Currently reading: The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi 📚

Finished reading: The Son by Philipp Meyer.

This book is incredible—I see why some think it’s the novel of the century so far. It follows one remarkable Texas family for 150 years, telling the family’s story through the interwoven lives of, primarily, three of its members. 📚

Finished reading: Lacunae by Scott Cairns 📚

Finished reading: Effortless Mastery by Kenny Werner 📚

Currently reading: The Son by Philipp Meyer 📚

A clerihew for MacIntyre:

RIP, Alasdair MacIntyre, A Catholic who, with Marxist fire, Sought to heal the is/ought wound Inflicted by his fellow Scotsman, Hume.

Currently reading: Effortless Mastery by Kenny Werner 📚

Currently reading: Lacunae by Scott Cairns 📚

It’s the first day of summer break, & my kids just discovered Weird Al. So… it’s going to be a long summer 🫠

Finished reading: Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. Read this one, & Out of the Silent Planet, with my daughter. We’ve both loved both books, so it’s on to That Hideous Strength! 📚

Currently reading: The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne 📚

Currently reading: The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature & Ideas by Geoffrey Hill 📚

Really, Wordlebot? Really??

Current listening: Anouar Brahem’s beautiful, haunting new album After the Last Sky. Brahem is accompanied by two brilliant peers, Dave Holland on bass and Django Bates on piano. 🎵

Grateful to have caught Bill Charlap at the Dakota tonight. The trio included the great Kenny Washington on drums and, unexpectedly for me, David Wong on bass.

An absolutely incredible set. Highlights were Charlie Parker’s scorching “Segments” & the encore, “Some Other Time.” 🎵

I wrote a short essay on Chinese architect Liu Jiakun for my newsletter. Liu, who won this year’s Pritzker Prize, is an architecture whose work I find stunningly beautiful.

Latest issue of my newsletter:

“The Wolrd is Run by Brilliant Idiots” and what we can learn from Holy Fools about how to respond.

One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.

RIP, Martin Marty.

The story of the foolish wiseman—on Thomas More, Niels Bohr, & the power of paradox in a black-and-white world.

Finished reading: Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han 📚

Currently reading: King Lear by William Shakespeare 📚

Finished reading: Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams. Subtitle: 99 Stories of Azrael.

Holy smokes this is a cool book. Vintage Williams, wild & strange & unforgettable. 📚

Finished reading: Lord Emsworth and Others by P. G. Wodehouse 📚

Currently reading: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges 📚

Currently reading: Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams 📚

Two absolutely killer albumss released today. One could do worse than spend the weekend listening to these two. 🎵

Hollis Robbins, "AI & the Last Mile"

Here’s a very insightful essay on the changing role — and increasing importance of — human judgment in the world of AI: Hollis Robbins, “AI & the Last Mile." A couple excerpts: While we worry about AI replacing human judgment, the real story may be how AI is creating a market for that judgment as a luxury good, available only to those who can pay for the “last mile” of human insight.…

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Parables are strange; finding your life transformed into a parable, even stranger.

Boy do I wish I had been in Chicago last Friday 🎵

Currently reading: The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro.

It’s time. Let’s do this. 📚

It’s a glorious time to be an American tennis fan. Half of the US Open men’s & women’s semifinalists are American! Unreal. 🎾

Currently reading: All Things Are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart 📚

Finished reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot 📚

Currently reading: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake 📚

Currently reading: Range by David Epstein 📚

The wisdom of simplicity: an interview with Uruguya's former president José Mujica 🔗

A brief, powerful interview with Uruguay’s former philosopher-president, who is now battling cancer. Though I disagree with him on many things, he has a lot of profound, simple wisdom to share: Humans can create infinite needs. The market dominates us, and it robs us of our lives. Humanity needs to work less, have more free time and be more grounded. Why so much garbage? Why do you have to change your car?…

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The power of journalism rises & falls inversely to journalists' belief in the power of journalism. The more journalists are convinced of their world-changing power, the less anyone listens. The more they just do their job, the more people tune in.

Get out there right now & watch Esperanza Spalding & Milton Nascimiento’s beautiful Tiny Desk (Home) Concert. A stunning collaboration between a true great of Brazilian jazz & a young musical genius. 🎵

Currently reading: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

Oft recommended; I’m reading it & going through all the exercises with my mother. Grateful she suggested this idea! 📚

Current listening: Pat Metheny’s beautiful new solo guitar album, Moondial.

The album includes a beautiful version of “My Love & I”—but that’s redundant, since every version of “My Love & I” is beautiful. 🎵

Loving Rick Rubin’s two-part interview with Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend (my family’s favorite band).

The episodes dive deep into each of VW’s albums, which winds up being a tour of all kinds of music—Rubin & Koenig are both musical omnivores of the first order. 🔗 🎧🎵

Luke Burgis offers a reading list for creators & entrepreneurs.

Personally, I’d replace Mill & Emerson with Middlemarch & any Jane Austen. And add McGilchrist as the third book for this century, along with some poetry.

But it’s an excellent set of books nonetheless! 📚

Current listening: Ron Carter, All Blues.

Roland Hanna’s solo on “Light Blue” is a beautiful little miracle. 🎵

Finished reading: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

What a remarkable book. I love academic memoirs, & this fits within that genre—but pushes well beyond it as well. It’s also a profound meditation on cancer, mortality, healthcare, poetry, faith, love, & family. Highly recommended. 📚

We’ve got a trip to Yellowstone & Grand Tetons coming up next month. Any recommendations for must-do hikes, must-see sights, etc? 🥾 🏕️

Currently reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot.

An old favorite. Profound from the first paragraph. 📚

Finished reading: Moonbound by Robin Sloan.

So great! Handed it off to my daughter—she’s 11; I’m sure she’ll enjoy it just as much. 📚

Finished reading: Night Train by A. L. Snijders.

Wonderful microstories, translated by Lydia Davis. Highly recommended. 📚

Currently reading: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi 📚

Cleaned like a zillion ants out of our mailbox today. (!?!)

Now spending the afternoon creeped out by feeling like I’ve got tiny ants crawling all over me. 🐜🏡

Matt Levine is hilarious & spot-on, exhibit 389247 🔗

Matt Levine is hilarious & spot-on, exhibit 389247 (likely paywalled unless you subscribe to his newsletter, which you should): AI sorting A dumb simple model of artificial intelligence companies is: It would be good to develop good AI (AI that helps humans), but bad to develop bad AI (AI that kills or enslaves humans). If you try to build good AI, there is some risk of building bad AI instead (your robot tricks you into thinking that it’s nice, then enslaves you), so you have to be very very careful.…

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Currently reading: Moonbound by Robin Sloan 📚

The pizzas turned out very well. I made four different pizzas, 5 pizzas of each style—turned out to be plenty to feed 40 people over a couple hours:

  • Marinara
  • Margherita
  • Pepperoni + hot honey (pictured; the fan favorite)
  • Prosciutto + arugula

🍕

Father’s Day Special:

Wordle 1,093 2/6

⬛⬛🟩🟨🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Prepping a whole lotta pizza for tomorrow… #pizzaparty 🍕

Jeff Koons and T.J. Maxx: a match made in heaven.

Want to read: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake 📚

Thomas Chatterton Williams pens another chapter in the story of how every sport is breaking under the twin strains of global spectacle & algorithmic efficiency.

Two options: embrace it (sports betting, fantasy everything) or go hyper local (high school sports, minor leagues, pick-up games). 🔗🎾

Ran my first 10k this morning at the Fargo Marathon. I beat my goal, finishing in 54:25. More importantly, I discovered that these races are a blast and a great way to to structure my training toward a concrete goal. I’ll be back. 🏃💪

Our first pizza night with the wood-fired Ooni was a great success! Can’t wait to start using this amazing tool weekly. 🍕

Finished reading: Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford.

This book is incredible—it connects many of my interests: jazz, counterfactual American history, religion, noir; the characters are wonderfully unique; the plot is gripping. Highly recommended! 📚

Currently reading: Night Train by A. L. Snijders.

Very short stories translated from Dutch by Lydia Davis (who herself writes brilliant microfiction). 📚

Currently reading: The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden 📚

Currently reading: Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford 📚

I love the impulse toward community in the work of the great Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto, winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize.

But I find the reliance on concrete, glass, & stark metals off-putting—working against the goals of his projects. A lingering, cold modernism, despite the beauty.

Finished reading: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu 📚

Currently reading: A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor 📚

Currently reading: Aspects of Truth by Catherine Pickstock 📚

Happy Feast of the Epiphany!

Our Rosca de Reyes turned out exceptionally well 😋🏡

I think this year would be a good year to listen to Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers straight through chronologically.

There’s a zillion albums, so I might not make it. But I can start. Tonight: Live at the Cafe Bohemia, volume 1. 🎶

Exodus 90: readings ✝️

Try to read each week’s Scripture once each day. Week 1: 8-14 Jan Reading: Exodus 1-4 Week 2: 15-21 Jan Reading: Exodus 5-8 Week 3: 22-28 Jan Reading: Exodus 9-12 Week 4: 29 Jan – 4 Feb Reading: Exodus 13-16 Week 5: 5-11 Feb Reading: Galatians Week 6: 12-18 Feb Reading: Ephesians Week 7: 19-25 Feb Reading: Philippians Week 8: 26 Feb – 3 Mar…

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Exodus 90: Mental prep ✝️

I have a very general, easy schedule of readings for the next 12 weeks. A few chapters each week—it won’t be a problem with all the new non-phone time you’ll have each day 🫠 Having done this twice before, I think the most helpful thing for you to prepare is to get a plan for areas where you expect to struggle: If it’s your phone/screen time: where can you put your phone at home & work so it’s out of sight, out of mind?…

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Currently reading: If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino.

Christmas: the perfect time to reread old favorites. 📚

Finished reading: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

Another Penelope Fitzgerald book I love.📚

Currently reading: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald 📚

Highland Advent vibes this morning. 🏡

Exodus 90: spiritual discipline between New Year's & Easter ✝️

Several times in the last five years, I’ve participated in Exodus 90, a 90-day program of spiritual disciplines and practices. This year, Exodus 90 starts right on January 1, and goes through Holy Saturday (March 30). I’m especially excited to participate this year. Although the Exodus 90 organization offers an app and a subscription service (who doesn’t, these days?), I’ve never paid for the service. You can get the full benefit of the program by simply recruiting a group of friends and following these practices together, checking in regularly (at least weekly) to discussion how it’s going.…

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Current listening: *The Incomparable Bola Sete 🎶

A new Geri Allen album??

Sure, it’s just a live recording, but I’m here all day for this one. Heck, here all year. 🎶

Finished reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚

Great day at the used book store 📚

I’ve been working on an essay on Sam Bankman-Fried and Sam Altman for a couple weeks now. Today seemed like a good day to finish it.

Why are the traits they share—among others, naiveté, narcissism, love for humanity but only in the abstract, reducing complex realities to simple equations—so common?

I like the new Wikipedia app… but it doesn’t always get everything right:

Screenshot of Maurizio Pollini’s entry in Wikipedia. The photo is cropped to show only the top of his bald head.

Finished reading: *The New Leviathans* by John Gray

Finished reading: The New Leviathans by John Gray. A book with no single overarching thesis beyond an examination of how liberal democracy is in crisis in the West, and how the alternatives at the moment, primarily Russia and China, are… unsavory. Gray’s book, just 3 brisk chapters, helpfully resuscitates Hobbes as interested in the wide range of forms Leviathan can take to provide order, peace, and freedom to its citizens. Unfortunately, all of these are more or less totalitarian—which is why Gray finds in Hobbes a helpful thinker for our age, in which the world is converging on forms of surveillance capitalism:…

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Current listening: a new Arvo Pärt album, Tractus, featuring a new, chamber-choir arrangement of Pärt’s setting of words from a sermon of John Henry Newman. 🎶

Rest in peace, Terence Davies. 🎞️

The first film I saw of his was his relatively recent documentary about Liverpool, Of Time & the City—a film of great beauty, full of profound reflection on memory & how profoundly the world has changed since the 1960s.

Here’s a quotation that reflects his sensibility, from the NYT obituary linked above:

“The first thing that goes is subtlety. The first thing that goes is any kind of restraint or even wit sometimes. I don’t know how to deal with that in the modern world.”

No words strike fear into a Minnesota United fan’s heart quite like “must-win home game.” #COYL ⚽️

Currently reading: Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill 📚

Currently reading: Toward the Winter Solstice by Timothy Steele 📚

Perfect night for a fire. A zillion stars in the cloudless sky. Some Wolfgang Muthspiel on the speaker. Life is good. 🏡

Finished reading: The Bible and Poetry by Michael Edwards.

A fascinating and very idiosyncratic look at Scripture, from an unexpected quarter: Edwards is a member of the Académie Française and one of the world’s leading Racine scholars. If you’ve ever wondered why so much of the Bible is poetry, and how that fact should influence your reading of Scripture, this is a very good starting point.

Plus, anything published by New York Review is worth reading at least once. 📚

Finished reading: Meet Me at the Lighthouse by Dana Gioia.

A delightful collection of poems, songs, & a few translations. I especially loved the closing sequence, “The Underworld.” I read “The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz” aloud to me daughter, & she loved that. 📚

Tyler Cowen draws attention to the remarkable life and work of the Catholic religious scholar R.C. Zaehner, whose Wikipedia page is, indeed, fascinating and wild. 📚

Currently reading: The Bible and Poetry by Michael Edwards 📚

Finished reading: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.

I love Bradbury’s simple, relentless enthusiasm for writing. 📚

A beautiful evening by the lake. I read; the kids built driftwood boats. 🏡

One should act like a man of thought, and think like a man of action.

~Henri Bergson, quoted by Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with Things 📚🏡

Can’t wait to dig into this one. 📚

Some days, you get lucky. Very, very lucky.

Wordle 785 2/6

⬛⬛🟩🟩⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Current listening: Johnathan Blake, Passage. Blake is a master. Always brings the fire. 🎶

True confession: I’m so inept at using the MacOS Photos app that if I want to use a photo, I usually resort to just taking a screenshot of it instead. 😬

Do not hurry; do not rest.

