Silly little humanoid thoughts
The spaces we create — at home and on the road — can help us live bravely in an unraveling world.
some housekeeping
As I work on the front lines of the AI disruption and navigate raising a family in a world that’s quite literally on fire, I feel a sense of urgency to keep expressing my silly little humanoid thoughts here. This newsletter has served as a place of creative refuge of me — as I hope it has for you — and I can’t shake the feeling that we will need it more than ever over the next few years.
While I’ll miss the design control of my current provider, I’m lured by the social flywheel available on Substack. This year, I’ve decided it’s time to double down on my investment in this project and go hunting far and wide for new readers.
I’ll need your help, of course. A couple of action items, if you’d be so kind:
If you’ve enjoyed any part of this newsletter, I’d be grateful if you would think of at least one person in your life who cares about design, living spaces, and architecture’s profound but often unnoticed affect on our lives. You can send them to shelterletter.substack.com to subscribe for free.
If you’d like to share a testimonial for the About page of the new site, I’d be doubly grateful! Simply reply back to this email with your blurb.
I get a lot of lovely mail from you folks, and I want more of that to happen out in the open so we can build some community together — instead of idling in the cul-de-sac of my inbox.
I’ve got some big plans for 2025 that I’m really excited about: interviews with great homemakers, fun new experiments like the post-election hotline I hosted back in November, and some collabs with other newsletter authors. As always, thank you so much for reading.
away we go.
Where We'll End Up Living as the Planet Burns
Gaia Vince for TIME
My take: I watched a video this week of a man staring at his burning house saying numbly: "There's my house. There's my house: gone. Nothing left." The caption read, "thank you thank you thank you for your memories." If there's something that immediately brings me to tears, it's watching people respond to moments of profound grief with gratitude. I hope I'll be able to meet such a moment the same way. And whether it's Biblical floods on the east coast or raging infernos in the west, it certainly seems like more moments like this are coming.
Best line: We can—and we must—prepare. Developing a radical plan for humanity to survive a far hotter world includes building vast new cities in the more tolerable far north while abandoning huge areas of the unendurable tropics. It involves adapting our food, energy, and infrastructure to a changed environment and demography as billions of people are displaced and seek new homes.
North of the 45°N parallel—which runs through Michigan in North America, France, Croatia, Mongolia, and Xinjiang in China, for instance—will be the twenty-first century’s booming haven: it represents 15 per cent of the planet’s area but holds 29 per cent of its ice free land, and is currently home to a small fraction of the world’s (aging) people.
Inland lake systems, like the Great Lakes region of Canada and the U.S., will see a huge influx of migrants—reversing the previous exodus from these areas—as the vast bodies of water should keep the region fairly temperate.
Jimmy Carter on death
Rick Rojas for The New York Times (🎁)
Best line: Mr. Carter’s death on Sunday at 100 has spurred an examination of a sprawling legacy: the successes and failures of his presidency; his work to eradicate diseases and bolster free and fair elections; his involvement with nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity.
Here is something else he left behind: In a culture where death as a subject is often taboo and engulfed in an aura of fear, he amassed over the years — across writing, public comments and Sunday school lessons — a compilation of observations that amounted to a candid, cleareyed, evolving exploration of the end.
33 ways to improve your life, Japanese style
Ashley Ogawa Clarke for Mr. Porter
Best line: Find your inner otaku. If there’s one thing the Japanese have mastered, it’s how to have an overly specific hobby – and we’re not just talking anime and manga. “There are so many galleries and museums dedicated to some unbelievable niches,” says McInnes. “Tobacco & Salt Museum, Meguro Parasitological Museum, ramen museums, cup ramen museums!” It’s testament to Japan’s all-in approach when it comes to doing something you love. So, if you have a passion, no matter how individual, this is your cue to follow it.
We had dirt in our fields, not soil. Something had to change.
friend-of-the-newsletter Ethan A. Stewart for Imagine5
Best line: By the time their daughter asked about keeping the milkweed around to help the butterflies, Tracey and Jackson were already having their own suspicion that things needed to change on the farm. “It just wasn’t working,” says Jackson. Their harvests were shrinking, their fields were becoming less productive, and they had both noticed something weird about their animals’ eating habits. “We noticed that our animals and livestock would not touch the GMO corn we were growing. They would eat around it. They would rather starve than eat it,” explains Tracey. “But, when we experimented and planted a small crop of non-GMO corn, that was ok to them. They would eat that without issue.”
home tour
Molly Baz's home (served) up good eats, epic marble, and that sweet California lifestyle
Julie Vadnal for Domino
My take: While it's absolutely worth mourning the beautiful designs that have now burned, I feel really strongly that the many lost celebrity homes in this week's fires in Los Angeles should only shine a light on the thousands of other less-famous families who are displaced: people like Henry Sanders and Mazi Mitchell and so many others. How horrifying for these folks to have lost everything — and for us to be watching it all go up in flames from our phones.
Best line: “Our dream has always been to have a house that feels like an open door,” says Baz. “There’s a big kitchen that then spills out into our living room, and people feel welcome to come in and know that they can hang, we can work, and there’s always food. It’s a very communal vibe.”
Seth Putnam is an editor and writer in Chicago. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in a 1920s home that is the epitome of a work in progress. See more of his work here.
"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." —Mary Oliver