Category: Posts
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Shift Happens
As a certified typewriter person, of course I’d be interested in Marcin Winchary’s magnificent book Shift Happens: A Book About Keyboards. But I didn’t think I’d actually be able to read it since it was a popular Kickstarter project that went for a cool $150 for the two-volume set before selling out. That is until…
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Head stop
We were heading out the door to meet some friends at a playground and our six year old was rarin’ to go. While my wife was still gathering things, he wanted to go outside and wait in the driveway until we were ready to depart. “It’s a head stop, papa,” he said. “Like a head…
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Media of the moment
An ongoing series The Naked Gun (2025). Cheers to a movie that knows exactly what it is and how to be that for just the right amount of time. Still giggling about random bits from this days later. Weapons. I’m typically a matinee guy but I stayed up past my bedtime to go see this…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series I think I might have found the most Chad thing on the internet: a database of the most obscure words in movies. This is hardcore but also admirable: “I deleted my second brain.” Shoutout to these guys who hated Comcast so much they built their own ISP. Can’t wait for this iceberg-based Arrival sequel. Happy 30th anniversary to…
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Introducing my new AI companion
The other day this line popped into my head: When despair for the world grows in me It’s the opening line of the Wendell Berry poem “The Peace of Wild Things”. I’m sure there were many reasons it surfaced from my subconscious (*gestures at everything*), but regardless I was grateful it did because brought to…
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Critters of the moment
In what’s becoming an accidental yearly tradition, here’s a selection of creatures big and small I’ve captured. A tree frog: A milkweed tiger moth: An oriental beetle: A zebra spider: An ovenbird just chillin’ on our front porch: A great blue heron:
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Every day is helmet day!
It always blows my mind when I see people of all ages biking around with no helmets on. Teenagers, I get it—they’re too cool for school and have undeveloped prefrontal cortexes, so they’re dumb by design. And motorcyclists without helmets? They clearly have a death wish. Good luck to them. But grownups? Especially parents riding…
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Science doesn’t teach
Derek Thompson on why science is a special kind of faith: We owe our electric age to scientists who were crazy, ignorant, or both. In his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman writes that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I used to hate this quote for its entreaty…
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Recent Views
More photography here. Life finding a way through a tennis court: Exploring the ice rink at our local sports complex: Angles at my parents’ house: Summiting the little hill at my childhood park: More angles and shadows at the library: The six year old just kickin’ a brick wall while we waited for the splash…
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I found religion in ‘Palm Springs’
Originally published at Cinema Sugar. What do you do when you encounter the impossible? Something that doesn’t compute with your understanding of reality and drastically challenges your worldview? You can ignore or deny it, confident the existing story you tell yourself can render any mystery or inconsistency meaningless to your everyday life. You can resent…
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Happy Fourth Eorlingas
That’s me at our local No Kings rally back in June. It’s the energy I’m bringing to Fourth of July this year, what with the United States government having been taken over by orcs, goblins, and all manner of Mordor-worthy villainy. May we the people soon topple their treachery and an Aragorn-esque leader one day…
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Cool is cringe
Fellow millennial Chloé Hamilton on how millennials became uncool: In recent years, millennials, the former hip young things that once seemed so cutting edge when cast side-by-side with the out-of-touch baby boomers and the rather nondescript generation X, have become, well, a bit cringe. … But, I’ll confess, being part of a generation that felt…
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Mundane is magic
Gracy Olmstead is back with another excellent issue of her Granola newsletter, this time on mundanity, the mind, and AI: While doing the mundane, we lose ourselves in process and place. The mundane roots us in the present, stubbornly refusing the demands of clock or calendar. It will take as much time as it requires.…
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What AI is and isn’t
Mandy Brown with a barnburning breakdown of what “AI” is and isn’t: “Artificial intelligence” is not a technology. A chef’s knife is a technology, as are the practices around its use in the kitchen. A tank is a technology, as are the ways a tank is deployed in war. Both can kill, but one cannot…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series Dug this history of album art. Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” sung by 331 different movies. TFW you go fishing and find a 152-year-old shipwreck.
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On lawns
Oliver Milman writing for Noema on the cult of the American lawn: “The American lawn is a thing, and it is American, deeply American,” Paul Robbins, an expert in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the book “Lawn People,” told me. “There becomes a kind of local social pressure to…
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I got a problem with ‘little kids, little problems’
Continuing my unofficial series on problematic parenting clichés, there’s one I’ve heard a few times recently and must address: “Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.” Setting the condescension aside, the idea is that all the challenging aspects of parenting babies and young children—e.g. diaper changes, loss of sleep, tantrums, potting training, keeping them…