Chad Comello

Tag: books

  • 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 I thought to check if I could borrow it through interlibrary loan, and sure enough I could. (Libraries to the rescue, baby. As always.) The only catch was I had to read it at the library instead of bringing it home, presumably to prevent a pricy book from disappearing. Which was fine: I just brought my six year old along and he perused his favorite graphic novels while I dove into this wonderful work of art, history, and typewriter glory.

    Fancy photos courtesy of the Shift Happens website.

    It’s hard to overstate just how beautiful the book is, both as an object and how the content is laid out. Everything is thoughtfully designed, all the way down to the footnote symbols:

    The book’s two volumes focus on the two major epochs in keyboard history: the origins and development of typewriters, and the keyboard’s advancement into computers and smartphones. (There’s also a bonus making-of booklet wherein Winchary goes into greater detail about the project’s conception and implementation.) Along the way there’s some really great writing on the burgeoning business of typewriters in the late 19th century, the QWERTY vs. Dvorak drama, and other delightful details die-hard typists will dig.

    I appreciated this bit of context-setting on Christopher Latham Sholes, one of the inventors of the typewriter:

    Sholes worked in a relative vacuum of technology. There were no tall buildings, and the few business offices that existed were coarse. Weller described them as having “rough, bare floors, box wood stoves, sawdust cuspidors and Windsor chairs and smoke-blackened walls.” The most complex object in most people’s homes was a manual sewing machine. The main source of entertainment at home was typically a piano; home radios were still half a century away, with television to follow twenty-five years after them. The telegraph allowed the flow of Morse code across continents, having crossed the Atlantic a few years earlier. But the first successful test of a telephone was nine years away, the Edison lightbulb another twelve, and electrification of cities and factories decades ahead.

    There’s also this passage from the chapter on touch typing about the equivalent terms for “hunt and peck” in different countries, which, as a hunt-and-peck typist myself, I found delightful and even inspiring:

    The Dutch call it “poking.” In Portuguese, it’s “key-per-key typing.” Germans have the most complicated word, of course: Adlersuchsystem, which translates as “an eagle search system,” imagining an eagle circling above the keys, striking from up high once in a while. In Hebrew it’s not uncommon to refer to casual typing as “doctor’s typing,” and in Slovak as “the police method,” singling out the professions apparently unable to learn touch typing. In Colombia, touch typing comes with a beautiful term, mecanografia, which for simple typing mutates into the colloquial chuzografia: “poke-o-graphy.” Some languages recognize even non-touch-typing technique as something to admire. Brazil’s catar milho can be translated as “collecting corn.” The Swedish call it pekfingervalsen – or, the index finger waltz. And then there’s the Japanese 雨だれタイピング、which means “raindrop typing.”

    (See the rest of my notes and quotes.)

    I doff my cap to Winchary’s dedication and care for every aspect of this endeavor, and am simply grateful for its existence. Consult WorldCat and your local library to see if it’s nearby or could be delivered to you. It’s definitely worth the postage.

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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 in a theater, and I’m glad I did. We were in whatever you call this thing together.

    A Little Prayer. The kind of movie that inspires you to listen more intently to the birds singing outside your window in the morning, or linger longer at a park bench. ‘Twas a pleasure chatting with the writer/director Angus MacLachlan about this movie, Jane Levy’s knockout performance, and more.

    Lost in the Stream: How Algorithms Redefined the Way Movies Are Made and Watched by Jeff Rauseo. Wrote a review of this over at Cinema Sugar.

    The Assessment. It’s been a minute since a movie gave me as many belly laughs of recognition as chills up my spine like this one did. 

    Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell’s acquired a bit of a divisive reputation, but he remains a great writer with unique and insightful perspectives. Not to mention a great podcast guest.

    Eephus. Gonna be a great autumnal rewatch. 

    Sinners. This has several A+, capital-C Cinema sequences that had me thinking “Here we go, hell yeah.” It also had a lot of stitching around them that perhaps a rewatch will feel more seamless but on the first go seemed to stick out a little. Overall though, an absolute pleasure to see an original film by an amazing auteur and inspired creative team.

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  • Media of the moment

    An ongoing series

    Black Bag. Felt great to see an honest-to-god movie in the theater with a delightfully twisty plot and inspired casting that made me feel as warm and fuzzy as the film’s lighting. Wouldn’t be surprised to find this on my best-of-2025 list. 

    The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson. Turns out there was a lot of drama leading up to the Civil War…

    Lincoln. Rewatched this after finishing The Demon of Unrest as a kind of Civil War bookend. Daniel Day-Lewis’s win for Best Actor might be the most deserving Oscar ever awarded.

    The Pitt. Been watching this Max series that’s an unofficial ER reboot and my hat is off to anyone who chooses to become and remain an emergency nurse.

    A Complete Unknown. I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool Dylan fan like many white dudes around my age and above, so perhaps that’s why I didn’t fall for this as hard as others, Chalamet’s excellent performance aside.

