Hello there! How are you? My week has been busy but the weekend is here, and I may have said this earlier, but I’ll say it again. I always take Saturdays completely off work. As a graduate student, I feel compelled to work all the time, but that’s not healthy for me, and I don’t think that’s healthy for most people. So, a reminder: please take some time out for yourself, enrich yourself, let yourself enjoy the weather and the food and the smells and your own company. You’ll be all the better for it at the end of things.
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0. Newsletters I Love
- Monday Musings by David Perell: I’ve been reading Dave’s newsletter for a few months now, and I’m astounded by his list each week. He’s got updates of what he’s been up to, interesting facts and ideas he’s thought of or come across, plus other links. I’ve not gotten around to his podcast, but it also looks super interesting.
- No Complaints: Caroline’s newsletter is something I’ve been reading for over two years now, and it has evolved, changed platforms, and more, but it is still entertaining, insightful and fresh, like a good newsletter should be. She shares things to read, and I believe has another newsletter just for podcast recommendations.
If you are thinking of starting a newsletter of your own, do it. It requires almost no investment apart from your time. You can use TinyLetter, Substack, Mailchimp, or anything (in increasing order of complication)! There will be readers for your newsletter, at least your friends. I’ll read it, too. If you feel like I can help, don’t hesitate to contact me. I feel like the more genuine personal opinions we have on the internet, the better off we all will be.
1
Oh God, It’s Raining Newsletters
I’ve extolled and waxed lyrical about the benefits and pros of email newsletters in this era of social media and short attention spans. Craig Mod here talks about some broad benefits of emails that I hadn’t thought about – decentralized, backed up in everyone’s inbox, ownership of content, and more. It’s wonderful. I subscribe to over 50 personal newsletters and content from about 20 more blogs and 30 other newspapers and magazines, and truly it feels like I’m in tune. It’s content I want, distributed the way the authors want.
2. How Bibliophiles Flirt
Lovely autobiographical piece from the New York Times.
It was not a competition, but there was a push. I felt him pushing me to be more of the person I used to be and more of who I wanted to be. Whenever he turned to discussing his current nonfiction book about the rise of Silicon Valley or environmental philosophers, I would tell him of fiction, of men who left their countries by hiding in boxes only to climb out and turn into birds. I would remind him that sometimes the only way to explain the world we live in is to make it all up.
3. The Woman Who Harvested a Wheat Field Off Wall Street
This is another New York Times piece and it’s about Agnes Denes, and I am so glad to know of her now. In 1982, she planted a two-acre wheat field in the middle of Manhattan just off from the World Trade Center. That is unbelievable and to me, is one of the most impressive “art projects” I’ve heard of or come across.
4. This is what it’s like waking up during surgery
It’s been a while since I shared something from Mosaic. This was so scary. When you go into a surgery, you’re not only given an anaesthetic, but you’re also given something that paralyzes you to prevent mishaps due to jerky movements. So… what can you do if the anaesthesia doesn’t work? Nothing, it turns out. Except just bear the pain.
The next thing she knew, she felt the blade of his knife against her belly as he made his first incision, leading to excruciating pain. She tried to sit up and to speak – but thanks to a neuromuscular blocker, her body was paralysed. “I felt so… so powerless. There was just nothing I could do. I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t open my eyes,” she says. “I tried to cry just to get tears rolling down my cheeks, thinking that they would notice that and notice that something was going on. But I couldn’t make tears.”
5. Want to Help Fight Climate Change? Have More Children
Controversial opinion, especially for me. In this short piece for Bloomberg , Tyler Cowen (someone with unique and widely appreciated views, I think) says that if you are a person who is considering whether to not have a child because of climate change, it’s likely that you’ll end up rearing a child who will do net good in the world. He also says that the more people there are, the more demand there will be for a fix.. do you agree with that last point? I don’t.
6. A Different Kind of Theory of Everything
Nice philosphical article about the state of modern science/physics. As a physicist-in-training myself, I liked the points that Natalie Wolchover brings out in this article.
Arkani-Hamed now sees the ultimate goal of physics as figuring out the mathematical question from which all the answers flow. “The ascension to the tenth level of intellectual heaven,” he told me, “would be if we find the question to which the universe is the answer, and the nature of that question in and of itself explains why it was possible to describe it in so many different ways.” It’s as though physics has been turned inside out. It now appears that the answers already surround us. It’s the question we don’t know.
7. 5 thoughts on self-help
A post from Austin Kleon. I love the lists that he makes. He writes in a passionate style but is ‘rigorous’ in an academic way by hyperlinking to almost everything he knows about the topic. He writes here about the genre of self-help. Say whatever you want about it, it will exist and you may as well accept that. There’s something in it for everyone.
I think these books last and endure because there is a sense that these writers were actually writing to themselves. They were sorting things out for themselves, and so the writing actually becomes simply a document of this process of thinking and learning, this self-help, if you will. Josh Shenk once said to me that all writing, in a sense, is a form of self-help: “we’re writing to help ourselves.”
8. Roger McNamee: ‘It’s bigger than Facebook. This is a problem with the entire industry’
I hadn’t heard of Roger McNamee but apparently he is one of the early mentors of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. He now talks about how everything is going wrong. Almost everything. Who would’ve thought.
9. What It’s Like to Be Diagnosed With ADHD as an Adult
This was scary to read, just like the earlier piece on waking up during surgery. For someone with ADHD and a late diagnosis, the medication prescribed is a godsend. It completely changes their life, but more in a bringing-it-to-equilibrium way.
Once I took the meds for the first time, it became apparent that I should have been on them for a long time. They removed all of the noise that I didn’t realize was there. I thought is this what it is like for “normal” people, no extra noise, no extra thoughts, just focusing on what I should be.
However, being on meds is not a magical cure-all. As my doctor told me, meds will not make you make the correct decisions, it just clears out some of the weeds and puts you in the right mind to make those decisions.
Only 9 articles! Too bad, no time. See you next week. -Kat.