By Neale Van Fleet on May 4th, 2024
Héritage
By Neale Van Fleet on May 3rd, 2024
I recently got to take part in a very small art performance for a single person, me. Montréal/Rome based artist Sarah Zakaib met with me in a coffee shop, told me stories of her extended family, and gifted me with a casting of a ring that one of her family members had smuggled out of Italy during World War II. It was an art performance for a single person. It was touching, personal, and refreshingly small. The other people in the coffee shop had no idea that anything unusual was happening at all.
Constellational Diasporas
By Neale Van Fleet on May 1st, 2024
A closeup of Anahita Norouzi‘s artwork Constellational Diasporas from the Montréal’s Musée d’art contemporain. Each glass orb contains an invasive Persian Hogweed seed, which is an invasive species here in Quebec.
The Suburbs are Subsidized
By Neale Van Fleet on April 30th, 2024
Japanese Train Tickets
By Neale Van Fleet on April 26th, 2024
Present & Correct has assembled some stunning train tickets from Japan into one little gallery. So good.
Via Kottke
Apple Jonathan
By Neale Van Fleet on April 25th, 2024
Photo via
My day job as a designer of Mac apps gives me a special fondness for computer concepts. This is a little-known Apple prototype from the 80’s which was a candidate to be a new platform alongside, or instead of, the Mac. Inspired by a bookshelf, “This concept envisioned a computer that would expand with the needs of the user, through the use of modular components”.
The user would add modules depending on what they needed to do, like disk, drives, storage, video cards, or specialized components. Modular designs often work out better in theory than in practice, and it’s likely that in this case getting all the pieces to work with each other would have been a technical nightmare.
Via Daring Fireball
On School Start Times, ADHD, and Sleep
By Neale Van Fleet on April 24th, 2024
I’m currently looking into high schools for my son, and start times are playing a larger role than expected. Many are too early for us to be able to get there on time without waking at an unreasonable hour. According to sleep researcher Dr. Matthew Walker, early school start times are increasingly common, as he writes in his book Why We Sleep:
A century ago, schools in the US started at nine a.m. As a result, 95 percent of all children woke up without an alarm clock. Now, the inverse is true, caused by the incessant marching back of school start times—which are in direct conflict with children’s evolutionarily preprogrammed need to be asleep during these precious, REM-sleep-rich morning hours.
Many schools start at 8:00am, or sometimes even earlier. Some of these otherwise great schools have dropped far down our list because of their unreasonable start times.
Levels of ADHD have been rising steadily around the world. This might seem unrelated, but according to Walker, sleep deprivation symptoms are often indistinguishable from those of ADHD.
If you make a composite of these [ADHD] symptoms (unable to maintain focus and attention, deficient learning, behaviorally difficult, with mental health instability), and then strip away the label of ADHD, these symptoms are strongly overlapping with those caused by a lack of sleep. Take an under-slept child to a doctor and describe these symptoms without mentioning the lack of sleep, which is not uncommon, and what would you imagine the doctor is diagnosing the child with, and medicating them for? Not deficient sleep, but ADHD.
More research is needed, as correlation does not mean causation, but the possibility that some of the rise in ADHD can be attributed to early school times is intriguing. As someone who is both bad at sleep, and diagnosed with ADHD, these passages are making me think hard about my own experiences in childhood with ADHD medication, which I absolutely hated and stopped after a couple of days.
Montreal Murals
By Neale Van Fleet on April 19th, 2024
Artwork by Kari Izumiya, photo credit unknown
Montréal has seen many, many pieces of public art pop up in the last few years, thanks in part to the Mural festival. These artworks are accessible, free to the public, and take art out of the institutional (dare I say elitist) art galleries. The city has started to curate a photo gallery of these murals, which number over 300(!). Worth a scroll to see some great pieces.
Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
By Neale Van Fleet on April 16th, 2024
Maria Popova’s excellent Marginalian blog shared some excerpts from John Koenig’s 2021 book The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, for which the author created new words to describe types of malaise for which don’t have current English words for. For example:
AGNOSTHESIA
n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.
Via Rafa
Your Undivided Attention on Social Media and Youth
By Neale Van Fleet on April 15th, 2024
As someone who is quite solidly anti-social media (this blog is the closest I come to taking part in social media), this episode of the Your Undivided Attention podcast is a sobering listen. It’s an interview with writer Jonathan Haidt, where they particularly focus on the mental health crisis among Gen Z, the first generation who have grown up completely in the social media era. Notably, Zoomers have much higher rates of anxiety and depression.
It starts with a sobering detailing of a slow educational crisis starting with Ben Z (generally considered to be kids born from the mid/late 90’s into the early 2010’s):
…humans had a play-based childhood for millions of years because that’s what mammals do. All mammals play. They have to play to wire up their brains. But that play-based childhood began to fade out in the 1980s in the United States and it was gone by 2010, and that’s because right around 2010 is when the phone based childhood sweeps in…
…scores in math and reading and those were all fairly steady, and then all of a sudden, after 2012, they drop. So that’s international. Around the world, our young people are… not learning as much as they would have a few years before.