Shards from the wide web: too good to be missed

This collection originally contained some musings about NFL football from smart sportswriters, but after Damar Hamlin's nationally televised collapse, I think I'll skip those ... What follows are other oddments.

From the San Francisco Chronicle's Soleil Ho:

I’m a restaurant critic. Am I fueling gentrification in the Bay Area? As a restaurant critic, I see part of my job as rooting out the “real”: relying on experience and know-how to highlight what is sublime and singular in the world around me. But the real has started to feel more and more elusive as the urban growth machine has facilitated culinary landscapes entrenched in an endless configuration of white walls, salad bars and food halls. Yet I’ve struggled with finding a productive way to talk about that in my work.

And it wasn't even raining when I met this anonymous man.

From Anthony Flores on the streets of San Francisco: 

“Who wants to be clean when you’ve got nowhere to stay?” Anthony said. “Your life’s pretty much a bummer sometimes.”

By way of sociologist Zeynep Tufekci: 

“Medicine doesn’t like what it can’t understand, so it often ignores it,” Ravindra Ganesh, a physician scientist who directs the post-Covid care clinic at Mayo Clinic, told me.

From Time columnist Charles Blow: 

... when I was writing my first book, I found myself in the main branch of New York City’s public library not because I needed to do research — the book was a memoir — but because the space itself seemed most aligned with the task of writing. It was like going to church to pray. 

I too am abundantly grateful for libraries.

And grateful also for a laugh induced by this squib from a tweet:

Looks like we're going to need all the laughter we can get in the New Year.