Ita Ever (1.04.1931 - 9.08.2023).

https://xkcd.com/1704/

Mice Studying, Kyosai Kawanabe

Take your clairvoyance and apply it to your life in the physical, Presumptuous half-hearted homunculus, Self-destruction is the power without knowing what the function is.

Felipe Andres Coronel

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

I think one of the kindest things you can do for people with various mental health struggles is just... let people back into your life after they've been absent for a while.

Making friends as an adult is so fucking hard already and isolating yourself from other people is a very common symptom of depression, anxiety, burnout, ocd, trauma, grief, etc. Which means that someone will do the hard work of recovery/healing and resurface back into a world where their previous friends have written them off because they stopped showing up.

So if you know someone where you're like "yeah we could have been better friends but they fell off the map a bit" and that person suddenly reaches out, or starts showing up to events even though you kind of forgot they were still in the group chat... well they may have been Going Through It and you don't actually have to punish them for their absence you can just be glad that they're back.

Latvian photographer Gunārs Janaitis was just 14 years old when he secretly took this photo of train leaving for Siberia labour camps on 25th of March, 1949. The animal wagons carried people captured by Russian authorities. The deportations were based on allegations for being either: 1) a nationalist; 2) a kulak (Soviet term for a relatively wealthy farmer). On this day in 1949, 42 125 people were deported from Latvia: 13 248 families, 11 316 men, 19 822 women, 10 987 children. Almost all of the deportees (95%) were Latvians.

Think rich, look poor.

Andy Warhol

Iceland II, 2024, oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm

I’m not so worried about the dangers of mental junk food. No, my worry is that you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain. I’m talking about what you might call the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming. ... Our maximum taste shrinks. Have you ever noticed that 70 percent of the people you know are more boring at 30 than they were at 20? I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent. I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.

David Brooks