    Parasite. Yes this is dramatic and tragic and twisted and all that, but it’s also so damn funny. “Leave it—free fumigation.” 💀💀💀

    Mary Poppins Returns. No one can touch Julie Andrews’ singing voice, but Emily Blunt really nails the other Poppins vibes.

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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 saved a couple passages that I enjoyed for various reasons. Here’s one featuring General Winfield Scott, who was in charge of defending D.C. and the Capitol building during the contested electoral count process in February 1861:

    The throng outside grew annoyed at being barred from entry and began firing off obscenities like grapeshot. If words could kill, one observer wrote, “the amount of profanity launched forth against the guards would have completely annihilated them.” Much of this tirade was aimed at General Scott. It had no effect. He vowed that anyone who obstructed the count would be “lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of the window of the Capitol.” Scott would then “manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body.”

    Love that FAFO energy from Scott. There was also this bit about President Buchanan’s Secretary of War John Floyd:

    By now the war secretary had become a deeply controversial figure and an embarrassment to President Buchanan, which was saying something, since the administration itself was widely considered to be an embarrassment. Floyd was deemed by many to be a paragon of corruption, and a traitor to boot.

    He had become embroiled in a financial scandal dating to 1858 that resulted in $870,000 in federal funds—equivalent to over thirty-two million in twenty-first-century dollars—being looted from the U.S. Treasury and the Department of Interior.

    An embarrassing, corrupt administration with a controversial cabinet member looting federal funds? History doesn’t repeat itself at all…

    And this exchange between General Beauregard and Major Whiting, who was scrambling to prepare the Confederate contingent surrounding Fort Sumter:

    The island’s batteries had been ordered to be “in readiness,” Whiting wrote, but all he saw was confusion. “We are ready, perhaps, to open fire, but we are not ready to support it,” he told Beauregard on Thursday, April 11. “For God’s sake have this post inspected by yourself, or some one else competent, before you open fire. I am alone here, as you know, and heretofore have been exclusively occupied with the construction of batteries.” One newly arrived contingent of men was “helter-skelter,” he complained; all were volunteers. “There are no regulars here at all.” Beauregard tried to calm him. “Things always appear worst at first sight when not perfect,” he wrote. “We cannot delay now.”

    Some mindful leadership from Beauregard right there. Too bad he was a traitor!

    Also wanted to shoutout this quote from Captain Abner Doubleday, who was part of the Union garrison defending Fort Sumter:

    Doubleday led the first group to the guns in the casemates that faced the Iron Battery at Cummings Point on Morris Island, due south. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach,” he wrote, “for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking.” As Doubleday saw it, he was fighting for the survival of the United States. “The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery.”

    Kudos to Doubleday for not obeying in advance.

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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 lot of people in different ways and different places almost all at once.

    I was about to turn 14 at the time. I saw the footage like everyone else and understood it to be a significant event, but I couldn’t have known all the details of the day that the book brings to life all these decades later.

    For that reason I’m very grateful to Graff for this monumental work of oral history, which captures the kaleidoscopic nature of the crisis by weaving testimonies from the myriad people affected by the attacks, including:

    • people in the World Trade Center and Pentagon who managed to evacuate after the planes crashed (and even some who somehow survived the subsequent collapses)
    • firefighters and first responders at Ground Zero
    • people desperately waiting to find out whether their loved ones had survived
    • transcripts of calls and voicemails from passengers of the hijacked planes
    • air traffic controllers managing the unprecedented grounding of all aircraft across the United States
    • fighter pilots ordered to intercept Flight 93 and take it down by any means necessary, including crashing into it midair
    • Dick Cheney and White House staffers managing the crisis from an underground bunker
    • Congressional representatives and staffers scrambling away from the Capitol with reports of more hijacked airplanes on the way
    • Staffers with President Bush in Florida when they got news of the attacks, then on Air Force One as they flew between military bases before heading back to D.C.

    One recurring motif that really stuck out to me was how often life or death came down to sheer luck, both good and bad.

    One man had to leave his desk high up in the World Trade Center to retrieve a guest in the lobby, which allowed him to escape after the crash and avoid certain death. Another woman was standing at the copier instead of her desk when a plane struck and thus survived when all her other office mates nearby perished. And one firefighter fleeing one of the collapsing Twin Towers alongside a colleague turned one way and lived, while his colleague turned the other way and didn’t.

    Call it luck or something else—we’re all a split-second away from death, often without knowing it. The Only Plane in the Sky honors those who were unlucky that day, and serves as a sobering reminder for the rest of us about the fragility of life and the extraordinary bravery of ordinary people.

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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 replicas of antique guns for wealthy buyers, is wracked with guilt and resentment after his sister and her kids were murdered by Japan’s secret police while he was being interrogated due to his girlfriend Juliana’s connection with the underground resistance. In distress, he goes to the home of a man named Mark, his sister’s former boss and a fellow closeted Jew who practices in secret with his kids despite Judaism being outlawed.

