Jenny

“America’s student-loan debt machine is now larger than Americans’ combined credit-card debt.[11] Think about how many college graduates have amassed five- and six-figure student-loan debts, and yet a third still earn less than half the nation’s median wage.[12] While economists argue that a four-year degree is still the best long-term path forward,[13] only half of Americans participate in any form of higher ed at all. 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

“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

“For blue-collar workers left to fend for themselves, many of them now working service jobs for half their previous pay and no benefits, the shift to unfettered free trade was like opening a velvet box and finding a turd inside. The Democratic strategist David Axelrod had a better (or at least more polite) metaphor: “I’m so proud of my association with Barack Obama, but the Democratic Party was the party that brought and heralded free trade. We lied to people and said all boats would be lifted somehow. Well, it was a tide that lifted a lot of yachts. A lot of the smaller boats got shipwrecked. A lot of people’s lives were changed for the worse.”[14]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“Deaths of despair are disproportionately concentrated in places where misinformation spreads rampantly—in high-poverty communities with low college education attainment, scarce access to local doctors, and scant local news. Small Ohio cities like the Springfields, Urbanas, and Marysvilles are places that tend to be the most overlooked by the Democratic Party and urban elites. “Emerging neurological research has shown clear links between despair and vulnerability to misinformation, right-wing radicalization, and violence,” noted a Brookings Institution study Chad shared with me.[”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America