Requiem for a Mad Farmer

RIP Wendell Berry.

A select writer with his own tag on this blog, he was a rare triple threat in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I love his novels Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow as much as Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, his advocacy for the preservation of tangibility, his documentary, and his many poems—like “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” and “A Homecoming”, which we had read during our wedding ceremony:

One faith is bondage. Two are free.
In the trust of old love,
cultivation shows a dark
graceful wilderness at its heart.
Wild in that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds of what we know.
O love, open.
Show me my country.
Take me home.

Do yourself a favor and dive into any of it.

September 2, 2026 Add Comment

‘Little Blue Dot: How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World’ by Katherine Dunn

  • “GPS and its competitors meant that for the first time in human history we could see the world as a whole. Suddenly, we really knew where things were – and when. GPS made it easier than ever to kill people, but also to rescue them; to better understand our world, and yet continue to destroy it. This makes it impossible to separate GPS from many of the major technological leaps of the last century.”
  • “The Second World War was the first around-the-clock battle fought on land, air and sea – and across the electromagnetic spectrum. Over the course of the war, navigation and radar systems rapidly proliferated, with each surviving piece of kit refined for its own specialities: bombing raids, detecting U-boats, early warning systems.”
  • “By the turn of the 20th century, long-distance seafaring was no longer as dangerous as it once was, though it was far from risk-free (Titanic, after all, sank in 1912). But it was really the arrival of aviation – and, nearly in lockstep, the rise of radio in those frenzied years of the 1920s and 1930s – that began to reshape humans’ relationship with navigation and time once again. Every time humans wanted to move faster, we needed new, ever more sophisticated clocks.”
  • America’s post-Sputnik satellites: “From a scientific point of view, these discoveries about the earth’s shape were utterly groundbreaking. The satellites’ fine-grained orbits were answering questions that had dogged astronomers since antiquity, and would go on to form the basis of modern earth and climate science. They were building a map of the earth’s shape and gravity at a mind-boggling level of complexity, far beyond what humans had expected from our weird and wonderful earth.”
  • Inspired by U.S.’s struggle to precision-bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War, United States Air Force engineers  met at Pentagon in 1973 to plan new satellite system to replace redundant efforts of various branches; birth of modern GPS
  • “Once a receiver is in time with the atomic clocks in the satellites circling our earth, it is pulsing in sync with all kinds of other global digital networks that rely on GPS time, from financial networks to energy grids to traffic lights. This is why GPS, although known for being a navigation tool, is perhaps best understood as a tool for transferring and coordinating time.”
  • “And so, in 1983, with the world teetering on the cusp of nuclear war, the president of the United States offered up a historically telling contradiction. Here was a US military project designed to more accurately tire nuclear missiles, funded by another US military project designed to make sure such a terrible outcome never occurred. If nothing else, it was a sign of the times. So often, it was impossible to tell where the nuclear arms race stopped and the attempt to rein in nuclear proliferation started. It was never easy to draw the line between a military lab and a civilian map, between science and satellites, computers and missiles, a Cold War and everyday peace.”
  • “GPS’s essential paradox has always been its weakness — the limits of physics that make it vulnerable to distortion and manipulation — paired with its absolutely staggering usefulness, its near-irreplaceable elegance in solving all kinds of problems that, for the most part, nobody pre-GPS even thought they had. That GPS is still so dominant is a tribute to the forward-thinking creativity of its architects in the 1970s. But virtually no one, including those same architects, anticipated how widely it would be adopted, and how profoundly we would be shaped in the process. This system of satellites and radio signals has given us new and miraculous ways to experience the world, and new expectations: of precision, of transparency, of accuracy, of trust — expectations that have then been subtly undermined.”

September 1, 2026 Add Comment

Links of the moment

An ongoing series

Typewriters + dictionaries + lexicography = the backwards index.

Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail.

A listening museum of mechanical keyboards and typewriters.

How IKEA furniture lost its color.

Fictional journeys drawn on the real world.

