underscored

@underscored

21 clips · 1 follower

Follow
Tag:identityClear

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
1d ago

In reality, the self making the choices at a point in time and the self living with their consequences across the timeline of life, the self avowing the promises and the self keeping or breaking them, are never the same person. To know this about oneself is the beginning of mercy.

6d ago

As an addict, you have to remind yourself that you're still an addict, even when you aren't doing things that are terrible for you.

1w ago

Really, though, my bereavement was internal and external justification for something I would have wanted to try anyway. I've trended toward heaviness my entire life, and food has always been a font of shame.

1w ago

The tissue was just hanging there, loose and slack. My skin had seemingly doubled in size. It was drooping, deflated. I'd never seen anything like it, until I realized I had. It looked like the leg of my grandfather when he was 90 years old.

3w ago

My friends, being my friends, invariably champion the necessity of objects piling up in my yard.

3w ago

Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.

3w ago

But at the end of the day, it's consumption, not production, that defines you as an individual. That might sound like an odd thing to say, especially if you've grown up believing — as my liberal parents taught me — that advertising is a form of mind control that greedy corporations use to force you to consume things you don't really need.

3w ago

Black comedy's revolutionary potential is strongest when it ignores the other eyes upon it—or, as Collins puts it, "Black comedy that primarily serves Black audiences." Where Bennett errs, however, is in holding up the era of crossover appeal as the apex of Black comic achievement.

3w ago

I want us to all build wardrobes that make us happy, last a long time, and help us feel more like ourselves.

1mo ago

Increasingly, identity is a raw material that scammers, spammers, and even platforms can remix without your permission — unless you show up to claw it back.

1mo ago

Singing that felt a little bit like communicating with a much younger version of me who was concerned with being able to get better, being legitimate, and wanting to not feel shame about making mistakes. I feel like that song was written to me today, and I felt like I could answer back to that person, "Yeah, you were right to want this and want to try harder."

1mo ago
longreads.com
In Search of Banksy

It is one of the most popular names in Britain, so common it helps him hide in plain sight.

1mo ago

I grew up in a very Indian California, and it was under almost constant siege by a society habituated to extraction, displacement, and dispossession. The Native Bay Area and California that raised me was pocked with these invisible enclaves of Indian community: filled with love and holding on by a thread.

2mo ago

Before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court…. What's left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.

2mo ago

The mind creates a narrative self, a kind of ongoing story about who we are. But this narrative is a construct, no less than a novel—and like a novel, it can be rewritten.

2mo ago

Before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court…. I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What's left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.

2mo ago

Before the electrodes were attached to his head he'd lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court…I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else.

2mo ago

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

2mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

Start saving quotes →