~Goethe; h/t Annie Dillard 📚

Currently reading: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury 📚

It’s incredible how many good book groups, seminars, & tutorials the Catherine Project is offering this fall—and all for free! I’d love to join them all. 📚

Currently reading: In Search of Lost Time Volume I Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust.

It’s been a decade or so. Just 25 pages in, I can’t believe how many gems I’ve already forgotten. 📚

Current listening: Tyshawn Sorey Trio, Continuing.

Four tracks, 53 minutes. As wide-ranging as ever for this group, which features Matt Brewer on bass and Aaron Diehl on piano. 🎶

This desk.

Click through for more detail—it’s worth it. Suddenly considering a trip to the Netherlands just to see it.

Finished reading: The This by Adam Roberts.

Lots to think about with this delightful book. Roberts calls it a Hegelian sequel to his Kantian book The Thing Itself. I think it can be equally read as a sort of hellish prequel to Purgatory Mount (is Paradise next?), or as a sci-do cautionary-tale companion to Nita Farahany’s The Battle for Your Brain.

In any case, science fiction at its strangest & best. 📚

A beautiful summer morning 🏡

Rest in peace, my dear old friend David MacKay

David MacKay, 1944–2023. David was already retired from IU by the time I started grad school there, but he and his wonderful wife Carole hosted grad students at their house weekly for discussion & dessert. Quick-witted, opinionated, kind-hearted, and erudite, David had a profound influence on me. Even though I wound up leaving academe, I still recognize David’s influence on my life & my faith. And when I walk through my woods, I think of the times he took me on trips around his own woods in his side-by-side, driving like a maniac, with a look of maniacal delight on his face.…

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Currently reading: The This by Adam Roberts 📚

Finished reading: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.

Rather sobering to have finished it on Father’s Day. But, like all of Austen, full of wisdom: a reflection on good judgment. 📚

I just love these essays that so confidently tell me what my own brain is doing to me.

Undoubtedly this is a headline issue more than a content issue—I’ve read and learned from Mastroianni’s work in the past—but I don’t plan on finding out, in this case. 🧠

My friend Rick recently helped design a book of poems about Parkinson’s disease.

The book is written by John Foley and illustrated by the great Mary GrandPré of Harry Potter fame.

Download a copy for free here. Hope you find it encouraging! 📚

R.I.P., Astrud Gilberto—one of the most ethereal & beautiful of all singers, IMO. 🎶

There are some compelling resonances between Tara Isabella Burton’s New Atlantis essay “Rational Magic” and Luke Burgis’s essay for Wired, “The Three-City Problem”.

For starters, both identify how a Silicon Valley culture that thinks of itself as highly rationale is undergirded by a stranger ethos.

Currently reading: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen 📚

Well, gotta say I’m glad I forgot my Loons had a US Open Cup match tonight… Houston 4-0 MNUFC. 😳⚽️

NB, publishers: describing an author as a “Forbes 30 Under 30 scientist” makes me want to read their book much, much less. 📚

Current listening: Danish Rain, the new album from a duet of wonderful musicians: pianist Justin Kauflin and bassist Thomas Fonnesbæk. 🎶

A wonderful essay by Tara Isabella Burton in The New Atlantis on Effective Altruism, the rationalist and now post-rationalist online communities, and the turn they’ve taken toward the transcendent.

Paywalled, but TNA is well worth a sub for those interested in moral engagement with technology. 🔗

Current listening: Brian Blade, Mama Rosa.

I’ve loved this singer-songwriter-Gospel album from a world-class jazz drummer. 🎶

Finished reading: Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin.

My second read; it’s as beautiful and profound as it was the first time through.📚

The Temptation in the Wilderness, part 1 (Good Teacher #3) ✝️

Original post here Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. But he answered, “It is written ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.…

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Baptism & new life (Good Teacher #2) ✝️

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.…

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I’m heading to Chicago this weekend for a birthday celebration with my father & brother. I’m eager for some bookstore recommendations. Any advice, Chicagoans? 📚

Welcome to the Good Teacher (Good Teacher #1) ✝️

In this newsletter, the goal is to consider Jesus’ teaching: what makes it worth following now, 2,000 after Jesus lived? Can it speak to us today? Does it have anything to offer our world? This newsletter won’t be about institutional Christianity; it won’t be about “spirituality,” whatever that means. Rather, we’re simply trying to answer the question “How should I live?” The goal isn’t to convert you to anything—other than to a better life.…

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Realizing I should be maintaining issues of my newsletter here on my blog, not just on Substack, in case things fall apart, as they tend to do. So I’ll start re-posting 1-2 a week.

The newsletter is on the ethical teachings of Jesus. It doesn’t assume any religious belief or perspective.

Austin Klein won’t be hiring a virtual assistant anytime soon. 🔗

R.I.P. Ahmad Jamal, one of the greatest and perhaps my absolute favorite jazz pianist.

My dad used to play “Stolen Moments” at night while I was going to sleep. I’ve loved Jamal ever since. 🎶 🔗

The best AI app wouldn’t be an everything app. It would be a nothing app—so smart it helped me do nothing on my screens and more in the real world. 🔗

Everything Iain McGilchrist has to say is worth considering, but I can’t recommend his conversation with Dark Mountain Project co-founder Dougald Hine highly enough.

It’s about climate change, the place of science in modernity, AI, and much more. 🔗

On Brad East’s blog, Denise Levertov’s Good Friday poem “On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX”:

Every sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.

✝️📚🔗

[Early book collectors] supported the lively culture of book hunting that still goes on, diminished but not dead yet, in the auction houses and antiquarian bookshops of New York, Boston and other cities.

Can this gentle, humane culture survive the attritions of social media and the carceral state? In a way, it already has.

~Anthony Grafton, in an delightful LRB review-essay of Denise Gigante’s new book. 📚

Yeesh. For Minnesota United fans, things are not looking good on the Bebelo front.

Fortunately, we’ve been playing shockingly well without him. #MNUFC #COYL ⚽️

Currently reading: The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk

A gloriously strange book from 17th-century Scotland. 📚

Blue Note Records is absolutely crushing it lately: Julian Lage, Charles Lloyd’s trio of trios, Bill Frisell’s new quartet, Gerald Clayton’s Bells on Sand, Ethan Iverson’s Every Note is True: seems like all my fav new albums are Blue Note.

And this week, new Walter Smith III and Kendrick Scott. 🎵

Current listening: Charles Lloyd, Trio of Trios 🎵

Three fantastic trio albums, each with a different cast of musicians alongside Lloyd: Thomas Morgan & Bill Frisell; Anthony Wilson & Gerard Clayton; Julian Lage & Zakir Hussain.

Current listening: Charles Lloyd, Trio of Trios. 🎵

Three fantastic trio albums, each with a different cast of musicians alongside Lloyd: Thomas Morgan & Bill Frisell; Anthony Wilson & Gerard Clayton; Julian Lage & Zakir Hussain.

No world / wears as well as it should but, mortal or not, / a world still had to be built.

~Auden, “The Birth of Architecture”

What is mobile is always the most just.

~Robert Walser. So many great sentences in Walser. 📚

Every last silly little thing has its unspeakably swift justification, its good clever grounds.

~Robert Walser in 1907, writing about the Internet 📚

Jaron Lanier, being typically insightful:

“We have to say consciousness is a real thing and there is a mystical interiority to people that’s different from other stuff because if we don’t say people are special, how can we make a society or make technologies that serve people?”

The profile is titled, “The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane.” Which does certainly seem like a more likely possibility.

Then, in all labyrinthine economies

there are obscure nooks into which Authority never pokes a suspicious nose

~Auden, “The Horations”

What has become of us as a people that we can possess the beautiful only in dreams.

~Robert Walser

Currently reading: Berlin Stories by Robert Walser 📚

The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist; it is, rather, the key means by which we emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of passions that the people who make our smartphone apps would like to see dominate us.

~Alan Jacobs, reflecting on David Hume & social media 🔗

I encountered a stunning book of photos on the Getty’s website today: Kazumasa Ogawa’s Some Japanese Flowers, from 1896.

19th-century photograph is always shocking & disorienting—how foreign, yet contemporary. 📚

Currently reading: The Battle for Your Brain by Nita A. Farahany 📚

Her contention is that control over our own inner life will become increasingly fraught in coming years, as advances in neurotech & pharma combine to create new ways of monitoring, interpreting, & responding to our brainwaves.

I’m only a couple chapters in, but she lays out so clearly how tech is building on-ramps to this surveillance—through gamification, virtual reality, & other developments that are pitched as innocuous & “free”.

Rest in peace, Kenzaburo Oe. My friend Caleb introduced me to Oe back in 2004 or 2005, and I came to love his novels A Personal Matter and An Echo of Heaven.

His Paris Review interview is truly fascinating.

Rest in peace, Wayne Shorter, one of the very greats. 🎶

Current listening: Kendrick Scott, Reverence.

A 2009 album featuring some incredible players: not just Scott, but Gerald Clayton, Walter Smith III, Mike Moreno, and Derrick Hodge. 🎶

Attention is how one disposes oneself to the world.

~Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

The more I use Arc Browser the more I love it—and I’ve been using it a lot! It restores some joy, some delight, to using the Internet. 🔗

Start of a new season for my beloved MNUFC tonight. I’m not optimistic about the season, but I am looking forward to it! ⚽️ #COYL

Finished reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg 📚

For the most part, a very good and useful book on project management—research grounded in reality, presenting some useful heuristics. Fans of Taleb & Kahneman/Tversky will like it.

Currently reading: Dubliners by James Joyce 📚

Chiefly, “The Dead.” Is there a more beautiful story?

Nicholas Dames on literary studies 🔗 📚

What happened to literary studies? If professionalization was the flaw in the construction of the bridge, making it unstable, it turns out there’s a meteor heading for the bridge anyway: the steady diminution of literature’s role in a culture where electronic, networked media is dominant. […] By lowering the barrier to entry, the Internet encouraged an early 21st-century efflorescence of occasional criticism and spontaneous theorizing that fostered vibrant subcultural readerships.…

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Finished reading: Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 📚

Currently reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg 📚

Current listening: Chris Potter, Got the Keys to the Kingdom. 🎵

Absolutely scorching live set featuring a dream-team of some of my favorite musicians: not just Potter, but also Scott Colley on bass, Marcus Gilmore on drums, and Craig Taborn on piano. Highly recommended!

Currently reading: Night Train by A. L. Snijders; translated by Lydia Davis 📚

Reading stories about Davos attendees’ optimism, I’m reminded of Iain McGilchrist’s insight that our brains' left hemispheres—the blinkered perspective that dominates our modern world—are blithely optimistic, even in the face of significant disconfirmatory evidence. 🔗

Currently reading: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 📚

Currently reading: Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 📚

Still excellent advice, on the whole, though I’m not sure what Auden would replace “Read The New Yorker” with now.

Aesthetic judgments in an anti-aesthetic age 📚 🔗

Just because we don’t believe in aesthetic standards as a culture doesn’t mean we aren’t making constant aesthetic judgments that rely on a wide range of hierarchies: [Study authors] found that writers ‘with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.’ They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.…

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Rowan Williams on Iain McGilchrist 📚

Rowan Williams reviews Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things. A masterful and appreciative review, unsurprisingly. Williams points out that so many criticisms of McGilchrist’s work reflect exactly the tendencies that McGilchrist traces and decries in his work. He also rearticulates McGilchrist’s exceptionally helpful descriptions of thinking, truth, science, and objectivity: Thought takes time; encountering a limit suggests new questions — including the question of whether we have thus far been asking the right questions.…

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The result of more free time for the masses is not more leisure, as Aristotle conceived it, but more time to scroll social media, flick through online dating profiles, binge on Netflix, and/or work on what Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha call “The Startup of You.”

~Zohar Atkins

Finished reading: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 📚

Finished reading: The Nature of Oaks by Douglas W. Tallamy 📚

It seems like the people most awed by “generative AI” art are those least familiar with humanity’s greatest artistic achievements. Those most impressed by ChatGPT are least familiar with good writing, good philosophy.

Unfortunately, they’re the same ones who run Silicon Valley.

Don’t come at me with some “philosopher test” if Hegel’s not one of the possible results. Hegel should be the only possible result. Sheesh.

My friend Patrick worked with his daughters to make an awesome collaborative card game—Nature Kin—celebrating San Diego’s biodiversity. Check it out!

This World Cup’s group-stage matchday 3 has produced absolutely scintillating, wild, edge-of-your-seat soccer. So, of course, FIFA is considering a bunch of really stupid ways to destroy it. ⚽️

World Cup update: 🇺🇸 and 🇦🇷 are through, so I’m happy. I can enjoy the rest of the group stage without stress. ⚽️

Not surprised—it’s a great album! 🎶

Alan Jacobs on your lies, and mine:

In any given community, there will be a profound divide between those who believe that the most dangerous lies are the ones told by our enemies and those who believe that the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

Here. 🔗

Despite EA & crypto, we're still living in the Victorians' world 🔗💰📚

Derek Thompson’s short, pensive essay on his own entanglement with effective altruism (EA) and Sam Bankman-Fried leaves off before getting to a problem that enabled both, a problem with the Internet in general: we humans just seem to be at our best when operating locally, in-person. Just as crypto’s promise of “trust in a trustless world” struck many as ridiculous, so too EA has been ridiculed for its impersonal approach to altruism.…

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Excited for 🇧🇪-🇨🇦. I spent 90 terrifying minutes several years ago watching Alphonso Davies tear apart #MNUFC at TCF Bank Stadium. I’d love to see Canada get a victory today. ⚽️

So far, this World Cup suggests that it might not be quite the disaster I expected to expand to 48 teams. Many of these smaller and lower-ranked teams can more than keep up—and their fans are showing up in a big way. ⚽️

Jacqui Oakley and Warren Barton are hands-down the best commentators in this Fox squad for the World Cup. They’re, you know, insightful on each team’s players & tactics. They were great yesterday for 🇩🇰 – 🇹🇳 & they are equally good this morning for 🇲🇦 – 🇭🇷. ⚽️

I’ve loved Argentina since I studied abroad there in 2005. That’s a crushing defeat. But huge credit to Saudi Arabia—they were excellent. Terrible passing in the final third for Argentina; incredible performance defensively by the Saudis. ⚽️

¡Vamos Argentina! 🇦🇷⚽️

Halfway through 🇺🇸- 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿, I’m thrilled. We’re playing great; creating some good chances. I’m especially impressed by Musah, Sargent, Jedi, and Ream. Beautifully taken goal by Weah. Let’s go! ⚽️

My heart-over-head bracket. Really had to get speculative to get the final I wanted… 🇧🇷- 🇦🇷 ⚽️

Everyone can’t look away from the story of the spectacular failure of crypto wunderkind/slacker dude SBF. Massive wealth, massive hubris, all gone in an instant. It’s a story made for Michael Lewis.

