Weekly Assemblage for 2025 Week 02

Weekly Whaaa…?

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 02 is the week of 2024-01-06/2025-01-12.

Aspiration of the Week

Even though I’m writing this on Jan 19th, a full week after Week02 has ended, I do think I’ll be ridiculous enough to aim at posting 100 things this calendar year, as I shared in last week’s weeknote. I’m realizing that, despite how much time I spend on social media, I find myself far happier after spending time reading short-form writing on blogs and digital gardens than spending the same amount of time scrolling an endless feed.

So I’m hoping that writing my own posts will give me a similar sense of fulfillment and community, as well as help me contribute reasons for others to spend more time in RSS readers (should that similarly suit them).

This means I’ll aim to average writing a weeknote and just one additional note each week this calendar year, which isn’t that big of an undertaking if I choose to think of smaller, breezier increments instead of larger, heftier chunks.

“Rally pace” always springs to mind when I think about this sort of mile-marking. I’m doing similar calculations for how many books or articles I’ll need to be reading each week in order to get through all my reading lists, which is another reason to steer myself towards sharing my own thoughts more frequently.

If you’re doing something similar, I’d love to hear about it—especially if you’re just starting out with a blog or other space of your own online!

Viewing

This week we watched more movies than in a typical week.

We saw:

• Dan in Real Life
• Downsizing
• 10 Things I Hate About You

Even a week later, I keep thinking of snippets of each of them.

Downsizing surprised us the most, since Netflix’s preview card led us to anticipate it primarily being a Jason Sudeikis joint, when the biggest role actually is performed by some dude named Matt Damon. Despite (or due to?) not being at all what we expected (most likely some kind of midlife crisis Honey I Shrunk the Kids meet the Good Place), it’s the one that has stuck with me most vividly.

Reading

I finished Hayot’s Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. this week, as well as starting Richards’ The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire.

Humanist Reason

Hayot’s Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. feels like something we’ve needed—or at least I’ve needed—for quite some time to help us explain the actual processes we perform, and the beliefs attested to by our behaviors, when doing work in the humanities. I’m planning to write more about it in the next few weeks.

I’d highly recommend it to anyone who cares about human knowledge, whether or not they think they care about those disciplines called “the humanities”.

The Imperial Archive

As I’m writing this, I’m about halfway through Richards’ The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire—and I’m very grateful that Past Me chose to put it on my lists.

Librarians and archivists have well-earned skepticism toward people who write about “the archive” without much engagement with actual archives or archivists, but I think that reaction would be displaced here.

Richards does an excellent job of explaining that he’s analyzing the cultural work performed by the fantasy of “an archive” of knowledge allied with the (British) state, and the influences of this primarily-imagined network. I’d also recommend it to anyone interested in knowledge, archives, or information networks, but it’s likely not to feel as groundbreaking as Hayot’s for most readers.

Kudos

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