Compelling reading this holiday: A Civic Thanksgiving - by James Fallows.

Enjoyed The Chancellor by Kati Marton. Qualities vital to Merkel’s rise and 16-year tenure: endurance, humility, steeliness, patience, calm. (She once described herself, as she stood next to the high-energy, publicity-seeking Sarkozy, as an “energy-conserving lamp.”) 📚

How to write an engaging, smart e-newsletter opener, by the editorial team at Massive Science:

For the past few years at Massive, we’ve tried to avoid a gee-whiz attitude towards scientific discovery. It’s a little * flips open dictionary * reductive, shrinking complex stories into neat boxes, making what are often small nibbles at progress into big kabooming breakthroughs. We know our readers are savvy enough to see through that kind of framing. But sometimes, it’s fun to indulge, and let the wonder of the world wash over you a bit. This Weekend’s Reading is on, well, discoveries and their thrills.

Learned of comedic writer Simon Rich on Conan O’Brien’s terrific podcast and picked up his new book, New Teeth. The opening story, about two pirates coming to care for a stowaway baby, was just perfect. Here’s a version on The New Yorker’s website. 📚

Nice line from Kelefa Sanneh’s “Major Labels”:

Unlike many virtuosos, Eddie Van Halen had a knack for making virtuosity seem like a good time, and all the early Van Halen albums sound as if they were recorded at house parties, with the party noise somehow edited out.

“Fewer have more”

This phrase and passage from Cullen Murphy’s April Atlantic essay, “No, Really, Are We Rome?”, have stuck with me:

But resilience does not prevent calamity. And being blindsided in slow motion is the hardest fate to avoid. The historian Ramsay MacMullen once distilled the long arc of the Roman Empire into three words — ‘fewer have more’ — but only the time-lapse perspective of a millennium and a half allows us to understand such a thing with brutal clarity. The sack of Washington unfolded suddenly, in a way no one could miss. The greater dangers come in stealth.

“Invisible does not mean uninterested.” — Jim McKelvy in his smart, highly readable book “The Innovation Stack," on finding previously ignored markets (as he and Jack Dorsey did with Square)

“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

*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

  1. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches & Meditations, Toni Morrison
  2. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, Anna Wiener
  3. Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, George Packer
  4. Having and Being Had: Eula Biss
  5. My Parents: An Introduction, Aleksandar Hemon
  6. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong
  7. Weather, Jenny Offill
  8. Promised Land, Barack Obama
  9. Then the Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian
  10. Jack, Marilyn Robinson
  11. My Life in France, Julia Child
  12. Severance, Ling Ma
  13. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
  14. Luster, Raven Leilani
  15. Intimations, Zadie Smith
  16. Monocle: How to Make a Nation
  17. The Passion Economy, Adam Davidson
  18. These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, Martha Ackmann
  19. Wine Simple, Aldo Sohm
  20. Normal People, Sally Rooney
  21. The Lying Lives of Adults, Elena Ferrante
  22. Girl, Edna O’Brien
  23. Lurking: How a Person Became a User, Joanne McNeil
  24. How to Be a Family, Dan Kois
  25. Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece, Alex Beam
  26. The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St. Clair
  27. No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, Sarah Frier
  28. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, Hanif Abdurraqub
  29. How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy
  30. How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski
  31. Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, Barton Gellman
  32. To Start a War, Robert Draper
  33. The Spy Masters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, Chris Whipple
  34. Agent Running in the Field, John le Carré
  35. The Monocle Guide to Better Living
  36. Hell and Other Destinations, Madeline Albright
  37. The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger
  38. Bitter Brew, William Knoedelseder

Movies

  1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (exquisite, perfect)
  2. Parasite
  3. Booksmart
  4. Marriage Story
  5. Little Women
  6. Uncut Gems
  7. 1917
  8. Meyerowitz Stories: New & Collected
  9. The Irishman
  10. The Trip to Greece
  11. Palm Springs
  12. Rams
  13. Knives Out
  14. The Other Guys
  15. Maggie’s Plan
  16. Shoplifters
  17. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
  18. The Price of Everything
  19. Ford v. Ferrari
  20. Despicable Me

TV Shows

  1. Better Call Saul, Seasons 4 and 5
  2. Atlanta, Seasons 1 and 2
  3. Schitt’s Creek, All Seasons
  4. Never Have I Ever
  5. Call My Agent, Season 1
  6. Roadkill
  7. Devs
  8. Great British Bake-Off, Season 6 and 8
  9. Ted Lasso

Visual Art
I can’t recall a year when I saw less art — whether here in St. Louis or in cities we didn’t travel to. With that unfortunate reality, I’m especially grateful to have been able to see the fantastic exhibition “Terry Adkins: Resounding” at the Pulitzer this summer.

Podcasts
Favorite new discoveries: The Modern House Podcast, Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg, Siegel+Gale Says, and Simplicity Talks. Valuable mood-improver for 2020: Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.

Music
My Spotify’s a shared-with-kids mess, and for loads of weekly hours I stream jazz and classical music that I don’t make a note of to be recalled. That said, I did especially enjoy new records from Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers, Adrianne Lenker, Jeff Tweedy, Lomelda, Bob Dylan, Run the Jewels, and Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist. I’m grateful to have been turned on to the music of Big Thief, Harold Budd (via the e-newsletter Flow State), Eleanor Bindman, and Haley Heynderickx, whose “Oom Sha La La” always brightened our family’s quarantine, with the kids screaming and jumping along to the swelling refrain, “I need to start a garden!” Here’s to what’s to come.

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

Odds and ends from the past few weeks:

Weeknotes #01

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.

Toni Morrison's Exquisite Nonfiction

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. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves….

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorry into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

From Morrison’s 1998 Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address:

If I spend my life despising you because of your race, or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave. I own your energy, your fear, your intellect. I determine where you live, how you live, what your work is, your definition of excellence, and I set limits to your ability to love. I will have shaped your life. That is the gift of your hatred; you are mine….

We are already live-chosen by ourselves. Humans, and as far as we know there are no others. We are the moral inhabitants of the galaxy. Why trash that magnificent obligation after working so hard in the womb to assume it? You will be in positions that matter. Positions in which you can decide the nature and quality of other people’s lives. Your errors may be irrevocable. So when you enter those places of trust, or power, dream a little before you think, so your thoughts, your solutions, your directions, your choices about who lives and who doesn’t, about who flourishes and who doesn’t will be worth the very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless. You are not heartless. And you have time.

Lastly, here is the oft-quoted passage from Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature:

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Playing Haley Heynderickx

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

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”

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. She knows because of all the things that have happened since. She knows because she is my Granny, and when she put her hand on my cheek I felt the nearness of death and was comforted by it. There is nothing as tentative as an old woman’s touch; as loving or as horrible.

Can’t wait to read more of her work.

“The weather is no longer small talk”

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson speaks with Ezra Klein about climate change and the oceans.