If your legacy is the people whose lives you reach, LOOK AT THAT LEGACY.

Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show in 1999, the year I graduated high school. (I was a fan even before, of the sillier Craig Kilborn version). Since then, I think I’ve barely missed an episode. In college, he was our nightly news, a break from studying. Since then — and my acquisition of a DVR — he became a dinnertime companion, watching his take on the previous day’s news over a meal, catching up even on the days we missed because his service was so invaluable.

His show made current events engaging, and more importantly made our problems palatable.Through the difficult Bush years, he offered catharsis. Through the bizarre upheavals of the Obama years, he offered a voice of reason. And always intelligence, always laughter.

Thinking about his departure, I don’t know if there’s a single other person in entertainment I’ve spent as much time with as Jon Stewart. (Maybe The Simpsons, but that isn’t quite the same.) Leading up to his final show, I felt a strange clenching in my chest. It wasn’t sadness, like you’re preparing for a loss. At least not only that. The closest comparison I can make is saying goodbye to someone you loved in high school. They’re always going to be a part of your life. In many ways they helped make you who you are. But now it’s time to move on, and you both know it. You may see each other again some day, but it’ll be different. But that’s okay. The time you had was unforgettable. Invaluable. And you leave with a little bit of dread, but also gratitude. Grief, but also joy.

Which celebrity have you spent the most time enjoying? Why them? How did they affect your life?

If any current celebrity suddenly went away, which one would be the biggest loss, the biggest blow to your life, would leave the biggest hole?

For me it’s Jon Stewart, and there might never be another one bigger.

Thanks Jon.

Now the coworkers you can’t stand and the roommates that drive you nuts can be the SAME PEOPLE.

Buzzfeed News has a long piece about a potential new trend that builds on the trendy shared “co-working” spaces so hot with the hopeful startup crowd. Apparently the next step is “co-living”:

Co-living offers up the same short-term leases and the same promises as co-working, except community members (it is always a “community”) get a bed instead of a desk. In both cases, practitioners sacrifice space for proximity to like-minded people and access to perks. WeLive and Common and The Caravanserai and their ilk purport, essentially, to do for the home what WeWork has already done for the office: Sweat the small stuff. Make you feel like a boss. Feed your body and your intellect. “WE TAKE CARE OF ALL THE ‘STUFF’, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANYMORE,” The Caravanserai’s Haid promises on his website; the impossible-to-spell startup says it’s geared toward “professionals who seek a great work life balance and don’t want to waste time piecing it together themselves.”

In typical startup fashion, the promise is not having to do any normal boring human stuff, so you have more time to focus on bringing your brilliant ideas into the world. But also, erasing the line (and that bothersome transition) between work and non-work, since when you’re changing the world, isn’t it all about the work, man?

Is erasing the division between work and life by living and working in the same place just another step on a terrible trajectory?

Or are the people who love what they do so much that it becomes their whole reason for being actually the ones we should be envious of?

What kind of people would you want to work with, or what kind of project would you want to work on, that would make this setup a good thing?

This “sassy” tween rapper makes my skin crawl every time.

An easy either/or question today inspired by a recent plane trip.

Which unbearable crap that is somehow allowed to be forced down our throats on a regular basis would you banish from this earth:

The nearly FIVE MINUTE LONG Virgin America music video about safety?

Or the seemingly-on-every-channel-all-the-time-despite-being-willfully-unfunny Big Bang Theory?

A seemingly innocent article in The New York Times discusses how start-ups are capitalizing on the GIF craze in mobile messaging. But it caught my attention not just because its author seems like a stodgy business writer coming several years late to the party. More eyebrow-raising are the handful of somewhat troubling quotes he casually drops in that hint at something bigger, deeper, and possibly more depressing going on with how we use images to connect:

“I’m not that great with words,” Mr. Howlett said. “But if I find the perfect GIF, it nails it.”

…

“A GIF packages your message for you, so you don’t have to figure out how to express yourself,” Ms. Baron said.

…

”Typing is an antiquated input method and you can’t express emotional dimension adequately with just a handful of emoji,” said Adam Leibsohn, the chief operating officer of Giphy, which is based in Manhattan. “GIFs have trumped all of it.”

In isolation, these can sound like cries for help from a generation incapable of speaking to one another; or on the other side, for anyone who places real value in articulating meaning through words, like the last gasp of our society giving up any pretense of attempted sophistication.

Are we willingly dumbing ourselves down by falling back on emojis and GIFs to communicate?

Will society gradually value words less and less as a form, in favor of the simplicity of images?

Or will there be a growing divide between those who care enough to use words and those who don’t, based on class, or education, or age?

Or is this all just reactionary, and we’ll simply have a richer variety of ways to express ourselves?

In even greater need of examination and fresh ideas: travel Instagramming.

In the Boston Review, Jessa Crispin writes “How Not to Be Elizabeth Gilbert” (which, great title for sure), examining the pitfalls of the contemporary female travel memoir trend.

As she looks back at the history of travel writing, she observes differences between classic male travelogues and this new wave of personal travel diaries:

We still look to men to tell us about what they do and to women to tell us how they feel.

And even diving deeper into various female travel writers:

Maillart traveled because she was trying to understand something in herself; Stark traveled because she was trying to understand something in the world.

And about modern travel writing in particular, at her most pointed:

The travel writer sells not only lovely prose and insights into a new land but also the lifestyle of the rootless and adventurous. Yet, when you establish your life and yourself as goals to aspire to, you take yourself out of the world. Every interaction is sculpted for its eventual presentation, and the aim of every presentation is to show how wonderful your life is.

 

How would you best describe your reason for traveling?

How do you process and package travel when presenting it to others? What kind of stories do you end up telling?

Is travel in general enriching, or really just indulgent?