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.
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.
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. 🔗