Weekend reading: the cardboard box edition

From Georgia to your doorstep

Photo by Roberto Sorin on Unsplash

Greetings, friends! I’m still on post-wedding, pre-Christmas pause—trying to get caught up on some essential work, most importantly my book draft—but I did want to keep your inbox stocked with some good reads.

All those boxes have to come from somewhere

I clicked on this New York Times Magazine deep dive into the cardboard box industry mostly because I’m a nerd about these sorts of things. I was surprised to find myself transported, in the first scene, to a Georgia loblolly pine forest.

It turns out the state is an epicenter of cardboard production. “We’ve got about 8,000 tons of trees coming in here every day,” the executive of a Georgia production facility told writer Matthew Shaer, “and we’re open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” That’s a lot of trees—which makes me think a bit differently about the stock of boxes I’ve got waiting for the recyclers.

Dancing through catastrophe

I was just gobsmacked by this great Elizabeth Weil essay in New York Magazine, exploring the different kinds of thinking that our ongoing planetary crisis might demand. Weil finds one productive mode of thinking at a New Orleans second-line parade. “A woman sold shrimp and grits out of hotel pans,” she writs. “A man stood and watched for hours, a sleeping toddler on his shoulder. Nothing here looked like climate action. It looked like perseverance.”