "we" language

https://buttondown.email/perfectsentences/archive/perfect-sentences-32/ this week in sentences: all over my arms, the earth owns them forever, hacking edges, a wholly owned subsidiary

IMO sand is NOT humble though, have you ever been to a beach sand loves to get into EVERYONE'S business and also clothes

Etymology suggests that humble as a word traces back to "lowly" as in literally "on the ground" (the same origin as the word humus), so it may have begun as an explicit statement of how materials like sand and salt are literally "of the earth"

one of those questions that on 2009-2015 twitter probably would have rustled up an expert: what is the history of referring to certain materials as "humble"? reading a book on commodities where the ~humility~ of various minerals gets invoked a lot, curious when/how that language became commonplace. Is it a Bible thing? Feels like maybe a Bible thing

Her job...it's just snooze

Lin-Manuelanguage Model

Always struggle with the "no time for despair" framing and the way it implies there's an indulgence to sorrow, as though one is losing in the fight of one's life simply out of laziness or not trying hard enough. I would love to feel other feelings!!

On the one hand I agree with the observation from Rebecca Solnit that despair is a valid feeling but it's not an analysis

On the other, I *feel* pretty strongly like I want to die sometimes and sometimes the feeling is too intense to really *analyze* it

Anyway I think I'm pretty well useless for the rest of the day from the cortisol of this non-update, goodnight