A modern apartment full of ordinary things that once inspired awe. 

Don’t paste the AI and don’t say just hello in chat.

August 31, 2026 Add Comment

Media of the moment

An ongoing series

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. A delightfully lo-fi sci-fi goof centered around Back to the Future? You know I’d be into it. If there were any justice in the world Matt Johnson would get an Oscar nod for his wonderful, wacky performance. 

The Odyssey. Truly what cinema is for. Zeus’s law requires that I commend movies like this for taking religion and myth seriously in all their weight and weirdness (complimentary). My first time in literal decades seeing a movie in IMAX as I usually don’t care about the format and would rather see a movie more cheaply, but I just had to make sure I saw the entirety of Agamemnon’s helmet and all the other goshdarn epic happenings.

True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color by Kory Stamper. The author of my favorite book of 2017 is back with another one about dictionaries and the ubernerds who make them.

How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell. As a blogger I appreciated learning a lot about the OG blogger/essayist and his era of the French Wars of Religion. Life was already hard enough during that time and then they added brutal religious violence? People, man…

Pressure. While this is not great, it’s a first-ballot Dad Movie Hall of Famer, and I for one welcome the prospect of Band of Brothers alums—in this case Damian Lewis and Andrew Scott—getting back together to reenact World War II stories.

Obsession. I’ve been out of the dating scene since 2012. Knew things were bad out there but didn’t realize this bad…

Toy Story 5. This got me good a few times, probably because I went with my 7 and 3 year olds, the first time in a theater for the latter.

If I Go Will They Miss Me. An achingly intimate movie with a magical-realist take on the universal experience of dads trying to outrun what we see reflected back by the mini versions of ourselves.

August 28, 2026 Add Comment

Podcasts of the moment

It’s been nearly three years since my last podcast lineup check-in, so time to see where things stand in my good ol’ Apple Podcasts feed.

Comparing all the previously check-ins, it’s interesting to see which shows have endured and which I merely visited for a limited time. I try to be extra judicious about what/who I spend my audio time with, so that often means being honest about which ones no longer hold my interest.

On the tech side, I sorely miss Google Podcasts for letting me listen on the web. I typically use Podchaser for that now but it’s unreliable.

My Current Lineup

Regular Listens

  • Armchair Expert
  • The Big Picture
  • Filmspotting
  • Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
  • The Town with Matthew Belloni

Depends on the Subject/Guest

  • The Rewatchables
  • Good Hang
  • Blank Check
  • Plain English
  • The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast
  • Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know
  • The Ezra Klein Show

August 26, 2026 Add Comment

Reading with your feet on the ground

Mandy Brown on reading and the limits of empathy:

To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means that you are there when you are reading; you, the reader, with your feet on the ground, a ground on which racism, misogyny, and extreme poverty are not so easily dispatched. You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt. To use reading to step into someone else’s shoes is to leave yourself behind.

August 10, 2026 Add Comment

Why should I change?

From the Wired story More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’:

Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.

The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.

Every time I hear about people changing themselves to appease the new AI paradigm, I think of Michael Bolton’s response in Office Space when asked why he didn’t change his name to avoid being confused for the singer:

I don’t even think these writers are wrong for doing this. Three cheers for linguistic innovation! (An exception: pretentiously writing all in lowercase like Sam Altman, of all people.) I just resent being backed into it by LLMs that hoover up real people’s writing—without compensation or copyright considerations, mind you—and regurgitate it back to us non-robots well enough to make us think we’re now stealing from it.

Oops, I used em dashes. Am I a chatbot??

August 3, 2026 Add Comment

On Glen Hansard, grace, and goodbyes

Glen Hansard died. I’ve been listening to and writing about him and his music for damn near 20 years, so this is a gut punch.

A few years ago I wrote an essay for Cinema Sugar about how seeing Once in the theater in 2007 completely changed how I viewed movie musicals, and much more. It’s hard to convey how electrifying it was to see “Falling Slowly” or “When Your Mind’s Made Up” unfold before me for the first time, and how vital all of Glen’s music has remained for me ever since.

