Month: April 2023
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Au Revoir to Aaron Rodgers
With Aaron Rodgers now officially traded to the Jets, I felt compelled to commemorate the end of his era in Green Bay—something I did for his predecessor. It feels impossible to fully honor Rodgers’ on-the-field legacy given his endless highlights and memorable moments over the last 15 years. But I’m with Mike Spofford at Packers.com,…
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On the passage of bathtime
There’s a quote I discovered floating around Instagram Reels that people use as narration for clips of their little kids: You have little kids for four years. And if you miss it, it’s done. That’s it. So, you gotta know that. Lots of things in life you don’t get to do more than once. That…
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The Church of ‘Bull Durham’
Really enjoyed reading Ron Shelton’s The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham, which I followed up with a rewatch of Bull Durham. He has such a wry, matter-of-fact style and perspective on his careers, most notably minor-league baseball player and movie writer-director. Some quotes… On being an athlete with intellectual curiosities: Around this…
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Lifeblood of reading
Alan Jacobs gets to the crux of the ongoing Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, which pits publishers against libraries in the quest to determine who has the right to distribute digital books: Whatever forces are arrayed against libraries are also arrayed against readers. But publishing conglomerates don’t care about readers; they only care about customers.…
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Holy book bans
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m against book bans of all kinds. They’re the literary version of the Streisand Effect, not to mention small-minded and fascistic. And yet, I also can’t get enough of people petitioning to ban the Bible based on the same criteria used for other books, most recently in Utah for example. It’s both A+…
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On the aesthetic mindset
I enjoyed the recent Armchair Expert conversation with Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross—the authors of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us—about how the arts affect our brains and well being. At one point they talk about having an aesthetic mindset, which isn’t some kind of highfalutin theory but instead just the concept…