Somehow, amazingly, Lewis has already been embedded with SBF for 6 months.

All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a deer stand alone.

~ Pascal, I think

Currently reading: The Nature of Oaks by Douglas W. Tallamy 📚

Decided recently to start a newsletter about Jesus' teachings. It won’t be religious, or even really very spiritual. I’ll simply consider how Jesus' teaching might help us live well in our troubled times.

Tomorrow, the Premier League starts a six-week mad dash prior to the World Cup; some teams will play more than twice a week during this stretch. There are going to be more injuries than ever before, during, & after the World Cup. But at least FIFA gets its way! ⚽️

D.C. Schindler on beauty and hospitality 📚

Instead, beauty effects a completeness that strengthens our capacity to be open and hospitable. It is fitting, in this respect, that we tend to think of giving the quality of beauty, more directly than the quality of truth or goodness, to our background surroundings, the encompassing atmosphere inside of which our existence unfolds. ~from Love and the Postmodern Predicament…

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Is there any better illustration of Iain McGilchrist’s theory of the left brain’s colonization of our thinking than this post (& the paper it cites), about why philosophers spend too much time studying their dead predecessors. Surely they’re both joking, right? Right? 🔗

Sure, I’d love to be your start-up’s Chief Metaverse Officer. Here’s my cover letter:

I solemnly swear that I will do everything in my power to foil your ambitions to create a metaverse. Please call or email if you have any questions or you’d like to discuss the position further.

Saddened to learn of Hilary Mantel’s sudden and untimely death at the age of 70. Her Wolf Hall novels are brilliant; what vivid historical imagination. R.I.P. 📚

So, apparently there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world.

That’s a cool 1.5 million per person. 🐜 🔗

Current listening: Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band, Season of Changes 🎶

Finished reading: The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. Profoundly bleak, even for Houellebecq, though there are some moments of beauty, particularly late in the novel. 📚

Finished reading: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. An amazing novel of revolutionary consciousness, conscience, & truth. 📚

Finished reading: The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World by Andy Crouch.

A wise essay on the importance of instruments, households, and history in resisting the technological idols of our age.📚

Finished reading: Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts 📚

Finished reading: Bells In Winter by Czeslaw Milosz 📚

Bill Russell, Track & Field, & Learning to Learn 🏀🔗

R.I.P., Bill Russell—an amazing athlete and man. Tributes to Russell reminded of an essay by a former professor of mine, Edward Griffin, entitled “Hoops & Hurdles: The Unlikely Story of How I Learned to Learn,". It’s an absolutely delightful, astonishing reflection on Griffin’s time on the USF track & field & JV basketball teams—while Russell (on varsity basketball, of course) was dominating the NCAA. There is a wild cameo about halfway through the essay that I guarantee you won’t expect.…

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In life and work alike, his contradictions are pressed together like layers in metamorphic rock. It is in the nature of monoliths not to grow old.

~Alex Ross on Thomas Mann, in the New Yorker. My favorite Mann is The Magic Mountain—it speaks with clarity to our world. 🔗📚

Finished reading: McGilchrist, *The Master & His Emissary* 📚

I finally finished Iain McGilchrist’s The Master & His Emissary this morning. It’s taken me about 6 months, but the time was well spent—the book is as rich in neuroscience and psychology as in historical and cultural analysis, & a profound guide to our current cultural dislocations. It’s earned a place in my personal pantheon—one of the best books I’ve read, and one I will return to often in years to come.…

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Thanks to MinnPost for publishing this rich, illuminating portrait of MSP drummer Dave King (of The Bad Plus, Happy Apple, & Julian Lage’s current trio, among many other groups & projects). 🔗🎶🥁

Tanner Greer on substance, not procedure 🔗

The trouble is that the national problems that the extremists fixate on are, for the most part, real. Their solutions are, for the most part, coherent and emotionally compelling. Those who believe these solutions are nevertheless wrongheaded must come out and prove them so. Someone who has determined, for example, that woke politics is destructive should use his wisdom and intelligence to demonstrate why the woke program trends toward disaster—and to provide saner solutions to the problems that wokeness purports to solve.…

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Max Richter, giving Auden pride of place in his Recomposed Four Seasons headshot. (The album is very good.) 🎶📚

“The Technocrat’s Dilemma” is as concise a framing of our current “misinformation” crisis as we’re likely to get: “The technocratic response to misinformation and conspiracy theory only exacerbates the problem and further validates the most extreme reactions.” 🔗

I basically agree with Gruber’s take on Netflix: Netflix would be better-served by focusing more on quality, less on quantity.

But that raises a question Gruber’s not too interested in exploring (and I’m not really, either, if I’m honest!): what is “quality”? 🔗📺

I relished Roy Foster’s Conversation with Tyler on Irish history, economics, and culture. I read Foster’s Modern Ireland years ago, and I’m eager now to read his books on Yeats and Heaney. 📚 🔗 🎧

“We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes.”

~ Michel Houellebecq, from an excellent profile by Justin E.H. Smith 🔗📚

Glad to see a third-party candidate enter the MN governor’s race. I don’t expect I’ll agree with the whole platform. But I agree with the principle: our current parties are broken beyond repair. 🔗🗳

Put the Oscars out of their misery 🔗 🎞

Most of the ceremonies feature flickers of genuine emotion amid hours of sanctimonious, self-serving or scolding speeches. ~“Opinion: Put the Oscars Out of Their Misery” Yes. Oddly, this op-ed doesn’t touch on the main reason to get rid of awards shows: we don’t have any agreed-upon aesthetic standards for deciding what’s deserving of awards—so what’s the point? My rule would be that you’re only allowed to hold an awards ceremony if Ricky Gervais hosts it.…

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The world needs more Cavafy 📚

On the absurd counter-productivity of cancelling Russian culture. 🔗

The last thing we need is to assume that once we are confident in our position, there is no more thinking to be done.

In order for people to use social media responsibly—i.e., not get addicted—we essentially have to use these platforms in ways that they were not designed to be used.

~from a review of Chris Martin’s Terms of Service 🔗

Finished reading: Tradition and Apocalypse by David Bentley Hart 📚

Unsurprisingly if you’ve read much DBH, this is a very strange book. I’d highly recommend chapters 1, 6, & 7 for a compelling vision of Christian belief & practice oriented not just to the past but to the future. The middle chapters on Newman & Blondel? Quite dry by comparison.

Finished reading: London’s Fields by Mark Waldon 📚 ⚽️

A delightful oral history looking at some of London’s football clubs: their histories, rivalries, grounds, & fan bases. I most enjoyed chapters on Orient, Millwall, Brentford, Wimbledon, Fulham, & Charlton—clubs that don’t get much attention state-side.

Review: *The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance* by Eswar S. Prasad 📚

Eswar Prasad, The Future of Money Reading Eswar Prasad’s The Future of Money was an odd experience. Let’s start by clarifying the author’s starting point. Prasad is the definition of an elite: a graduate of some of the world’s most prestigious universities (Madras, Brown, U of Chicago) a long stint at the IMF an occupant of a endowed chair in economics at an Ivy League school a senior fellow at the center-left-think-tank-to-rule-them-all Brookings Institute possessor of an advisory appointment as research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research I mention all these roles not to impress you, but rather to give you a sense of what to expect from The Future of Money: cryptocurrency filtered through the perspective of someone deeply entrenched in the structures, institutions, and frameworks that define the world as it currently is.…

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Everything about central bank digital currency (CBDC) is the stuff of totalitarian nightmare.

~A powerful essay against CBDCs 🔗

Expert ≠ leader (or vice versa):

The pandemic has shown us the dangers of expert rule, and the failures of political and institutional leaders to heed them. It has also demonstrated, through its absence, what good governance might look like.

~Joseph E. Davis in The New Atlantis

Social media & the human heart 🔗

From Mallory Owens’s review of Bruno Maçães’s History Has Begun: It would be disturbing enough if, as Maçães predicts, the great lords of Silicon Valley left us to amuse ourselves in our virtual sandboxes while they went off to conquer the solar system. With an ever-expanding arsenal of digital tools at their disposal, however, they are unlikely to show such restraint. Their war against reality can never truly be won until they have triumphed over the most stubborn and deceitful of all things, the human heart.…

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When was the last time I link to a Slate article? Maybe never.

In any case, their “Best Jazz Albums of 2021” is excellent—introduced me to a number of albums I hadn’t yet heard; all the ones I have heard I also loved, especially the Mingus and the Shepp/Moran. 🎵 🔗

Tyler Cowen’s conversation with biographer-historian Ruth Scurr is delightful—bookstores, Cambridge, finding a book’s form, & much more. 🔗🎙

Beautiful light in my office this morning.

A fresh layer of snow overnight + fire-red sunrise.

Incredibly excited for the future of Slant Books. They have some wonderful titles coming in their first year as an indie not-for-profit press. 🔗📚

R.I.P, Robert Bly, one of Minnesota’s great poets. I’ll remember him most for his translations of Thomas Tranströmer; among if not the first translations into English of the incredible Swedish poet. 📚 🔗

A beautiful obituary of Chinese philosopher and aesthetician Li Zehou. 🔗

This sunrise this morning… unreal. 💥 🏡

Alan Jacobs on distributism & the need for new institutions 🔗

In the Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs describes the potential for “A New Guild System”: I envision a world in which the increased fragmentation of our media scene—fragmentation created by institutions that have lost their sense of purpose and individuals who have lost trust in those institutions—leads, over time, to the rise of new institutions that are built on stronger foundations. Micro.blog is certainly part of this new-institution-building. And many developments in web3 seem dedicated to the same purposes: distributing political & economic power in new ways; thinking through what institutions could look like if organized differently—in more distributed, bottom-up forms.…

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Bitcoin & the US fiscal reckoning 🔗

Bitcoin and the U.S. Fiscal Reckoning - National Affairs Until and unless Congress reduces the trajectory of the federal debt, U.S. monetary policy has entered a vicious cycle from which there is no obvious escape. The rising debt requires the Treasury Department to issue an ever-greater quantity of Treasury bonds, but market demand for these bonds cannot keep up with their increasing supply. In an effort to avoid a spike in interest rates, the Fed will need to print new U.…

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A first post in my shameless theft of Robert‘s Last/Next notebook category. I’ll enjoy looking back on this in a few years. 📓

Daniel A. Kaufman defends “The Good Old Liberal Consensus” against its foes on both right and left. H/t to my friend Bharat. 🔗

"Homeward Bound (for Ana Grace)" 🎵

The title track from Johnathan Blake’s upcoming album Homeward Bound is a beautiful tear-jerker. “Homeward Bound (for Ana Grace)” was written in memory of Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, the daughter of saxophonist Jimmy Greene & flutist Nelba Marquez-Greene, who died at Sandy Hook, just six years old. 🎵🔗…

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This is a wonderful appreciation of Norm MacDonald—the best I’ve read so far. 🔗

“Destiny waits in the hands of God, not in the hands of statesmen / Who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing, / Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time.”

~T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

MNUFC old-timer Brent Kallman provides the context behind the “Nicest Rivalry in Sports” moniker. Spoiler alert: it’s not so nice. ⚽️

Another beautiful sunrise on Rish Lake🏡

Current listening: the Danish String Quartet’s Prism III 🎶

R.I.P., great author, publisher, and literary scholar Roberto Calasso 📚 🔗

In “The Future is a Decentralized Internet,” Olaf Carlson-Wee explains the theory behind DAOs and other blockchain-based networks. I’ve been exploring these ideas through the 1729 project. 🔗

There’s no world in which I sign up for a newsletter hosted by Bulletin, just like there’s no world in which I ever conduct a transaction on Diem.

Zuckerberg’s models of leadership are the 19th century imperialists.

Currently reading: Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings by Peter Pettinger 📚

Stop whatever you’re doing and go listen to Glenn Loury’s podcast conversation with Cornel West. H/t to my friend Pete. 🎧

Current listening: Squint, jazz guitarist Julian Lage’s new album, which features the trio Lage has been playing with lately: Minnesotan Dave King on drums and bassist Jorge Roeder. 🎶

Current listening: Another Land by Dave Holland, featuring Robin Eubanks on guitar and Obed Calvaire on drums. 🎵

Weekend project: cleaning out the garage, the last holdout/dumping-ground from our Oct move. Wish I had a “before” shot—believe it or not, this is a major improvement! 🏡

A beautiful sunrise over Rush Lake this morning. #nofilter 🏡

I’m not interested in the decision of the Facebook “oversight board” on Trump. A foregone conclusion from an inconsequential body.

I’m more interested in the decision of the general public to reject Facebook and Twitter entirely. Not a foregone conclusion, but one I hope for.

Management as marketing

I’m no management guru, but my takeaway from the drama at Basecamp is “Don’t confuse your management and your marketing.” Perhaps if the policies hadn’t been communicated so publicly, not so much trust and goodwill would have been lost. As an employee, I wouldn’t feel good about my company making my workplace an example in the latest culture war—regardless of which side of that war I was on. Of course, up till now Basecamp’s marketing has been basically all about revealing their management secrets.…

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It was a beautiful foggy morning at Whispering Woods 🏡

Currently reading: The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist 📚

The European Super League™️ Sponsored by JPMorgan Chase® is an affront to soccer fans around the world. I certainly won’t watch it.

