Author: Chad
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The Demon of Unrest
I just finished reading Erik Larson’s latest book The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. It’s about the military and diplomatic machinations surrounding the Fort Sumter crisis, including South Carolina’s role in fomenting secession and Lincoln’s journey to Washington D.C. and the presidency. I…
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My kid did Paint that
While working from home the other day I had my work laptop out at the dining table with my six year old nearby. Since I’m usually hidden away in my home office, this quickly piqued his curiosity. I let him type out a short email I had to send, then opened up Paint and showed…
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Blogging now and then
CJ Chilvers: According to research by Neil Patel, 59.2% of traffic to blogs is driven by SEO. It’s the biggest single driver of traffic by far. Neil found that if your site is 10 or more years old, 44% percentage of the pages on your site could be considered “irrelevant” by search engines. The more irrelevant…
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The Only Plane in the Sky
I can’t remember where I saw the recommendation, but I decided to try The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff and found it a riveting read. Heavy, of course, but also very illuminating about how quickly and widely the September 11 attacks rippled beyond downtown Manhattan, affecting a…
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The seven year etch, or why am I paper resistant?
In what amounts to a positively glacial pace, I finally managed to fill up the small pocket Moleskine notebook I’ve been carrying around for seven years: It was given to me by my friend Jason, an artist who founded Geocommunetrics and gave it this unique cover design: It was tucked in my backpack for most…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series This Lonely Island musical medley is a thing of deranged beauty. Another winner from Beautiful Public Data: Cold War military slides. Didn’t realize the “junk journaling” I do was a thing. A gorgeous longread on the “hardest working font in Manhattan.”
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This was my washing machine
Part of the This Is My series. This week we said goodbye to our washing machine, which according to its serial number was manufactured nearly 35 years ago in September 1990. For context: Goodfellas had just released in theaters, Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait, and I’d just turned three years old. Time flies. Its sudden demise…
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The Birthday Bowl
Happy 6th birthday to our firstborn! We celebrated by going out to breakfast and then bringing him bowling for the first time. He got second place with a bumper-assisted 85, while I snuck into first place with a well-timed strike at 95. While it had been about a decade since I’ve played, I also have…
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Maple trees and moles
During a recent songwriting session with my five year old (i.e. in the six minutes before he got distracted by something else), he improvised these lyrics while I strummed my guitar and took notes: There’s a maple tree in the meadowAnd every winter it’s not making progress But in the spring, the tree starts growing awayAnd…
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Guarding Beauty in the Dark: On ‘Custodians of Wonder’ and ‘The Man in the High Castle’
There are two powerful moments in Amazon Prime’s alternate-history “what if Germany and Japan won World War II” show The Man in the High Castle that I think about a lot, especially in relation to current events. The first is in the sixth episode of season one (“Three Monkeys”). Frank, a laborer who also creates…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series What the next Beatles album could have looked like if they hadn’t broken up. Title design of Best Picture winners and 20th century sci-fi. Behind the scenes of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Behold the sight and sound of a meteorite strike. These videos of a landscaper mowing overgrown lawns are…
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Of or relating to
That’s one of my favorite phrases in the English language. Why? It means you’re most likely looking at the definition of a really cool adjective, and as a writer and certified word nerd I live for really cool adjectives. A quick perusal of my Cool Words list shows 13 instances of this phenomenal phrase, including:…
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Recent Views
More photography here. In early November we visited some friends on their farm in the far exterior of Chicagoland: Hat-tip to this payphone that’s just hangin’ in there: Sunset from a different farm: A song of ice and fog at our local park: The view from getting gas at Costco: The sun shone kindly upon…
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Biden his time
Continuing my tradition of doing a presidential postmortem for the outgoing commander-in-chief (see Bush and Obama and Trump), here are my brief and bumpy thoughts on the brief and bumpy Biden era:
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Take a look, it’s in the Book Notes
I’ve always enjoyed taking notes on my reading—both fiction and nonfiction—mostly to track factoids and save interesting quotes for reference. For a while those notes lived in a plain text doc, then a Google Doc, then WorkFlowy. After briefly pondering setting up a dedicated subdomain for them and turning each book’s notes into their own…
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Read the meeting minutes
If you’re looking to get more involved in your local community, there’s a quick and easy way to start doing that: read the meeting minutes. Your city’s government, library, school board, and other institutions are required by law to post their meeting agendas, minutes, and other reports online, and I’ve found that even just skimming…