Let this excerpt from the essay serve as my eulogy for a legendary artist gone far too soon:

Once, directed by John Carney, is fairly easy to describe. An Irish busker (Glen Hansard) meets a young woman (Markéta Irglová) on the streets of Dublin and they grow close as they play music together, discuss their bruised loves, and inspire each other as they enter new phases of life.

But such a tidy description belies the miles-deep emotional undercurrent that runs beneath this story and propels the main characters—who remain unnamed and are credited as Guy and Girl—first toward each other and ultimately onto their individual fates.

Probably because the film’s core of Carney, Hansard, and Irglová are real musicians, they capture both the tedium and thrill of creating meaningful music—and, by extension, art—better than almost anything I’ve seen.

They do so by paying close attention to moments in the songwriting process that are small but significant: assembling snatches of melody, hearing someone add harmony to your song for the first time, finding replacement Discman batteries so you can finish your lyrics, and nailing a song on the first take.

These little euphorias add up. With what Guy and Girl accumulate together, they give each other gifts they couldn’t have imagined before meeting: she helps him record his songs and find the confidence to move forward, while he reignites her passion for playing.

It was goodbye in the best way, with grace and gratitude for what they meant to each other.

What I took with me after seeing Once for the first time was how people can come into each other’s lives, knowing their time together will end, yet still choose to make something wonderful with the moments they have.

That’s what music can do, and what art can do, and what grace can do if we let it. That’s what Glen Hansard’s music did for me.

Rest in peace, Glen. You sang your melody, and you can rest assured knowing we’ll keep singing along.

July 29, 2026 Add Comment

Critters of the moment

An occasional series

A freshly molting cicada:

A night heron:

A fox in our backyard:

A yellowjacket stuck between our window and the screen:

A great egret:

A snapping turtle spotted in the section of a creek under a road underpass (the lines are reflections of the ceiling):

A Photinus pyralis, i.e. a good ol’ lightning bug:

July 28, 2026 Add Comment

Recent Views

More photography here.

Proud of capturing the 3 year old midair right before splashdown:

Windshield bubbles:

Our frontyard lilac in full bloom sandwiching our backyard redbud:

Books on books on books at the library:

Raindrops just hit different in the morning:

Ahhh, ahhhhhh:

Caught this airplane lifting off mid-cloud during my 7 year old’s soccer practice:

Angles and elements of an underpass:

July 9, 2026 Add Comment

Hot new laptop features

I’m obsessed with this “laptop” our 7 year old made:

I asked him what the different features were. Check out these specs:

  • Ghost button unleashes a ghost from the laptop
  • Crossed-out ghosts buttons bring ghosts back in
  • DO NOT PUSH button activates his laser hand (i.e. an empty cup from a local ice cream shop that turned into a laser hand during a playdate with his friends)
  • Green drips are slime
  • Brown thing is rope
  • Colored buttons when pressed in different orders activate different powers

He just whipped this together on a whim while listening to a Yoto. Kids, man. Time, space, and materials for the win.

July 1, 2026 1 Comment

Myself on Shelf Source

Zachary Kai runs a series on his site called Shelf Source featuring “readers who share books they love on their sites.” He reached out about me completing the questionnaire, and as I am all too eager to talking about books and reading I was happy to obliged.

Check it out here to learn which book changed how I think about the internet, which book I’ve recommended the most, and more.

June 19, 2026 1 Comment

‘National Treasure’ is a national treasure

I don’t believe in the concept of guilty pleasures (just watch and read what you want!). But if I did, the beautifully bonkers 2004 history-nerd film National Treasure would top my list.

Read my America Month piece at Cinema Sugar celebrating all the reasons why the Nic Cage-est of Nic Cage movies still endures, if only in my heart.