And I’m glad I don’t support a team that is joining it—because I’d have to seriously reconsider my support for that club. ⚽️

Conversion in modernity

Continuing on the theme, here’s Pierre Manent on why conversion can seem so objectionable to us moderns: The only truly unforgivable human action is what one used to call “conversion." There is no longer any legitimate ground for change because there is no longer any legitimate ground for preference. …

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Varieties of Conversion 🔗

Two interesting pieces on conversion: A review of Neil Price’s history of the Vikings, Children of Ash & Elm, that wonders how a people as fierce as the Vikings came to convert to Christianity. Ross Douthat on the conditions of our meritocracy’s disbelief, and what conversion requires today (NYT). Conversion is a fascinating concept, whatever form it takes (religious or otherwise; conversion or de-conversion): what would it take for you to embrace a dramatically different vision of reality?…

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Who is Wanchope Ábila and what does his nickname mean? ⚽️

Minnesota United’s new striker, Ramón “Wanchope” Ábila is an old friend of our superstar midfielder Emmanuel Reynosa. The two played together at Boca Juniors, the Buenos Aires club I supported when I studied abroad there. Ábila’s nickname is apparently a reference to the Costa Rican striker Paulo Wanchope, who played for West Ham & Manchester City (& even scored twice in 12 appearances for the Chicago Fire). The original, Costa Rican Wanchope played for Rosario Central of the Argentine first division for a season, in 2006 (the year after I lived in BsAs).…

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Dropped yesterday: Uneasy by Vijay Iyer with Linda May Han Oh & Tyshawn Sorey. Three jazz musicians at the absolute pinnacle of their instruments. It’s a beautiful album. 🎶

What happened to the ACLU? 🔗

A fantastic story in Tablet about how the organization abandoned long-held principles in pursuit of relevance: The embrace of political partisanship, the dropping of standards, the buckling to donor demands at the expense of long-held principles—[former director Ira] Glasser says all of these developments have rendered the ACLU unrecognizable from the group he once led. The organization known as the ACLU is now led by people beholden to an ideology purporting that the essential function of the Constitution has been to serve as a blueprint for white supremacy, and that its broad free-speech protections are not a tool of emancipation for society’s underdogs but rather the handmaiden of their oppression.…

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Robert Pogue Harrison reviews several recent books by and about the wonderful Shirley Hazzard. 📚

As she once remarked to me, were Virgil to sail into [the Bay of Naples] today, he would recognize all the lineaments of his adoptive city.

Freddie deBoer’s Substack has been excellent lately. From a recent post of thoughts for new writers:

For a long time now media has been overtaken by a cult of expression which forbids any style or mode other than contemptuous blank irony.

The NYT obit for Adam Zagajewski is quite touching.

I remember talking with a peer at a conference. She taught with A.Z. at the University of Houston. She spoke glowingly of him: “Adam is such a sweet, wonderful man.” He was clearly a colleague of hers, not the superstar. 📚

RIP Adam Zagajewski, my favorite contemporary poet. 📚

Happy new year / public-domain day! 🎶 📚

Happy new year & happy public-domain day! The works coming out of US copyright protection this year are pretty impressive: Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, The Trial; music by Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, & Fats Waller. Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a detailed overview.…

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Your annual reminder that Geri Allen’s A Child is Born is the pinnacle of Christmas jazz, and the title track is sublime. 🎶

Busy morning on the river

The Charthusian monks: brewing Chartreuse in the Alps during a pandemic

A fascinating essay in the NYT on the Charthusian monks, brewers of Chartreuse: “An Elixir from the French Alps, Frozen in Time”. It’s filled with amazing quotes & quips like: The days pass very quickly when you’re immersed in the shadow of eternity. Or, from the president of the Charthusians' business: I am very scared always. Only three of the brothers know how to make Chartreuse — nobody else knows the recipe.…

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My favorite year-end list is always Ted Gioia’s 100 favorite albums of the year. I guarantee you’ll find something excellent you didn’t previously know about.

(If you think 100 albums isn’t quite enough, well, he includes 100 honorable mentions as well.) 🎶

Leibovitz on the Supreme Court & religious liberty 🔗

Supreme Court decisions rarely make for page turners, but the one handed down last night, siding with Jewish and Catholic groups opposing the draconian restrictions placed on religious services by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is an exception. In just 33 pages, the highest court in the land gave us a thrilling study in how the two tribes that compete for dominance in our ravaged America approach the world.…

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Shouldn’t it be “philosophy schimosophy”? 🔗

Is there an anecdote that better describes our current moment than this one? Probably. But this one is exquisite. From NY Mag’s essay on the mess that is the NYT: The conversation turned into what more than one Times employee described to me as a “food fight.” During the mêlée, “Opinion” columnist Elizabeth Bruenig uploaded a PDF of John Rawls’s treatise on public reason, in an attempt to elevate the discussion.…

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The Politics We Don't Have 🔗

Most Americans want secure work, safe streets, healthcare, dignity, freedom, and a governing class that prioritizes them above itself. People want plenty else besides, of course, that politics cannot provide, like love and meaning—but even a movement organized around the minimum would threaten entrenched interests in both parties. It would undermine the Democrat’s dependency on Silicon Valley’s surveillance economy, elite-driven offshoring, and embrace of corporate consumerism in liberation drag. And it would finish off the well-funded Republican party of fiscal responsibility and austerity politics underwritten by foreign policy and financial globalism.…

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Out this week: Songs from Home, beautiful solo piano from Fred Hersch. 🎶

A beautiful day to prep the garden for winter. 🏡

the family cleaning out the garden

You think it is helpful having a fluorescent praying mantis coming into their office, telling them about German philosophy? Do you think that’s helpful? I can tell you, it’s not helpful.

~Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, profiled in the NYT Magazine 🔗

Currently reading: Montaigne: Life Without Law by Pierre Manent 📚

Moving day. Our first day of snow for the season, too. 🏡

Currently reading: Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics by Tom Keymer 📚

The Big Move 🏡

Our family is getting ready to move from the Minneapolis – St. Paul metro area up to central Minnesota. We’ll be closer to my wife’s parents and my own, and right in the heart of beautiful MN lake country. It’s something we’ve wanted to do as a family for a number of years. Since we’re homeschooling the kids this year anyway, now seemed like a good year to make a move like this.…

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UMN professor of history Jon Butler has a fascinating new book out: God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. According to an interview with Publishers Weekly, the book “explores the rise of religious pluralism in Manhattan between 1880 and 1960." I’m in. 📚

Liz Bruenig on Catholicism & American power

Elizabeth Bruenig has written a couple of amazing columns this week for the NYT, columns that focus on the Catholic Church but help any reader better understand the contradictions in modern America. Her first column sorted through the capitulations of Catholic politicians right and left to the demands of contemporary liberal-capitalist society. She suggests that it was inevitable that they’d abandon core Catholic principles even as they ascended to heights of power many never imagined possible for American Catholics.…

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Coffee + grading while listening to Mahler’s Sympony No. 5, prompted by this touching anecdote from Alex Ross. 🎶 ☕️ 🔗

I watched The Booksellers this evening. It’s a delightful documentary about the passionate folks in the rare-book industry. Some mournful notes, but also some hopeful ones. Overall, a delight. Streaming now on, err, Amazon Prime. 📚 🎞

Here’s 58.5 hours of Glenn Gould playing Bach for y’all. See ya next week. 🎶

R.I.P. Fr. Edward Sthokal

Show me what you give your time and attention to, and I’ll show you what you love. ~Fr. Edward Sthokal Here’s a beautiful send-off for a mentor who wouldn’t have wanted a fuss from D.J. Tice in the Star Tribune. Sthokal was a powerful presence at the first 3 silent retreats I attended at Demontreville. Even as he was approaching 90 years old, and was already “retired,” he was present at the retreats and gave us an opening spiel with his trademark humor.…

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It’s finally Minnesota’s turn in the Atlantic’s series of photographs from each of the 50 states. 🔗 📸

Catching up on some soccer highlights: Alphonso Davies had a ridiculous assist for Bayern in their 8-2 destruction of Barcelona in the Champions League quarterfinals. If I were Nèlson Semedo I wouldn’t show my face in public for a few weeks… ⚽️🔥

At the very center of his identity, Kushner is a Good Son. He’s run the country in a spirit of filial devotion to an implacable father. It’s a role that he thrives at playing, because he’s spent his whole life rehearsing for it.

~Jared Kushner, profiled in The Atlantic 🔗

Just behind the kingdom that failed ran a nice little river. It was a clear, lovely stream, and many fish lived in it. Weeds grew there, too, and the fish ate the weeds.

~Haruki Murakami, “The Kingdom That Failed” 🔗 📖

Tonight’s MNUFC win shows a deep team that’s well-coached. Some of our best players—Opara, Molino, Metanire—were out, but we dominated a surging San Jose team. And as usual, Hassani Dotson dominates wherever he plays. Can’t wait for the Adrian Heath revenge match against Orlando! ⚽️

Visit to Como Zoo / RIP Buzz

Abe, Sam, & I visited Como Zoo today. It opened a few weeks ago, and I was impressed with how seamless and enjoyable the experience was. It was one way, with some sections completely cordoned off, but clearly marked and easy to navigate. We saw all the most exciting animals, and heard both the lion and the sea lion roaring. We wondered why we could see only one of the two polar bears.…

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In the years to come, New York and the United States would eventually recognize and embrace Derek Walcott. The disappointment of this early encounter with New York would be replaced by a fuller and more satisfactory relationship with the city.

~Walcott in NYC (h/t 3QD) 🔗 🇱🇨

“Same as it ever was”: On heaven & the Talking Heads 🔗

The traditional imagery of heaven is ribbon-wreathed and rococo, but “Heaven” is almost severe in its simplicity.

Early Morning Nature Hike

Silverwood Park, Saint Anthony, MN…

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A delightful story about an initially failed, but remarkably persistent, fantasy writer:

Brandon Sanderson: ‘After a dozen rejected novels, you think maybe this isn’t for you’ 🔗

The promise of politics is that, within and through our differences, some form of common life can be discovered. But if the process of discovery is to be faithful, hopeful, and loving, we must render ourselves vulnerable to others we don’t understand.

~Luke Bretherton 📚

On the nihilism of Harari’s *Sapiens* 🔗📚

Sapiens is a distinctly nihilist tract, rejecting every sort of theism, every claim that life has meaning, and every assertion of human rights. According to Harari, there’s nothing the least bit sacred about human life, the Declaration of Independence is in error about liberty and equality, and the word “nature” itself—as in human nature—is meaningless. Insofar as Sapiens is a work of philosophy, it’s Nietzchean in its rejection of the most central human values, as well as in its suggestion that a superman—created by genetic or “inorganic” engineering—may be on the way.…

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Malick’s technique 🔗 🎞 🎥

The effect is to situate the actors within the world; even with closeups, the individual is never alone in front of the camera. So Fani’s anguished face is set against the backdrop of the people enforcing her isolation. From a review of Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life that beautifully connects the formal, cinematic techniques employed in the film to its underlying theme, martyrdom.…

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Appiah on race, language, & capitalization 🔗

A compelling essay by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah that argues for why it’s so problematic to capitalize “Black” but not “white”: One reason that the MIT philosopher Sally Haslanger prefers to capitalize the names of races is, she explains, “to highlight the artificiality of race,” by contrast to the seeming naturalness of color. A larger argument lurks here: Racial identities were not discovered but created, she’s reminding us, and we must all take responsibility for them.…

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Ismail Muhammad on Coltrane’s “Alabama” 🔗 🎷

In The Paris Review Daily: The quartet recorded the track in November 1963, two months after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, made an absence of four little black girls. When I listen to Coltrane playing over Tyner’s piano I hear smoke rising up from a smoldering crater, mingling with the voices of the dead. …

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Adam Zagajewski on poetry in an age of mass culture & popular pseudo-science 🔗📚

The central issue for us is probably the question of whether the mystery at the heart of poetry (and of art in general) can be kept safe against the assaults of an omnipresent talkative and soulless journalism and an equally omnipresent popular science—or pseudo-science. ~Adam Zagajewski, quoted by Cynthia Haven…

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Joshua Hochschild on communal life & the life of the mind 🔗 📚

Today an authentic intellectual life seems more natural in the flaneur than the professional scholar…. Whether our focus is on the tools of training, a heart for service, or learning from our asynchronous neighbors, the intellectual life is, ironically, a particular kind of political practice, an art of membership…. We can educate in a way that makes us all, despite and even through upheavals of culture, economy, and politics, more intelligible to each other and to ourselves.…

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Billy Hart Quartet, Live Streaming at the Village Vanguard 🎶

I just caught the Billy Hart quartet live at the Village Vanguard, thanks to the club’s streaming series. (Vijay Iyer’s trio is up next weekend.) Hart and his conspirators were excellent. All original pieces, I believe. I particularly love Turner’s piece, “Nigeria,” with which they closed their set. Personnel: Billy Hart, drums Ethan Iverson, piano Ben Street, bass Mark Turner, tenor Partial set list: ? (I missed the intro & half of the first tune) Aviation (Iverson) Teule’s Redemption (Hart) Showdown (Iverson) Ira (Hart?…

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Weekend project: building new beds for the boys. All that remains is to add a bed skirt to cover up those screws. 🔨

Morgan Meis on a highly questionable paraphrase of Auden in the NYT: “We must assist one another or die”?

Ahhh… back in the outdoor office at last.

R.I.P., Lee Konitz.

Here’s jazz pianist Ethan Iverson’s tribute to Konitz, insightful as always.

A sure way to establish enduring significance as a thinker is to combine sophistication with carefully constructed ambiguity and, if necessary, outright contradiction.

~ “Can Schmitt’s Political Theology Be Redeemed?”

(But it depends on how you define enduring.)

Today (Mon 6 Apr) at noon CST: “Christian Ethics & Pandemic Ethics”.

My colleague Pilar’s 86-year-old father has been hospitalized with covid-19 in Spain.

