“Astronomers take the position—an incidentally ethical one—of knowing.” — Rivka Galchen in The New Yorker, on the James Webb Space Telescope
Enjoyed and was impressed by Jim McKelvey’s “The Innovation Stack." I expected the smarts, but it’s also consistently funny. Great pacing, light on its feet. The STL connections are an added bonus.
Jeff Tweedy’s new Substack newsletter, Starship Casual, is unsuprisingly great — at turns goofy and thoughtful, just like his books and interviews. Today’s post, “Heart of Glass (Rememories 5), was especially memorable. He’s a slyly penetrating artist.
“Theodicy,” by Nick Laird. What a phenonomal poem, with a vivid, piercing close.
Year in Review: 2020
Thursday, December 31, 2020
*Sylvie, sipping through a backyard quarantine concert by a friend and SLSO musician* Year 20 of my annual cultural-recap tradition was quite something. Thus far my family’s had good fortune amid the global pandemic, so we’re spending most of our time feeling grateful, yet exhausted, then grateful, yet exhausted. With lots of time at home, there was some enjoyable culture to take in. Here’s a look at some highlights: Books The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches & Meditations, Toni Morrison Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, Anna Wiener Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, George Packer Having and Being Had: Eula Biss My Parents: An Introduction, Aleksandar Hemon Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong Weather, Jenny Offill Promised Land, Barack Obama Then the Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian Jack, Marilyn Robinson My Life in France, Julia Child Severance, Ling Ma Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson Luster, Raven Leilani Intimations, Zadie Smith Monocle: How to Make a Nation The Passion Economy, Adam Davidson These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, Martha Ackmann Wine Simple, Aldo Sohm Normal People, Sally Rooney The Lying Lives of Adults, Elena Ferrante Girl, Edna O’Brien Lurking: How a Person Became a User, Joanne McNeil How to Be a Family, Dan Kois Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece, Alex Beam The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St.
Latest rave: the new Aleksandar Hemon book, "My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You." Moving, funny. You get the sense Hemon has thought deeply about the moments he puts to paper.
Weeknotes #02
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Odds and ends from the past few weeks: What a fun treat to see Forbes spotlight ListenForestPark.org, an audio microsite my team launched a few years ago as a side project. It’s found a new audience these days. Finished “Devs” on Hulu. Dug the style and performances; so-so on the ultimate substance. The series “ZeroZeroZero” was, like one of the creator’s prior work “Sicario,” cinematically beautiful; it was just too grim and violent for me to continue past episode three.
Weeknotes #01
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Borrowing the structure of a few other online writers whose websites I enjoy (Paul Robert Lloyd and Mark Boulton, among others), I thought I’d start weekly low-key look-backs on the week, bullet list-style. Perhaps weekly is aspirational. We’ll see. Greatly enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s long New Yorker profile of Fiona Apple, whose long-awaited record just hit my Spotify streaming today. After reading the piece, I’d been going back through Apple’s back catalogue, awaiting the new songs and relishing the old.
Toni Morrison's Exquisite Nonfiction
Friday, March 6, 2020
I just finished Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019), and every few pages or so, I thought to myself: it’s rare I’m taking in prose this rhythmically perfect, this deeply intelligent. From “Peril” (2008): How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us.
Playing Haley Heynderickx
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Thanks to a chance moment listening to KDHX in the car, I’ve now had Haley Heynderickx on repeat — especially her record “I Need to Start a Garden,” and especially the song “Oom Sha La La.” Looked it up, and sure enough, there’s a Tiny Desk concert in the books as well, with that tune kicking it off. Grateful for the find.
How Basecamp Communicates
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Thoughtful and clear series of internal communications principles from the (distributed) team at Basecamp, which strives to be a calm, intelligent and profitable company. Loved #6 especially: Writing solidifies, chat dissolves. Substantial decisions start and end with an exchange of complete thoughts, not one-line-at-a-time jousts. If it’s important, critical, or fundamental, write it up, don’t chat it down.
Anne Enright: “The Gathering”
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Dimly, I had never read a word of Anne Enright’s before recently hearing her recommended by Stephen Metcalf on the Slate Culture Gabfest. Based on my gobbling up of The Gathering, I’ve been missing a lot. The prose was utterly controlled and evocative, with surprising, perfect dichotomies throughout: But this is 1925. A man. A woman. She must know what lies ahead of them now. She knows because she is beautiful.
“The weather is no longer small talk”
Saturday, November 9, 2019
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson speaks with Ezra Klein about climate change and the oceans.
Charles and Ray, Designers From the Near Future
Saturday, August 31, 2019
Loved this passage from Sam Jacob’s essay “Context as Destiny: The Eameses from Californian Dreams to the Californiafication of Everywhere,” published in the satisfyingly chunky The World of Charles and Ray Eames (2016): For architects and designers like [Peter and Alison Smithson, who were British], the Eameses’ Californian-ness opened a dazzlingly bright window into another world, a sun-kissed world far from the origins of European modernism weighed down by all that Old War baggage — by history, politics and war, by notions of an avant-garde, by post-war reconstruction and the serious politics of the welfare state.
Tweedy + The Beasties
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Two relatively new music books I enjoyed this summer: Jeff Tweedy’s Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back:) A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. (honest, often funny; really enjoyed the sections about his sons) and the bluntly titled Beastie Boys Book (their mischief has been carried over to the copy and design).
I was impressed and moved by Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Poetic, searching, deeply affecting. Highly recommended. Related reading/listening: Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker; Kat Chow in The Atlantic; and this Politics & Prose conversation with the author (genuine, exacting, deeply intelligent).
From the novel:
Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?
Paul Ford's Latest
Thursday, May 30, 2019
Any new Paul Ford piece is a must-read for me. No one else I know of writes about technology with such a combination of literary style and wit and hands-on knowledge. (Once the Web Editor of Harper’s, he’s now the CEO of the digital product studio Postlight.) Here’s the opening to Ford’s latest Wired cover story, “Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry”: Nerds, we did it.
Jia Tolentino: “Ecstasy”
Saturday, May 25, 2019
One of the finest personal essays I’ve read in years — poetic, precise, expertly set up and brought to a close.
Three episodes into Decomposed, a fabulous new podcast about classical music hosted by Jade Simmons. Loving the storytelling, Simmons’ narrative style and the use of music throughout.