There is nothing so often condemned, and so deeply loved, as the past.
— Will Durant
Finished reading: The Best American Essays 2024 💙📚
I’m on an essay kick, and the latest “Best American” series provided a wide range of thought-provoking takes and introduced me to some new voices. I share my five favorite essays in the full review. ★★★☆☆
Rats are invading strollers in and around Central Park:
They’re bold. You can stomp your foot all you want, but they’re New York City rats. They are not afraid.
Those many years on an island in Washington state taught me all about rats. But here in NYC? They really are something else.
What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content — all the great things in life are done by discontented people.
Christopher Morley
The 15” M4 MacBook Air
I upgraded to the M4 MacBook Air last month during one of Amazon’s big sales. I chose the larger 15” model with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD drive. This replaced a five-year-old 13” M1 MacBook Air with the same size drive but a miserly 8 GB of RAM. This MacBook Air is a fantastic laptop, and certainly the best computer I’ve ever owned. The performance bump from the M1 to the M4 has been nice, but it’s not the blow-your-hair-back experience that upgrading from older Intel Macs to the M1 was.
Nancy Pearl’s Revised ‘Rule of 50’:
When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number is the pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book … When you turn 100, you are authorized (by the Rule of 50) to judge a book by its cover.
💙📚
I’m late to the discovery of @annahavron’s wonderful Analog Office blog. Her Lumpers vs Splitters post on whether to keep one notebook for everything or many specialized notebooks is pure gold. Anna could write about staplers, and I would read it. Full disclosure: I am and forever will be a lumper.
The Kobo-Instapaper integration has officially launched, replacing the now defunct Pocket app for reading articles on the ereader. I’m curious to know if highlights made on Kobo sync back to Instapaper (and thus to Readwise). If so, this could be the tipping point for this long-time Kindle owner.
To see a thousand objects for the first and for the last time, what can be deeper and more melancholy? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant.
— Victor Hugo from Les Misérables
Finished reading: On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle 💙📚
It’s Groundhog’s Day but with an existential slant on the meaning of self, time, mortality, sustainability, and the inevitable progression of love and marriage. ★★★★☆
You would think after three months, I would be tired of all the crowds, noise, and concrete. But I couldn’t shake the feeling during a walk through the East Village last night that I was on an elaborate movie set or maybe the holodeck on a starship. NYC might really be the center of the universe.
If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
— Montesquieu
Mornings in New York
We emerge from the air-conditioned lobby of our apartment building on this warm August morning, pulled along by two anxious dogs. The humidity slips over and around us like a sweaty embrace. The faint scent of garbage, flowering shrubs, and dog urine hangs in the still air. We look both ways for other dogs before descending the steps, alert to the bedlam an encounter here at the edge of their estate would create.
I look forward to these Sunday morning walks in Manhattan. The city empties out over summer weekends. Fewer people out walking, even fewer cars. An hour’s walk along these streets and avenues is therapeutic for the body and soul.
Finished reading: On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder 💙📚
A concise summary of the tactics used by totalitarian governments to suppress freedom and democracy. Clear examples from twentieth-century despots support each of the twenty lessons. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer 💙📚
I’m glad I read this hefty tome. I can put current events and government decisions into the context of what happened in Nazi Germany. I know better what to look for. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard 💙📚
A recent New Yorker article by Anthony Lane prompted me to read this one, my first Elmore Leonard book. I enjoyed the pacing and dialogue and colorful cast of characters, all set in languid south Florida.
★★★★☆
America has been a terrific country for investors. All they have needed to do is sit quietly, listening to no one.
— Warren Buffett, 2023 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter
Take gratefully any pleasures the world provides, but don’t curse God when they fail. Nobody in the universe ever promised you anything. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird
Good news for Kobo readers or those looking to escape the Amazon ecosystem: Instapaper Read-It-Later comes to Kobo e-Readers later this summer.