His last wish is to find a friend of his from Folkstone, Kent, England. I’m posting an article about his search here just in case anyone can help.

A stunning New York Times photo-essay on how coronavirus has devastated Bergamo, Italy.

In high school, my family hosted an Italian exchange student. His hometown? Bergamo. I never imagined it would return to my mind, or enter the global consciousness, in such a tragic way. 🔗

How Texas supermarket chain H-E-B has prepared better than just about anyone for the pandemic. 🔗

Probably also been reading some Taleb. 📚

I sense a lucrative consulting career in the near future for Justen Noakes, H-E-B’s “director of emergency preparedness.” 💰💰💰

There is no afterwards. 🔗

A profound, honest reflection on COVID-19 and our mortality. Written for Leonard J. DeLorenzo’s students at Notre Dame, but applicable to all:

The call in this season is to throw off the illusion of invulnerability and live together in truth.

The World's Best Virtual Art Galleries

A follow-up to last week’s post: for those who don’t want to sift through 2,000+ options, here are the Financial Times’ picks of the world’s best virtual galleries (the article’s behind a paywall, but here are the links): Sistine Chapel British Museum V&A – Indian Textiles Rembrandt & Amsterdam Portraiture Met – Timeline of Art History Uffizi – On Being Present Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room …

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Current listening: Pat Metheny, *From This Place* 🎶

I’ve been listening to Pat Metheny’s outstanding new album From This Place. From the compositions, through the arrangements (Metheny called in Alan Broadbent to help), to the musicianship of drummer Antonio Sanchez, bassist Linda May Han Oh, & pianist Gwilym Simcock. Highly recommended—& also available on Bandcamp.…

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Sunday Morning Biscuit-Making

Singers, among many others, have had their livelihoods cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to COVID-19.

But it turns out you can still make beautiful music together virtually. Here’s my sister-in-law singing Mauricio Duruflé’s Ubi Cartas, as part of a virtual octet. 🎶

In my extra reading time these days, I’ve been taking @ayjay‘s suggestion to read essays and short stories to heart by reading Chekhov & Montaigne. Also revisiting an old favorite, The Imitation of Christ. 📚

🔗 2,500 museums you can visit virtually

I’m planning on visiting many museums in this way with my kids in the days & weeks to come. 🎨 🖼

My selections from our trip the Shoreview Public Library today. Looking forward to some reading time over the next few days off… but I may have overestimated just how much time I’ll have. 📚

DL: 270x3 OHP: 102.5x5 🏆

Sq: 225x6 BP: 180x3 🏆

Learning to play the piano without a piano 🔗🎶

This is a remarkable story, though disappointingly brief.

OHP: 110x3 🏆

“Chelsea are back in fashion – but Roman Abramovich is out in the cold” 🔗 ⚽️

Speaking of Chelsea FC, here’s a fascinating essay by David Conn on owner Roman Abramovich’s rise to oligarch status, purchase of the club, & influence on the EPL: It is a stretch now to remember how alien it was to England’s traditional football culture when Chelsea began to splurge on mostly overseas stars, funded by an owner with no previous connection to the club, to capture the game’s highest prizes.…

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Martin Filler on the MOMA’s expansion 🔗 🖼

The mindset that bigger and more are preferable to less but better has incrementally eroded the average person’s ability to experience the world’s greatest collection of modern art under pleasant conditions that previous generations took for granted. A truth that applies to many areas of our lives in contemporary America. You could summarize Filler’s comprehensive review in a single word: arrogance.…

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The Poverty of Economics & The Wealth of Religions: an essay on the limits of the economic analysis of religion. Unsurprisingly, when you struggle to define the object of your analysis, the analysis isn’t particularly illuminating. 🔗

I’ve never like Chelsea FC—I’ve actively disliked them, in fact. But now, with Pulisic playing—playing well—and with the funny, sharp Frank Lampard managing, I’m happier to see them succeeding. And I’m certainly glad to cheer for them when they’re playing Manchester City. ⚽️

“Miguel Ibarra’s My Friend” ⚽️ 🔗

He played his heart out on the pitch and quite fittingly wore his heart on his sleeve. He would often tweet inspirational quotes when it was obvious that he was struggling with not getting playing time or not playing as well as he wanted. He was a player that every fan wanted to succeed, because he made you feel like your support mattered. A truly moving tribute to Batman, written by my friend Wes Burdine.…

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Nothing too surprising in MNUFC’s contract-deadline-day decisions… other than the club unceremoniously cutting loose Miguel Ibarra, one of our best & longest-tenured players. At the very least, letting him go for nothing seems like bad business. ⚽️

Money & Government: Against Economics 🔗

From a long, but very readable review by David Graeber of Robert Skidelsky’s new book, Money & Goverment: The Past & Future of Economics: Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights here, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century’s problems. The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same problem we are now facing: i.…

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Andrew Delblanco on Rethinking the Puritans 🔗

From a review essay in The Nation entitled (brilliantly) “Vexed and Trouble Englishmen”: Rodgers’s book is not only a close reading of the reception and history of Winthrop’s speech but also a rescue operation for Puritanism itself. Rather than instigating the pernicious idea of the United States as God’s most favored nation, the Puritans, he argues, were unsure of their worthiness and subjected themselves to “the moral scrutiny of the world.…

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Wendell Berry’s essay “The Pleasures of Eating”—beautifully illustrated and with a new introduction by Alice Water—has just been republished by Emergence Magazine.

Two Views On Art and Politics 🔗

Will Arbery: It basically boils down to a dissatisfaction with the ending, on both sides. People want a clear thesis, or they want to know what my diagnosis is. On both sides, you hear, like, Clearly, he’s still confused and doesn’t know where he falls. That for me is sad, because I don’t think that what they’re talking about is art. I think they’re talking about something else that I’m not interested in making.…

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Hjemkomst

Spent the morning at the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead. It’s a history museum centered (literally) around a large ship, the Hjemkomst, built by a Moorhead man and sailed to Norway. It’s a remarkable place; we all loved the story and were fascinated by the massive boat. 🇳🇴…

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I was in Fargo for a couple days for my mom’s birthday. While there, I enjoyed an all-too-rare gift: an hour of free time to play jazz with my dad.

Our set list:

  • Midnight Mood
  • Little Waltz
  • Stolen Moments
  • Lucky Southern
  • Autumn in New York

🎶

Ethan Iverson's ECM Artist's Choice Playlist 🎶

I’ve been exploring the ECM Artist’s Choice playlist curated by pianist Ethan Iverson (available on Apple Music & Tidal). It was cool enough to have these ECM tracks hand-picked by him. But then I discovered that he has also annotated each selection. Iverson’s notes illuminate the music—but they also provide a window into the listening biography and musical development of a great jazz pianists.…

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Silence & Music: two of my favorite things. Also the name of a beautiful album by the Gabrieli Consort. 🎶

Daylight savings time: my semi-annual reminder that the government delights in tormenting parents.

I voted today after work. The poll workers seemed genuinely surprised when I walked in—I bet fewer than a dozen ballots were cast at my precinct today.

In defense of my neighbors, the only item on the ballot was the school board; 3 candidates were running for 3 open seats.

Lots of news regarding my beloved MN United today ⚽️:

Early morning nature hike. 📷🍁

MInnesota United ⚽️ declined contract options on five players today:

  • Carter Manley
  • Collin Martin
  • Wilfried Moimbé-Tahrat
  • Ally Hamis Ng’anzi
  • Rasmus Schuller

I’m not too surprised, though I am excited to see who they bring in. It’s going to be a long offseason…

The Trees of Windsor Green 📷🍁

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MN United FC: Season Recap and Roster Notes ⚽️

Last night’s heart-breaking loss to LA Galaxy brought an end to a pretty exciting, encouraging season. The front office made some great moves (Gregus, Metanire, Alonso, Opara), and one or two not-so-great moves; they built for the future with an exciting young DP signing in Uruguayan Thomas Chacon and a killer draft—regulars Hassani Dotson and Chase Gasper along with goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair. Overall, they showed some evidence of direction, progress, a plan.…

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Current reading: Waugh & Engelmann 📚

Waugh’s satire of Hollywood doesn’t hold up particularly well; still, there are some funny scenes and critiques of American culture that still ring true. Waugh doesn’t always quite get American culture. Like Graham Greene, he knew enough to oppose & ironize, but not quite enough to pull off a successful, stinging satire. I’m enjoying Teach Your Child to Read, mostly because my twin four-and-a-half year olds are also enjoying the lessons and proud of their progress.…

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Fall at Silverwood

The trees at Silverwood Park are beautiful today. The photos don’t do them justice.…

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A fall week in Minnesota. 80° ➡️ 30°.

I’ve been intrigued by Derek Parfit’s photos of Venice and St. Petersburg since learning of his hobby in this New Yorker profile. Now it looks like a selection will be published as part of the aptly named exhibit Derek Parfit: The Photos. 🔗 📷

Autumn in New Brighton

Monday…

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Autumn Leaf

One of Ruskin’s early lessons in The Elements of Drawing is to draw a leaf, as carefully and accurately as possible. Here’s my lunch-hour effort. 📚 🎨

English is Not Normal 🔗

When saying ‘eeny, meeny, miny, moe’, have you ever felt like you were kind of counting? Well, you are – in Celtic numbers, chewed up over time but recognisably descended from the ones rural Britishers used when counting animals and playing games. ‘Hickory, dickory, dock’ – what in the world do those words mean? Well, here’s a clue: hovera, dovera, dick were eight, nine and ten in that same Celtic counting list.…

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I hadn’t heard of Inktober till it was mentioned in the Micro.blog community. But I recently decided to work on my drawing skills, and this seems a great time to do it. #GrowthMindset

So incredibly proud of my brother Andrew Kaul for launching a new design studio, Buddy-Buddy.

He and his friend and colleague Ross Bruggink are incredibly hard-working, talented, and—above all—wonderful people. Best wishes, you two, for many successful years!

Recently attempted, & abandoned 📚:

  • David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (should’ve stayed an article)
  • Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, & Apricot Cocktails (I love Bakewell’s book on Montaigne—but I just don’t care about the existentialists)

Current reading 📚:

  • David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation
  • P. G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves
  • Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

Morning dinosaur-puzzle time. 📷

A day when one’s surroundings reflect one’s heart: dreary & a bit deflated.

If you use Apple Music and you like top jazz, give my ¡¡¡ Top Jazz !!! playlist a listen. (Shuffle mode recommended.)

With 690 tracks of great jazz music, there are few better ways to spend the next 72 hours. 🎶

Shirley Hazzard's *Greene on Capri: A Memoir* 📚

Shirley Hazzard’s Greene on Capri recounts the relationship that Hazzard and her husband, the Flaubert scholar and translator Francis Steegmuller, had with Graham Greene over two decades, from the late 60s to the late 80s. Their friendship started when, in a Capri cafe, Hazzard overhead Greene struggling to remember a line from a minor Robert Browning poem. Hazzard, who seems to have most of the English literary canon memorized, walked up to him, reminded him of the line, and walked away.…

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San Diego atheist noir: On Patrick Coleman’s *The Churchgoer* 📚

The Churchgoer I stayed up late to finish The Churchgoer, a new novel written by Patrick Coleman. It’s San Diego noir about mega-churches, faith and doubt, and about learning to accept love from others, despite unshakeable belief that you don’t want or deserve it. It’s so good. The voice is brilliant from start to finish. The narrator and central character is a former youth pastor turned atheist. His theological training gives him exegetical and etymological habits that won’t die, though his faith has; they’re a source of brilliant and fresh metaphor.…

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I made an Apple Music playlist of Hans Castorp’s favorite music in the “Fullness of Harmony” chapter of The Magic Mountain. (Full disclosure: there’s lots of opera.)

Amazing that it’s so easy to enjoy the same music that a fictional character listened to 110 years ago! 📚 🎶

An Anglo-Catholic literary tradition

This piece by Tara Isabella Button, In Brooklyn, ‘tradpunk’ Christianity meets millennial counterculture, speaks to some of what resonates with me in Anglicanism. Her literary lineage of Anglo-Catholics is a bit heavy on the twentieth century, though. I’d keep them all, but add Robert Browning, the Rosettis and William Morris, Hopkins, the Brontes, Bram Stoker, and Ruskin. Not all Anglicans, or Catholics, or even necessarily Christians, but all part of that same religious critique of modernity.…

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Today’s listening: on a recommendation from my father, Pat Methany’s Still Life (Talking), a Latin-jazz-fusion album. Like a lot of Methany’s music, it’s strange, beautiful, a bit surreal, heavily produced. 🎶

Oxford’s Schwarzman centre for the humanities

I’m excited about the new Schwarzman centre for the humanities at Oxford, which will provide a hub for the humanties departments and also a research center for the ethics of AI. It’s great to see major gifts earmarked especially for the humanities. Oxford has yet to identify architects to design the 23,000 square metre centre, which it intends to complete by 2024, but the university has earmarked land near the Blavatnik school of government and the Radcliffe observatory in the city centre.…

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I really like Ezra Klein’s podcast about half the time. He’s fair-minded, listens carefully, asks good questions—but only when interviewing people he disagrees with. That said, his interview with Stacey Abrams is still very good, because she’s so articulate & thoughtful.

I’m excited to be co-leading a reading group on Thomas Mann’s wonderful novel The Magic Mountain this summer. The novel is truly delightful: long, funny, and strange; a novel that explores pre-WWI Europe. If you’re looking for a big book to read this summer, take a look! 📚

A beautiful day at the office.

It was a beautiful morning for a bike ride to school—perfect, in fact.

Brad Mehldau’s new album, Finding Gabriel, is apparently the fruit of an intense reading of the Bible. Its compositions are inspired by passages from the wisdom literature and the minor prophets. Unsurprisingly, then, it’s wild, wide-ranging, and beautiful. 🎹 🎶

I’d listen to Clifford Jordan’s Glass Bead Games just to have a chance to look at the gorgeous cover art again. But the music is even more exceptional than the typography! 🎶 🎷

I wanted to create something useful and practical, you see… And since I also loved books, I was determined that they be as beautiful as possible. That’s all there is to it.