June 16, 2026 2 Comments

Lovin’ Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’

Just published a new essay at Cinema Sugar as part of America Month called Lincoln is the Better Angel of Biopics. It’s a celebration of Spielberg’s masterpiece as both a biopic—a genre I’m generally suspicious of—and a portrait of the man beneath the myth at a crucial juncture in history.

Regular readers of this blog will understand how much of a bullseye this topic is for me as a cinephile and history lover. I wrote about visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in Springfield, Illinois, all the way back in 2008, which is when I also read the Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals the movie is based on. For that reason this essay is nearly two decades in the making, which probably explains why I was able to write it so quickly compared to previous ones.

So I beseech you to read the essay and also check out Cinema Sugar’s list of the Top 76 Movies That Define America that will be rolling out throughout the month leading up to the Fourth of July. I was born for this theme, so look out for even more star-spangled cinematic goodies coming soon!

June 5, 2026 Add Comment

We Went Wild Kratts

Last weekend we went to Wild Kratts Live! on stage in Madison. It’s basically an extended, supercharged episode of the show, with Chris and Martin Kratt in various animal costumes and doing silly antics while teaching about creature powers along the way. It was a thrill to be in a large amphitheater packed with kids and grownups who love their work as much as we do, singing along to the theme song and interacting during the show as if it were The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

As for the brothers themselves, we were a little starstruck to see them in person considering they’re in the PBS Host Pantheon along with Fred Rogers, Bob Ross, and Julia Child. Their pure enthusiasm for animals and nature is infectious and honestly inspiring. At their age they most likely wouldn’t be hoofing it on stage in giant animal costumes for an hour and a half in a national tour if they didn’t totally love what they do.

Their enduring power was evident in the huge cheer at the end of the show when they announced 20 new episodes were coming, including one on the family-favorite axolotl. You know we’ll be watching!

June 2, 2026 Add Comment

Links of the moment

An ongoing series

Several of my interests in one: Steven Spielberg on The Rewatchables talking 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Wikipedia as a Windows XP desktop.

Shoutout to the Night Witches, (unfortunately) not an awesome band but an all-female Soviet bomber regiment who attacked the Nazis during World War II.

May 31, 2026 Add Comment

Media of the moment

An ongoing series

This Is A Gardening Show. Heard about this new Zach Galifianakis limited series on Netflix from friends, and it’s a delight. Funny, informative, family- friendly. Great hang.

Project Hail Mary. Saw this with some dad friends, which felt appropriate since it’s both very dad-coded but also widely appealing as its box office shows. Deliberately did not read the book because I knew the movie was coming. (One of my controversial opinions apparently.)

Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema. I read this new movie memoir from film critic Jeffrey Overstreet in advance of interviewing him for Cinema Sugar. Extremely up my alley and a pleasure to read.

Late Shift. Reviewed and really dug this new Swiss-German film for Cinema Sugar. Like if The Pitt had a wearier, no-nonsense European cousin.

KPop Demon Hunters. Very late to this mega-phenomenon, but now I’m in. The “How It’s Done” opening was one of the most electrifying movie sequences last year.

A Wizard of Earthsea. Wanted to read a short fantasy novel and this Ursula Le Guin book hit the spot. Just really liked living in this world and her writing.

May 11, 2026 1 Comment

Color commentary

I was at the library last weekend with my two boys and we were playing a board game with pieces of all different colors. My 7 year old son picked a purple piece, and another boy who was a little older than him and at the same table as us said, “Why did you pick purple? That’s a girl color.”

This has happened many times over the years, coming from boys and girls. And every time it happens, including this time, I told him, “There’s no such thing as boy or girl colors. All colors are for everyone.” I also said purple was one of my favorite colors, which is true because purple is an incredible color.

Parents: please make it extremely clear to your kids, both boys and girls, that all colors are for all people. There are no boy colors or girl colors. There used to be, but that time is gone.

Color is one of the most incredible phenomena in existence. It is extremely dumb and self-defeating to segregate specific colors by gender when there are literally millions of variations of colors detectable by human eyes and available for our enjoyment.

May 7, 2026 Add Comment