Jenny

“When they pulled the ladder of upward mobility away from low-wage families, they took away the thing that soothes misery and distress; they took away their hope. What the free-market boosters failed to account for is that, without the potential for advancement and the general sense that fairness and justice will prevail, our social compact is screwed. The more divided our education levels, the more divided our nation.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“For some time after Anne's death, Otto had been unable to bring himself to read the diary. But when he finally picked up this private document that his child had left behind, he was startled by the depth and nuance of her reflections. "It was quite a different Anne than I had known as my daughter," Frank said, in his careful, accented English. "What really her feelings were, I could only see from the diary." Otto had been very close to Anne, he pointed out, so it was interesting to consider how little he had understood about her. "Most parents don't know, really, their children," he said.

That feeling Frank describes, of not being able to fully understand one's own adolescent child, has surely been compounded for parents in the era of social media.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“When I left for college in 1982, the Pell Grant paid the entirety of my tuition, my room and board, and even my textbooks—an investment in my future that I have paid back through taxes many times over. When you consider that the government recoups the money spent on a typical Pell grantee, through taxes on their increased earnings, in just ten years,[10] the gutting of Pell’s purchasing power is extremely shortsighted. But the plundering of this federal program, birthed in the last gasp of America’s War on Poverty, is also rarely discussed.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“It would have been easy to create the illustrations in this book on a computer -- to take a photo of an original artwork and edit Kitten in digitally. It was a greater challenge, and a whole lot more fun, to see if I could actually make pieces of art that looked like the originals in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and blend Kitten's headlong pursuit of the mouse into them. Everything you see Kitten encountering and exploring in this book was handmade, using acrylic and oil paints, gouache, ink, plaster, wood, gold leaf, clay, paper, glass, lead, and more. Some of the techniques I used were ones that I'd done before, and some were new to me.

So yes, it could have been done digitally. And now, artificial intelligence even allows us to enter a description of what we want, and in seconds, the computer spits out an image. But where's the satisfaction in that? The computer created it, not us.

If you like making things, practice. Practice makes better! It takes time to develop skills so things turn out the way you want them to; the way you see them in your imagination--you can't simply leap ahead and skip all that work. But it's fun to write stories and to make pictures and build things, and I hope you'll do these things because they're satisfying. Focus on the enjoyment you get while your skills are coming along. You can make pretty much anything you want to, if you teach yourself how.

If people before us could do it, why not me? Why not you?”
― Brian Lies, Cat Nap