~ Jacques Schiffrin, qtd. in “On Founding One of Literature’s Most Beautiful Collections” 🔗 📚

Today’s listening: gotta be the new Vampire Weekend album, Father of the Bride. 🎶

#MNUFC

It was a beautiful first match for me at Allianz Field, celebrating my birthday with my father, brother, and a couple old, old friends. I was also thrilled to be there for our first home win in the new stadium, participating in the first Wonderwall singalong at Allianz. It wasn’t a pretty win, but it was a win! #COYL…

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Publicly manifested prosperity might well hide a deeper sorrow than we at first could imagine.

~ Fr. James V. Schall, on the moral vision of Samuel Johnson’s essays 🔗 📚

Agnes Callard on losing philosophical fights

When you lose, you experience just how far your capacity to think takes you, which is to say, you experience it giving out. That’s when it washes over you: the feeling of not knowing what you are talking about, the empty nothingness of your own mind. ~ Agnes Callard, in her latest public philosophy column for The Point…

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Riding with the gauchos of Argentina

Riding with the gauchos of Argentina: A photo-essay (h/t Gray Areas I studied in Buenos Aires in the spring semester of 2005, and my brother & I had the good fortune to travel through Argentina’s northeastern provinces for a couple of weeks after the term ended. My kids are currently obsessed with a coffee-table book in my library, Estancias: The Great Houses and Ranches of Argentina. This photo-essay linked above is a remarkable complement, a testament to the dying gaucho way of life.…

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I’m re-reading a favorite novel, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, preparing for a reading group this summer.

Looking for a good summer read? I’d highly recommend MM—you can’t go wrong with a long, philosophical novel about time, sickness, & death. (It’s funny, too!) 📚

The St. John Passion at the Lab Theater

I’m proud of my sister-in-law, Krista Costin for her role in the Oratory Bach Ensemble’s production of the St. John Passion at the Lab Theater this weekend. To quote from the Star Tribune’s review, Six female dancers provided a sensitively balletic counterpoint to mezzo-soprano Krista Costin’s probing account of “Von den Stricken meiner Sünden,” an aria in which the significance of Christ’s suffering is contemplated. …

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The Acropolis vs Mount Athos

Monasticism is not a theology; it is a way of life. Abbot Eliseus told me that there are two foundational monuments in Greece: the Acropolis and Athos. “But one is dead and the other is living,” he continued. “One is an idea, the other is a living experience.” From a remarkable travelogue by the secular philosopher Simon Critchley in the NYT.…

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I’ve been listening to a lot of Third Stream recently. So far, though, nothing I’ve found has come close to the depth & beauty of Sketches of Spain. 🎶 🇪🇸

Here’s a delightful symposium on personal libraries. The best entries, in my opinion, are those from Sarah Ruden & Peter Travers.

The symposium inspires me to write the story of my own personal library. I’d love to read others from the microblog community, as well. 📚

A disappointingly short, but still worthwhile, portrait of editorial illustrator Anna Parini, whose striking work has been all over the place of late. 🔗

“Zuckerberg says Facebook will shift focus to private sharing”

via the New York Times I’m sure they’ll be completely transparent and absolutely vigilant, whatever they come up with. There’s no way they’d ever use their platform for personal gain when it suits them. Zuckerberg is definitely the guy to trust when it comes to communications, especially private ones! What I love most, though, is that Zuckerberg contrasts the push for private communication channels with “today’s open platforms”—e.g. Facebook. In what world is Facebook an open platform?…

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Recommended: this excellent review of a book I plan to read as soon as possible: Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. 📚

I finally cancelled my Twitter account. It was time—I had my fill of toxic nastiness & virtue-signaling (later than many). Very glad to have an independent, thoughtfully designed platform in Micro.blog.

I haven’t seen The Green Book, and don’t plan to, but still highly recommend reading Ethan Iverson on Don Shirley over at the New Yorker’s culture desk. 🎬 🎶

Grateful for some time this morning to read by the fire. More grateful still for a new book by a favorite poet.

The incomparable Brian Phillips is featured on the latest episode of Bookworm, alongside man-eating tigers, a man-eating-tiger-hunting man, death on the Iditarod, and Impossible Owls.

“How Facebook Deforms Us” - a thorough, thoughtful review by LM Sacasas of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media.

Just discoereved @motyar’s MarkShow: Markdown to Slideshow app. It’s wonderful! I lesson-plan in Markdown, & have been looking for a tool like this forever. Thank you!

Recommendation: Spectacle App

In my day job as a technical writer, I use Windows; it’s really not been a great experience, but that’s a subject for another day. There is one feature I LOVE, though: using the Windows + arrow keys to arrange windows around the desktop. Till now, I haven’t found a good alternative on the Mac. But today I found @spectacleapp, and it’s wonderful so far! Free, open-source, customizable, maintained. Check it out here.…

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I read a wonderful novel tonight, Patrick DeWitt’s very dark & very comedic “tragedy of manners,” French Exit. (h/t the display stand at the local public library.) 📚

I hadn’t heard of translator Anthea Bell until I read her obituary yesterday. But then I realized that the day before, I had started one of her translations: of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. So far, the book is profound, tragic, & absolutely captivating. 📚

The implausible idea of a "chief ethics officer"

I read Kara Swisher’s recent column on the need for chief ethics officers in Silicon Valley with great interest & great skepticism. Swisher documents, with droll understatement, just a few of the ethical “quandaries” [their words] our giant mega-corporate start-ups have faced (or created): Corporations accepting loads of money from Saudi Arabia (cozying up to Saudi Arabia is a problem they share with the NYT itself, incidentally) Facebook lying (again!…

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A wonderful short essay on soccer & politics in Brazil, from Andrew Downie in the London Review of Books: Sócrates & Brazilian Democracy.

Joan Barry & two forms of political belief

This article is fascinating. It follows Joan Barry, a Missouri Democrat whose politics don’t neatly fit entirely within party lines, as she tries to make some room for pro-life Democrats within the party. I think it reveals some damaging assumptions undergirding contemporary political life. Consider why one person quoted rejects Barry’s position: Right now it’s really important to stand for something. Later on, someone else uses very similar language to dismiss Barry:…

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Fall Walks, Silverwood Park

2018-10-17 2018-10-18…

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Truth vs useful knowledge: Teaching business students *How to Think*

I’m teaching Alan Jacobs’s book How to Think to my business communication students this semester. Communicating and thinking are inseparable, and I’ve always tried and struggled to integrate critical thinking into my course. Previously, I’ve tried using John Lanchester’s How to Speak Money, in addition to assorted essays and excerpts, without much success. But Jacobs’s book has gone much better so far, because it does something that the other books haven’t: it meets the students where they’re at, in a social-media environment that is shaping their habits of thinking and communicating in ways none of us fully recognizes or understands.…

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I work with a lot of different foreign languages, & Korean is my favorite, hands down. The font we use makes it look like hieroglyphics from the future.

Everything you need to know about Facebook’s understanding of journalism—in one useful ad!

Happy 85th birthday to the great Wayne Shorter! We mere mortals can celebrate by reading Ethan Iverson on Shorter’s transcendental year, 1964.

While you read, listen to his albums from that year: Night Dreamer, Juju, & Speak No Evil. 🎂📚🎶

Craigslist purchase of the year. $30!

In a remarkable essay for NYT Magazine, Ilya Kaminsky revisits Odessa, city of his birth.

Time & silence, Tolstoy’s ears, fathers & mothers & sons, WWII, the essay is about everything, & nothing. (“When I say the word nothing, I name something that is there.”)

Centrist Democrats in the Age of Trump

Yesterday, the NYT published an interesting, and beautifully photographed, article on ND senator Heidi Heitkamp. The piece is framed in terms of the difficulty of her decision to approve or oppose Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. But by the middle of article, it’s reasonably clear she’ll be one of the Democrats who will approve the nomination; the real issue is the impact of Trump’s misguided trade wars on Midwestern farmers.…

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The vast majority of electricity used in the world’s data centres comes from non-renewable sources, and as their numbers rapidly increase, there are no guarantees that this will change.

~ John Harris, “Our phones and gadgets are now endangering the planet”

Thoreau in Minnesota. I had no idea about this voyage of Thoreau’s; thanks, @rnv, for the link!

Cavell on citizenship as conversation

Today’s a good day to reflect on the demands of citizenship in our troubled nation. And there’s no better place to start than with this reflection on the centrality of citizenship in the philosophy of Stanley Cavell (R.I.P.): Cavell … thought that the success of democracy depended on making the enterprise of thinking attractive to people. He showed by example what it meant to think for oneself, and he encouraged his readers to discover and develop their own sensibilities — a prerequisite, as he saw it, to the growth of the kind of individuality necessary for flourishing democratic life.…

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A sobering look at how tech companies conquered America’s cities, by the excellent Farhad Manjoo. As if I needed any more reasons to move to the country…

Friends in Europe: there is some excellent jazz coming your way this summer. The Billy Hart Quartet (Hart, Ben Street, Mark Turner, and Ethan Iverson) is touring Europe with Joshua Redmon this summer. Make time for this group! 🎶

Trump’s description of his parallel reality unwittingly calls to mind his most reckless and destructive actions, and it shows how oblivious he is to their consequences.

~ Daniel Larison has patiently chronicled the foreign-policy implications of Trump’s reckless presidency.

*Of Farming & Classics: A Memoir* 📚

I recently finished re-reading David Grene’s memoir, Of Farming & Classics. Grene balanced action and contemplation in his life in a truly remarkable way: he spent half the year teaching classics in the University of Chicago’s fascinating Committee on Social Thought, then the other half farming, first on a small farm in Illinois, then back on small farms in his native Ireland. His memoir is a charming little book. Just 160 pages, it’s focused and delightful, pushing against our assumptions regarding the nature of both farming and education.…

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Please read my friend Bharat Ranganathan’s essay on Scripture, immigration, and Christian ethics. It’s a good overview of why Jeff Sessions’s comments were so deeply misguided.

So excited for the World Cup, starting today. ⚽️

  • My prediction for the final: 🇦🇷 3:2 🇧🇷
  • Dark horses: 🇹🇳, 🇨🇷
  • And I can’t help but hope that 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 will have a great Cup, at least making it to the quarter finals.

Michael Dirda, typically excellent, recommends two recent books on Stoicism and ancient philosophy more broadly.

H/T to him for referring to Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric and Classical English Metaphor, both of which I’d somehow never heard of before tonight. 📚

#CINvMIN ⚽️

My beloved #MNUFC ground out (truly—it wasn’t fun to watch) a US Open Cup win in penalties against FC Cincinnati tonight, thanks to typically great goalkeeping from B🚫bby Shuttleworth, and a pretty lackluster performance from pretty everyone else. I thought Mears was good, and in extra time Ibarra and Danladi both attacked with some energy. But Cincinnati was impressive, and I’m looking forward to having them in MLS soon. My favorite part of the match was how the fans were chanting “Shuttle-worthless”… then he saved 3 penalties.…

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View from the desk this morning.

Children’s Museum

Rainy day in MSP—perfect day for a day at the Children’s Museum with grandma.…

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I’m a sucker for gossip & insider info on editors & publishing. This NYT piece on TLS editor Stig Abell was esp. delightful in uncovering Abell’s MN connections—I trust he’s also now an #MNUFC supporter.

Teju Cole, in conversation with Krista Tippett

I had the great privilege to listen in on Krista Tippett’s conversation with Teju Cole this evening. The subjects ranged widely: baptism, art and politics, Google and memory, Thomas Tranströmer, Elizabeth Bishop, improvisation and presence, and more. Many thanks to my sister-in-law Krista for snagging the tickets; I’ll post the recording from the evening when it’s published on On Being. Till then, read the interview on the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music blog.…

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Finished my first Muriel Spark novel this morning, Aiding and Abetting, and greatly enjoyed its very dark comedy. I will certainly read more of her. Look for some, er, Spark notes here soon.

This morning’s listening: the Cedar Walton Trio’s Ironclad: Live at Yoshi’s (Apple Muisc link), featuring what is surely some of the greatest album cover art of all time.

All holy books are works of fiction.

Saw this bumper sticker today (on the way to church, of course). I disagree with some of this dude’s core assumptions—especially regarding the nature, truth, and value of fiction!

My good friend Brad wrote about Mississippi’s Yazoo River, where attempts to prevent flooding threaten to have dramatic unintended consequences elsewhere in the river basin.

Just wrote a long post on awkwardness in Vodolazkin’s “novel” Laurusmjkaul.com/2018/05/0…

From the NYRB, a fascinating essay on Berenice Abbott, jazz-age photographer in NYC and Paris.

Time, place, and circumstance: they are like three balls that you toss in the air, and they control your life.

An exceptional essay by Garnette Cadogan, “Due North”—an oddly edited, but also delightful and profound, essay on walking NYC from the Upper East Side to the South Bronx.

These photos of Lake Baikal are absolutely stunning (though I could do without any of the ones with people in them).

*Laurus* and Dostoevsky

The further I go in Laurus, the more I see Dostoevsky all over the place. That’s not surprising—you can’t write a work of fiction about Orthodoxy set in Russia and without reflecting deeply on Dostoevsky. In some ways, it’s as if Laurus is a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov, with Arseny an Alyosha figure shaped by a holy elder who dies early on (Christopher / Fr. Zosima). Moreover, death hangs over both books, intensely.…

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Addendum to my Cecil Taylor post: Ethan Iverson’s essay on Taylor is remarkable, and does justice to Taylor’s sui generis work.

Like every post on Iverson’s blog, it’s essential reading.

Where Are You, Spring?

Latern Waste; or, April in Minnesota…

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I’m finally starting Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus, in anticipation of the Anselm House book night in a week and a half. So far (50 pp in), it’s wonderfully strange, its medieval-modern form heavily dependent on pastiche and parataxis for its effects. I’ll hopefully write more soon.

Christian Democracy in Europe—and America?

