Getting too bourgeois

“We don’t want to be fixed in something that doesn’t move. In French we call it getting too bourgeois.”

--Alice Lemoine, whose chic and relatively minimal family home was featured in the October 2019 issue of Architectural Digest (which is lately my favorite magazine into which I escape from my very bourgeois life)

The online clamor

"At the time, like many of her friends, she was frozen, unsure of how to proceed. In Oakland, where she lives, it felt like everyone she knew was asking themselves, 'What is the point of what I am doing? Am I adding anything to the world?' At the same time, it felt difficult to distance oneself from the online clamor long enough to formulate an answer."

-- from the NYT Book Review of Jenny Odell's “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy." I really, really liked the essay she wrote which apparently led to the book. If I can pry myself away from the Internet for long enough maybe I'll actually read the book too.

 

"I can walk away."

“I’m too old—not too old, but I’m tired—to put a lot of energy into something I don’t really want to do. And I am genuine when I say I can walk away.”

-Hannah Gadsby, the (perhaps now former) stand-up comic on deciding to leave comedy for good after her very successful show Nanette. Via her interview with Vanity Fair

A certain way to be

"Unlike LeBron James, who'd grown up in the spotlight and had years to get used to an unsettling level of fame and attention, or Steph Curry, who'd grown up wealthy, in a family that passed along a measure of security and knowledge about life off the court, Durant was learning as he went.

'I wasn't no phenom growing up,' he told me. 'It was just my mom, my brother, my godfather, and my grandma. My games wasn't packed out in high school. I didn't even play at night. So this shit is all new. As it's happening, I'm experiencing it for the first time.

I wasn't taught a certain way to be growing up. I got taught right from wrong, and how to be fair. Anything else, I had to figure out.'"

 

--From GQ's recent profile of Kevin Durant. I've been watching more basketball recently, and Durant is definitely a favorite. The Warriors are very lucky to have him.