The weight of it all
Sometimes, the darkness can seem so dark, it is hard to see the light
Greetings,
Every Sunday, my father would get all the newspapers and spend the day pouring over news from around the world. The first thing he would do when he woke up was put on the news and, in the evenings, he would watch the 20h00 news. In between, he would have his small radio playing in his office, when he didn’t have meetings. This was always a point of contention between us. While I often read the Sunday papers, usually starting with the Sports sections at the back, I have never been much of a news person.
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We now live in a time when news and information are pervasive to the point of cacophony. It is an endless stream of information that is impossible to keep up with. In Can You Be A Good Person If You Don’t Read The News?, Leah Finnegan writes: “…I have come to believe that an essential form of self-care is consuming as little national news as possible, and I will argue that this is an ethical choice.” While it is written within an American context, I do think it applies across the board. By being deliberate about the news I consume, I am able to focus my energy and mind on being more productive as a human being.
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I randomly came across Naval Ravikant on Twitter and have been following him there for some years. And, through people like Tim Ferriss and Shane Parrish, I have learned more about him and his journey from India to the US, the hardships along the way and his successes as an investor and founder.
Eric Jorgenson has now published a book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide To Wealth and Happiness, in which he has aggregated and curated Ravikant’s philosophies and wisdom. He breaks down how he went about it on Six Innovations on the idea of a book from the Navalmanack. It is available for sale and for free download HERE. I am currently reading the PDF but it is a book that I eventually need to get for my bookshelf in which I can make notes and reference often.
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Writing has, for reasons I am still trying to make sense of, become the core of everything I do. For some, this is a wonderful place to be because of a mildly romantic view of living off words. For others, often writers, it can be a lonely and painful state of affairs. I call writing squeezing water from stone. Sometimes, I enjoy it, when writing purely for the pleasure of stringing words together; sometimes, I don’t.
The Single Reason Why People Can’t Write, According to a Harvard Psychologist.
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In a previous job at a magazine, I had a disagreement with the sub-editor on capitalising the letter B in Black, when writing about people. Publications have been governed by style guides that were developed in a different time and my argument has always been that these should not be cast in stone. The Case for Capitalising the B in Black.
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The Short Tenure and Abrupt Ouster of Banking’s Sole Black C.E.O. is a story that epitomises the challenges that Africans still have in a world and in systems that were not built for us, regardless of how capable we may be.
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The accurate documentation of Africa’s history is important to me. The rewriting of our history is, to a certain extent, at the heart of many false perspectives and stereotypes that we grapple with today. And, with AI-generated deepfakes, this is a problem that is going to get worse: Fake video threatens to rewrite history.
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In doing a Google search on Grace Jones, under People Also Ask section, there’s the question Is Grace Jones A Guy? I grew up on her music, loved her in films like the James Bond A View To A Kill and Boomerang with Eddie Murphy and had a bit of a crush on her through high school. I have always loved how she “subverted Western archetypes on Black women and gender binaries”, as stated in the article Grace Jones’ pioneering gender play and Afrofuturism on the exhibition Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco Studio at Nottingham Contemporary in the UK
That’s it for this week. Have yourselves a wonderful one. If you liked, please share.