This short essay in the Guardian makes a case for a Christian-democratic movement in the US to counter the rise of secular authoritarianism. The authors state that it was a distinctly Christian Democratic movement that successfully defeated fascism in Europe; they claim a similar movement is needed here. Given evangelicals’ remarkably comprehensive (and revolting) capitulation to Trumpism, and liberal Protestants’ own unthinking embrace of the Democratic platform, it’s hard to see how such a movement could gain any traction.…

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The a-fore-quoted interview with Cecil Taylor harmonizes with this interview with Ursula K. LeGuin, which begins with a lengthy and fascinating discussion of rhythm and grammar, the foundations of LeGuin’s own remarkable craft.

Cecil Taylor, RIP

Start with Ben Ratliff’s obituary for the NYT. NPR’s coverage of Taylor’s life and work is also excellent: Jazz, Freed: On Cecil Taylor’s Expansive Brilliance an obituary by Tom Vitale finally, and most importantly, Taylor’s appearance on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz. It’s a wonderful episode; Taylor seems to be a gentle, strange, and caring person who’s remarkably humble about his remarkable improvisational gifts. He’s also a teacher whose only advice to a hypothetical student is: Look, find one note on the instrument that pleases you.…

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Building Anglo-Saxon England

A fascinating new release from Princeton University Press: John Blair’s Building Anglo-Saxon England. Here’s the book description: This beautifully illustrated book draws on the latest archaeological discoveries to present a radical reappraisal of the Anglo-Saxon built environment and its inhabitants. John Blair, one of the world’s leading experts on this transformative era in England’s early history, explains the origins of towns, manor houses, and castles in a completely new way, and sheds new light on the important functions of buildings and settlements in shaping people’s lives during the age of the Venerable Bede and King Alfred.…

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Timothy Murphy's *Devotions*: Art and Death

Reading Anthony Domestico’s review of Timothy Murphy’s latest book of poems, I was saddened to learn of Murphy’s stage IV cancer. He’s one of our great poets; the fact that he’s from my hometown, Fargo, has given me a particular fondness for his work: Now separation has become my fear. What was does not console, what is, is past control— the disembodiment that looms so near. Read several of his poems at the Poetry Foundation.…

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I recommend this conversation in Democracy on whether political parties are dying or strengthening, though its conclusion—that parties are essentially content-less platforms—shouldn’t surprise anyone who lived through the last presidential election.

Robin Sloan’s Sourdough: like Mr Penumbra, simply delightful. I’m half done, and can’t put it down. Highly recommended!

Alan Jacobs makes a powerful and persuasive argument for the open web in The Hedgehog Review:

We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls.

A wonderful essay in the TLS on Arnold as poet—his (deliberate) awkwardness, off-rhymes, and the “poetrylessness” of the Victorian age.

Robert Caro’s responses in this NYRB interview are profound, fascinating, and inspiring—as is the portrait of him at his typewriter.

Rebecca Solnit on writing and agency

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach. ~ From Rebecca Solnit’s excellent writing advice…

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Les Murray, “Animal Nativity”

The Iliad of peace began when this girl agreed. Now goats in trees, fish in the valley suddenly feel vivid. Swallows flit in the stable as if a hatching of their kind, turned human, cried in the manger showing the hunger-diamond. Cattle are content that this calf must come in human form. Spiders discern a water-walker. Even humans will sense the lamb, He who frees from the old poem turtle-dove and snake, who gets death forgiven who puts the apple back.…

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Restoring the Democrats’ foreign-policy vision

Samuel Moyn calls for Democrats to restore the liberal internationism that formed the core of its foreign policy, prior to Clinton and the rise of neoliberalism: A foreign policy based on expansive militarism and endless war is neither liberal nor internationalist. If the true meaning of those now abused terms is to be recovered, a good deal of retrenchment and restraint is critical…. The United States cannot even begin to think about bringing freedom and equality to the rest of the world until it cleans its own house.…

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Rereading Mary McCarthy

B.D. McClay’s review essay on Mary McCarthy is excellent, homing in on precisely those qualities of her writing that make McCarthy so simultaneously worthwhile and difficult: If neither God nor political ideology could be counted on as firm guidelines for behavior, what, exactly, was one supposed to use? While others leaned on concepts like decency, McCarthy herself moved in a different direction. Whatever was painful, whatever was hard to say, whatever you didn’t want to look at, whatever you were afraid to do—that was where you needed to direct your attention.…

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This delightful essay from Sven Birkerts describes his time with a trio of poet-pals who lived & taught in Boston in the 80s: Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, & (especially) Derek Walcott.

More from that essay on Paul Thomas Anderson:

Such restorative attachments are one response to the epidemic of spiritual hunger and spiritual crisis in Anderson’s American West, where the promise of Manifest Destiny had trailed off into the sea.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “casually Catholic,” Californian upbringing

Wonderful essay in The Point on Paul Thomas Anderson: Anderson describes himself as shaped by a casually Catholic upbringing, and in his films ideas about sin and expiation jostle against his distinctly Californian passion for the panaceas of personal therapy and self-help. …

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A single poem in your head

Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. ~ Christian Wiman, quoted in a wonderfully contrarian essay called “The Case Against Reading Everything”…

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Adam Gopnik on Parents’ Greatest Gift

I still think the greatest gift you can give your kids is easy exposure to interesting things. Not compelling them to go see things, but making them feel that art and literature are just parts of the world. ~ Adam Gopnik, in a thoughtful profile…

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Imagine if the New York Review of Books had hired a slightly stoned Edwardian fop as art director and you’ve got … Rolling Stone at its point of highest development.

~ Andrew Ferguson, on Jann Wenner

Very proud of my sister-in-law, Krista Costin, who is performing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the MN Orchestra.

Snack time, listening to and imitating Auntie @kristacostin live on #classicalmpr. Sounds wonderful! #auntikrista #bach

This interview with Sonny Rollins is amazing.

The idea of jazz is so spiritual, and it has such great qualities, that it will always withstand whatever the larger culture is.

I loved fishing and silence. Walking in the hills…. I didn’t talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I’d stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people.

Tonight’s listening: Emerson String Quartet, Chaconnes and Fantasias: Music of Britten and Purcell. It’s beautiful and mysterious music, highly recommended.

Recommended reading: Moyn & DBH

Two exceptional recent Commonweal essays: David Bentley Hart demolishes an attempt to defend the death penalty Samuel Moyn reviews Jeremy Waldron’s new book on equality While you’re there, go ahead and also read Anthony Domestico on what you can learn about Millennials by reading their novels rather than silly Internet “think pieces” about them (that is, us).…

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The Brad Mehldau Trio @ the Dakota

The Brad Mehldau show tonight at the Dakota Jazz Club was so, so good. Among the highlights from a set filled with new material: A new Mehldau tune, “Bel and the Dragon” A new, wildly polyrhythmic composition co-written by Ballard and Mehldau A beautiful rendition of “Wolfgang’s Waltz,” from an album, Rising Grace, that I’ve been listening to constantly over the past couple weeks What a gift to see musicians like these in one’s city.…

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Really looking forward to this book. Ecklund is an excellent scholar and writer, and this is a critically understudied topic.

Current listening: Hudson, with Jack DeJohnette, John Scofield, & Brad Mehldau Larry Grenadier (whom I’m seeing live on Sunday at the Dakota!).

Ted Gioia’s albums-of-the-year lists are always long and excellent. This year’s list is no exception. There are hours of beautiful, exciting music here.

Camus, quoted by Izzo:

The love we share with a city is often a secret love.

Current listening: Mavis Staples, One True Vine:

I can tell when something’s going on, And something’s going on. But some Holy Ghost keeps me hanging on…

A pleasant surprise after a looooong weekend of grading. Reading and writing: I’m easy to please.

The three little Octonauts. Enjoying this Halloween—undoubtedly the last one they’ll choose complementary costumes.

The three little Octonauts.

Lanchester on Scott, Suzman, & Civilization

More John Lanchester: his latest, a review (with wonderful cover image) of James C. Scott and James Suzman. Lanchester’s simple opening point: it’s worth considering the difference between science and technology, terms we think of as naturally and intrinsically linked.…

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October in Minnesota.

I love these three brave explorers.

This girl takes her sleep very seriously. #hermothersdaughter

New arrival!

On wrath, contemptuous smugness, and slower thinking: Alan Jacobs interviewed by Emma Green for the Atlantic.

Beautiful mist on the lake this morning.

Big leaf pile, beautiful day

The wonderful Andrew O’Hagen on literature vs. “the dark babble of social media."

The London Review of Books has a new podcast up, on Auden. It’s excellent. Supplement with Alan Jacobs on “The Public Poetry of W. H. Auden”.

Current listening: two albums from London’s jazz scene: Nubya Garcia’s Nubya’s Five (check out her cover of “Contemplation”); Alfa Mist’s Antiphon.

If forced to pick the greatest song of all time, I might choose “I Want You Back”. That bass line…

Turns out things are pretty much the same, except wetter, and Siri works better.

Captain Abemerica. Saving the world, and stopping to smell all the flowers.

So glad to be present at a very full @AnselmHouseUMN for a talk by Dan Siedell on modern art.

Current listening: Tyshawn Sorey’s Verisimilitude, a beguiling fusion of jazz & classical (a fusion that’s incredibly fertile at the moment).

“You are the Product." John Lanchester, brilliant as always, in the London Review on why Facebook is terrifying.

D is for dreary.

Sandbar, with canoe. Cross Lake, MN.

“The Economics of the Protestant Reformation”. (I love when academic research like this is freely accessible, btw. One of the most frustrating things about my discipline, literary studies, is how dependent the discipline is upon noxious gatekeepers like JSTOR.)

Current listening: “Lazarus”, from Bowie’s late, great Blackstar.

Current listening: Matthew Shipp, I’ve Been to Many Places. I especially like his version of “Summertime.”

Success! Finished uploading old WP posts to my new Jekyll-based site. Next adventure: a custom domain?

J.M. Coetzee’s early poetry was written in binary, hex, & FORTRAN, anticipating the digital-humanities turn by decades.

On my commutes, I’ve been listening to Tony Judt’s Postwar. It’s a remarkable book, & I will write more later—but for now, I just wanted to say I have only 19 hours left in this 43 hour long behemoth!

Digging moss with Nana.

Current listening: my local symphony orchestra’s recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies.

Two of the great moral philosophers of recent history are Bernard Williams and Alaisdair MacIntyre. This essay does an admirable job articulating the differences between the two thinkers—the former a pessimistic and skeptical classical liberal, the latter a pessimistic Catholic traditionalist.

Joshua Cohen is the guest on this week’s episode of Bookworm, discussing his new novel, Moving Kings. It’s an incredible conversation about what sounds like a superb book—do check both out.

Spending a big chunk of the afternoon trying to set up my personal site and microblog with Jekyll & GitHub Pages. As always, it’s far more complicated than expected—but also very enjoyable, deep work.

Polos. Bed head. Ready for their first day of business school.

This post, on the rift between the White House & the State Department on Qatar, confirms that foreign policy is turning out to be the most terrifying part of a terrifying presidency.

Current listening: Sun Ra, Monorails and Satellites, vol. 1. Inspired by the remarkable NYT Magazine portrait of Craig Taborn published Sunday.

Current listening: Jobim’s Stone Flower, a melancholy masterpiece of the late Jobim.

Current listening: Max Richter, from Sleep. Beautiful music, composed about, and for, sleep.

These two rascals let themselves out of their beds, and their bedroom, this morning at 6:25. We’re doomed.

Tyler Cowen’s interview with Jill Lepore is, like all his conversations, fascinating and wide-ranging.

This one is particularly recommended for its focus on writing, on the ways we understand and interpret history, and on time-travel.

Lucky enough to catch the second set of the Chris Potter Quartet at the Dakota last night. Incredible show—I’d highly recommend his most recent albums.

If you are in the habit of kissing your kids' owies to help them feel better, you better also prepare yourself for the day when they bite their tongues while chewing soggy Cheerios. #YouReapWhatYouSow

Abraham #bossinrainboots

At last… sprinkler season.

Bravest explorers.

Wandering and river-watching on a dreary Good Friday.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.

Fire sunset #nofilter

More birthday festivities: morning at the zoo. Sam was rapt—he could have watched the giraffes for hours.

Two years old today… Their day included 3/4 grandparents, a singing Elmo birthday card (thanks @monnytam!) tons of cake (thanks @deborahkaul!), a giant cardboard box, puddle splashing, and Chuck E. Cheese. So, an amazing day for two amazing boys.

Exciting news: Jeffrey Stout will give a series of Gifford Lectures this May 1-11. Entitled “Religion Unbound: Ideals and Powers from Cicero to King,” the lectures will “trace the ideal [of ethical religion]‘s history and explain how its defenders have defined and criticized religion.” Follow the lectures (they’ll stream live) on the Gifford Lectures site.

#theboys

The road less traveled.

I’m very proud to have helped edit one of the essays that became this book, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature, while I was managing editor of Victorian Studies. The essay, “Wild Charges: The Afro-Haitian ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’,” was among my favorite of the many, many critical essays I read in the course of my graduate studies.

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Krista Tippett’s conversation with Anil Dash is a classic—one of my On Being all-time favorites.

The indignity of Minnesota winter: when you drop a glove & then, upon stopping to pick it up, kick it full of snow.

Auden on Attention

Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be. ~ Qtd. in Winnifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life…

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Geoffrey Hill on Making and Self-Making

The world is full of noise, the noise of opinion. Are you going to be able to master some small aspect of it, and use it in the making of your own voice? Or is it stronger than you are? Do I mean stronger or just louder? These particular difficulties, and other vaguer apprehensions seem to me to be the force field of making and, in a way, self-making. Even now when the things are coming fairly quickly, I do feel that everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence.…

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Commiseration & consolation for Minneapolis in winter.

Observing New Year’s Day at the Conservatory. (And zoo.)

The boys, loving Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (a gift to their big sister on the day of their birth, from uncle @andrewkaul and aunt @baileekaul)

Found my favorite bar in NYC.

The most beautiful morning for a walk.

#BWCA #latergram #nofilter

Mission accomplished. #tcbookfestival

Clifford Day!

Home.

The giant playground wasn’t quite exciting enough.

Puddles.

Morning at the zoo!

A beautiful night for soccer.

¡Feliz cumplé, Carmen, y adios, arepa!

Climbing trees at the Farmers Market.

Abe is just shocked that the gorilla is letting the elephant loose on the world.

#ReadingTime

The boys love their chocolate banana dessert.

We’ve found heaven on earth for the kids.

It Tolls for Thee

I will leave you by saying that it seems that a widely predicted outcome of digital culture has come true: that all of the new means of interconnection serve as a vast system of mutual surveillance, that there is now nowhere for us to go where we are not constantly observed and thus constantly judged by everyone around us, that the internet’s great power is not for more human diversity but for more human conformity, that we are now all constantly under supervision, supervision of the bosses and the government and the great Puritan effect of other people’s attention, that we are training generations to fear that people with power are always watching, that the necessary and inevitable effect will be a culture of docility and fear, that the constant guilt by association leads us to relationships that are prophylactic and insincere, that the future is the fascism of the HR department, the totalitarianism of our own grinding uncertainty about who might be offended by what we’ve done, and why, and of never knowing why we’re in trouble but always being keenly aware that we are, where only the wealthy and the connected enjoy the privilege of candor and indifference to offense, our country a democracy of fear.…

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First visit to @functionbrewing! Delighted to finally be here, several years after it opened! cc @andrewkaul @rossbruggink

BFFs. Cc @joelniese @meaganniese @kdkaul

Road trip!

Calm.

The boys are serious about their graham crackers. #latergram

Belated birthday celebration. Lil was pretty excited about singing—and the boys were just concerned about getting some cake.

Dinner with friends … Lots of friends.

Easter egg hunt! Lil just ran around, a little too terrified of the other kids to pick up any eggs.

Waiting for the bus.

Beautiful day for a @hellopizza_mn picnic!

Spring! At last! The boys, it turns out, are pretty interested in this thing we call the outdoors.

Spent a lot of time today photographing trees. #treesofinstagram

Long walk, blue sky, lake country.

Painting time!

Well, two out of three enjoyed the walk this afternoon. Abe, however, was a bit cranky.

Window shopping. (One of the dishes at this place is awesomely named “The Prime Rib of Miss Jean Brodie.")

Many of Osip Mandelstam’s own poems only exist today because they were memorized by his wife & friends before they were burned.

Happy birthday, Abe & Sam!

Giant snow octopus. Only in New Brighton.

Breakfast for the boys: all of grandpa’s eggs.

Sunrise, New Brighton style

Robot!

Sammy: so happy; so confused by glass.

Birthday!!! Thanks for the great par-tay @monnytam @fargofd @deborahkaul @andrewkaul @ryanleedawes @baileekaul @kristacostin @smmoothies @kdkaul

Thanks for the Amazon gift card, @monnytam & @fargofd – it was put to good use. 📕📗📘📙

Berryman on Writing Short

Write as short as you can In order Of what matters. ~ qtd. by Gabriel Josipovici, here…

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Time for a quick early morning snooze.

Sick day with Nana D.

Malingering.

Snow + Angel

Weekend project with Pa Kaul, finished!

Christmas with the Kauls.

#TreesofSilverwood

#TreesofSilverwood

Evening walk with the boys.

I’ve seen a lot in these last nine months. But nothing quite so gag-inducing as what the boys did to this poor bowl of Life cereal.

Sammy, really excited for bedtime.

Collect for the First Sunday in Advent

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.…

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The office today.

Fun day with Auntie @kristacostin, Grandpa @fargofd, @monnytam, @ryanleedawes, and @karincostin!

Cozy moment this morning.

Sammy, pretty proud after pulling himself up for the first time.

Mark Greif on Esteem for the Novel

In his important new book, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America 1933-1973, Mark Greif, discussing writers like Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow and related 1950s-era debates about what was expected, then, of fiction, points out that there was much talk at the time about the "death of the novel" as a major literary genre and cultural force. At the same time, though, and thanks to books like Invisible Man and The Adventures of Augie March, "…

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Evening walk #nohatsnocoatsnovember

Someone’s kids haven’t quite adjusted to daylight savings yet. On the plus side, they’re a great help in my new plan to wake up earlier.

Lil, worried she would scare people because she looked so much like a real lion, decided to reassure them by telling them she was a tiger.

I’d describe her style as Van Gogh with a bit of Turner.

Morning menu planning.

Lil exploring the lake with Nana D.

Successful day at the #twincitiesbookfestival

Someone started crawling today! Evidence captured by auntie @karincostin

Auden on Our Media Consumption

[Our] ease of access is in itself a blessing, but its misuse can make it a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more poetry & fiction, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possible respond to properly, and the consequence of such overindulgence is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces than yesterday's newspaper.…

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Apple picking, pumpkin patching, and CHICKENS!

Full boys = happy boys.

Morning play time.

Rise and shine!

#freshhoney

Another early morning–the boys didn’t want to miss the loons. Instead, they woke the loons up.

First morning at the lake. It’s an early one.

#bedhead

New chalk is all meticulously lined up. Thanks @kristinvarella!

Fun at @monnytam’s cc @fargofd

Sam & Grandpa

Abe & Nana D

Well, at least one of them thinks I’m funny.

karincostin #twinspics

MiniMessi

At least one of them’s in a good mood today!

The boys are 3 months. That means soon I won’t be able to put them on the kitchen table unrestrained anymore.

Jason Moran + Robert Glasper, at the Walker. Absolutely amazing.

Happy birthday, boys!

Beautiful day on campus.

Thanks for the visit, @kristinvarella! (Also, Lilli’s pretty pumped about her sweet new shades.)

Weekend with the nephew. He’s the smiliest kid ever.

#twins

Lil loving her new bicycle. Thanks @karincostin for the sweeeeet helmet!

After taking care of the boys all night, the grandparents still seem to love them.

Two weeks old.

Sleeping in on a Friday.

Abraham Andrew and Samuel Ryan, soaking up some sun at 4 days old. Enjoy it while it lasts, boys.

Italo Calvino on City & Memory

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. ~Italo Calvino…

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James Poulos on the New Adventurism

Unhappily, however, the wisdom-loving aristocrat’s appreciation for non-attachment is a harder sell than a sybaritic adventurism once restricted to a dedicated class of decadent nobles. ~James Poulos…

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Party time, with pickle.

Surprise spaghetti night with “nampa Kim”!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the Reading of Fairy Tales

My Father (who had so little of parental ambition in him, that he had destined his children to be Blacksmiths &c, & had accomplished his intention but for my Mother’s pride & spirit of aggrandizing her family) my father had however resolved, that I should be a Parson. I read every book that came in my way without distinction — and my father was fond of me, & used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me.…

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Marilynne Robinson on the Beauty of Classic Language

I like dealing with people whose vocabulary and worldview is less media–saturated than ours is. I think that there is an acceleration of a kind of slang shorthand that is very characteristic of our period but not especially beautiful. It is meant to be ephemeral, in a way that when you’re using language that you would consider “hip”—or whatever the present word would be—you are using it in the knowledge that in a year or two years, you would be embarrassed to use the same word.…

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Mesmerized by hopping animals. #Walker75

Philip Roth on Richard Stern

I met Dick in the fall of 1956, and thus was initiated a fifty-seven-year-long literary conversation and friendship. In 1956, Dick was just starting out in the University of Chicago English department while I was teaching freshman composition in the College. He was twenty-seven, I was twenty-three. I had just returned from the army to Chicago, where I’d earlier received an MA in English. Dick and I started to talk immediately about writers and books and didn’t stop until just a week or two before his death.…

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Nightly reading to Curious George in the laundry basket.

Christmas reading with uncle @andrewkaul and auntie @baileekaul h/t on Once Upon an Alphabet: @brainpicker

Costin Christmas

Jonathan Rée on Foucault

He could not cover the whole story in his six lectures at Louvain, but he got under way with detailed expositions of a ceremonial chariot race in the Iliad and Oedipus’ belated recognition of his guilt in Oedipus Rex. Between these two moments, Foucault says, we must postulate the emergence of a new kind of legal process, based not on the outcome of a tournament between antagonists, but on the authority of a third party: a judge, with a duty to discern a single truth transcending the clash of claims and counter-claims.…

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Jonathan Yardley on Book Reviewing

I came to this task as a journalist, not a literateur, and I have remained one to this day. I have high literary standards and delight in the expression of strong opinion, literary and otherwise, but I also read a book as if I were a reporter: looking for what it is “about” in the deepest sense of the word, determining what matters about it and what doesn’t, trying to give the reader a feel for what it is like as well as passing judgment on it.…

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Beautiful morning. #latergram

The moment I’ve been waiting for. #windinthewillows

Mill on Annotated Reading

For the first year or two after my visit to France, I continued my old studies, with the addition of some new ones. When I returned, my father was just finishing for the press his Elements of Political Economy, and he made me perform an exercise on the manuscript, which Mr Bentham practised on all his own writings, making what he called 'marginal contents'; a short abstract of every paragraph, to enable the writer more easily to judge of, and improve, the order of the ideas, and the general character of the exposition.…

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Snow snow snow!

Halloween!

I love you most of all, my darling, When autumn leaves start to fall.

Afternoon at the lake. #latergram

Piano with grandpa

In a corn hole world, horseshoes doesn’t stand a chance.

A moment with Schiller on my ride into work this morning.

Blankets! With uncle @andrewkaul

Scoping out the lake.

Costin family photo day @karincostin @kristacostin @ryanleedawes @fargofd

Somebody smudged the mirror @askovfinlayson… @andrewkaul

Beautiful walk with the little one around the lake tonight.

Probably should have emptied the pool after it rained…

Her father’s daughter.

Still Lil with flowers.

#ComoPark

Smelling the summer flowers

The scratcher! With @ryanleedawes, @fargofd, @andrewkaul, @baileekaul

HI! Lilli’s new favorite word.

Like father, like daughter.

Someone really enjoyed her dinner this evening.

A page straight out of @kristinvarella’s cookbook!

This game is dum.

Great gift, @kristacostin!

Opening her first Christmas gift with aunt @karincostin (#book)

On a one-day drive across both Montana and North Dakota, everyone needs to pitch in! #latergram

First day of Christmas skiing.

Morning walk to work.

Sleeping in.

Vancouver. I could get used to this place.

Naptime

Playtime

Trying to start crawling and standing on the same day.

Napping at daycare

#onlyinbloomington

Labor Day picnic at Bryan Park

Air balloons, / the summer evening: / both quickly gone

The fried butter put Lilli straight to sleep. #INstatefair

Wild times with buddy Billy!

Still life with soccer ball, cook books, and baby.

Lazy Sunday afternoon

I love the new toy, it’s delicious! Thanks aunt @karincostin!

Sitting is so much fun!!!!!

Sourdough. Heirloom tomato. Bacon. Cheddar. Avacado. #masterchef

Applesauce!!!!

#indy #pipeorganbuilders?

#indy

Smile time with gramps.

Trying so hard to crawl.

Dancing with gramps! So much fun!

New jumper!

First bites of food! Everybody’s favorite: oat cereal.

Reading time.

The next Messi.

Swing + foot = contemplation

Bath time!

“My dad totally rocks!” ~Lil’s onesie

Someone’s looking forward to lunch.

Somebody learned how to roll over today!

Life is good.

Alley view of the Bloomington square.

Farmers' Market

Standing is so much fun.

Bed time.

Hummingbird!

Serious Liffrig discussion, post-wedding. #kaulwedding

With the lovely couple #kaulwedding

Oh boy. #kaulwedding

Wedding dance whaaaa??? #kaulwedding

Wedding dance whaaaa??? #kaulwedding

Pre-wedding bath!

karincostin no kidding!

With Grandpa Arlen

Catnap.

Today, suddenly, toys are fascinating.

Go, dog. Go!

Now naptime.

Playtime!

#30thbday @kristinvarella

#30thbday

#30thbday

Sleeping in.

Lilli’s first trip to the east coast… And mine! #providence NYC is next, @jnetsamyn!

“My carseat is awesome!!!!”

Reading time with pa.

Time for a walk with ma!

Inaugurated into the classic Gpa Kent evening snooze tradition. With @fargofd

andrewkaul feeding Lil

With @ryanleedawes, @kristacostin, @andrewkaul, Gma Tammy & Gpa @fargofd. And taken by @kristinvarella.

With @meaganniese and @hendersweet

With @andrewkaul, @ryanleedawes, and @kristacostin

Lilli’s Easter Sunday baptism!

Time for breakfast!

Suspicious of uncle @andrewkaul

Meeting uncle @andrewkaul

Ready to meet uncle @andrewkaul!

Two months!

Right after the big grin, of course!

Lovin' life!

Loving' the bath!

Boss dad

Someone got a sexy new haircut! Ye-yeah!

Quiet Lilli

Lilli in Grandma’s cocoon. So cozy.

Snoozing in the laundry pile.

4 weeks today!

Chillin' in the chair.

ryanleedawes has new buttons!

Reaching for the stars with aunt @kristacostin.

Everyone’s favorite sleeping position: arm suspended mid-air.

Nap time, again. Lazy kid.

Three weeks old. And loved by auntie @karincostin! (And her other aunties too!)

Meeting Grandpa!

“Grandma loves me”

Tammy’s birthday!

Sunroom

With my girls.

She’s already got attitude.

Pizza with the reles!

SuperBowl par-tay!

Flannel fort.

With Aunt @kristacostin.

Sunday best.

Squirmy.

Nap time.

Sunday morning laziness.

Friends. Amazing.

Happiest mama on the block.

Cozy Moby

Chillin' to Bill Evans with dad, for whom side-lying is an incredible revelation.

With aunt @kristacostin for some amazing lunch from @kristinvarella

USA-Canada last night. Lilli’s first soccer match put us both to sleep. Her more quickly than me.

Home from my doctors appointment and doing well!

Home sweet home (2:45 am version, w/tornado warning & no sleep)

Home sweet home

Kristin

First car ride

The happy family

This one’s for you, Aunt Ems #riskyflash

Sleeping beauties

Death grip on the finger

With the old man