    Mark asks Frank if he’d be OK with them doing a prayer for his sister and her kids. “Losing people is one thing,” Mark says. “Not being allowed to grieve for them, well, that’s another.” He then performs the kaddish, a Jewish mourner’s prayer for the dead, which is intercut with scenes of Juliana’s covert resistance work. In a ramshackle, candlelit apartment, hearing words he doesn’t understand but feels deep in his bones, Frank is finally able mourn his immense loss.

    The other moment happens in the following episode (“Truth”), when Frank asks Mark why he chose to have kids despite the danger of being Jewish and continues to risk their lives practicing their faith. Their exchange:

    MARK: I don’t plan on dying, Frank. But you can’t live your life in fear. I was back east at the end of the war, in Boston. You had to see it to believe it. Overnight, lynch mobs were murdering Jews because suddenly we were less than human. Those of us who came out in one piece, we buried service weapons underground, well-wrapped in oil, and we vowed revenge. I got a life to lead, got kids to raise. And Hitler and the Nazis—I don’t care how it looks, they won’t last. One thing I realized about my people is we got a different sense of time. These may be dark years, but we’ll survive. We always do. You’ve just got to find something to hold on to.

    FRANK: Faith, you mean.

    MARK: Yeah, faith.

    FRANK: I don’t have any of that.

    MARK: Well, what about art? You’re supposed to be an artist. Why are you making fake guns?

    FRANK: Because no one wants to buy my art.

    MARK: So do it for yourself. Beauty is important, Frank. It gives us hope.

    FRANK: I don’t know. I don’t know where it would get me.

    MARK: Yeah. Right. You don’t need anybody to keep you down because you got your own little inner fascist right there telling you what you can and cannot do. That’s how you let them win.

    I wrote about The Man in the High Castle more generally after it debuted. Though I stopped watching after two seasons, these and other moments stuck with me ever since and resurfaced in my mind recently when I read Eliot Stein’s new book Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive. It’s a travelogue that spotlights artisans and specialists all over the world who have continued practicing their often incredibly arduous crafts, often with great sacrifice, even as modern life has rendered them obsolete.

    From the world’s last nightwatchman in Sweden to an Incan rope bridge master in Peru to a rare pasta maker in Sardinia to the makers of first-surface mirrors in India, these dedicated folks have upheld traditions passed down often within a single family for centuries or even longer. How? And why? According to Paola Abraini, the Sardinian grand master of su filindeu pasta:

    It’s a matter of principle, of tradition. What I have always said is that as a custodian of this tradition that has been passed down from mother to daughter, I will respect that. My daughters know how much of an undertaking this is for me, but they know how much I love it, so as long as the good Lord gives me health and life, I will continue to make it. I remain hopeful that one of them will one day take it on, but if they can’t, then I will be sad. So many things in this world that once were no longer are.

    Stein writes that Abraini’s parting message “felt like a prophecy, a pressing reminder to cherish the beautiful, gentle customs that make the world glimmer while warning us not to blink.”

    Guardians in the darkness

    Perhaps you can see why learning about these remarkable people brought to mind Mark in The Man in the High Castle, who continued the practices he considered meaningful despite the societal forces allayed against him. He continued to cherish the customs that made his world glimmer and lived out his assertion that beauty is important. Though the traditions documented in the book aren’t outlawed like Judaism in The Man in the High Castle, they require the same dedication to uphold—to hold fast against the entropy of modernity and relentless advance of technology that would try to make them disappear.

    The book also helped me reckon with what being a custodian means, which is much more meaningful than my reductive view of it as something akin to a school janitor. Knowing the word custodian comes from the Latin for guardian gives it the weight and nobility it deserves. And here’s the thing: custodians of all kinds keep the world going. Where would we be—what would we be—without the people who handcraft pasta, take out the garbage, clean up messes, build vital bridges, and routinely perform so many more acts of preservation and maintenance and care?

    We are all custodians of something or someone, whether in our families, communities, or just our own minds. We must not let the fascists in our government or our inner voice dictate what’s important. Or make us forget that art matters, and that there’s good in this world that’s worth fighting for. (Cue Samwise Gamgee’s speech in Osgiliath.)

    Tend to your garden. Make your art. Do not obey in advance. Find something to hold on to and be its custodian in the darkness.

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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 post, I opted to just put them all on one page called Book Notes.

    It’s a beast of a page, representing 130+ books and ranging from only a few bullets per book to dozens. But being text-only means it’s pretty lightweight, and I added a Table of Contents and jump links to make navigating it a little easier.

    I’ve found the funnest way to experience it is by searching for keywords to see where they pop up in different contexts: try “trees” or “truth” or “books” and see where they lead you. Or just scroll at whim and enjoy the ride through my scattered yet very satisfying survey through the books that have nourished my mind and soul throughout my adult life.

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  • Favorite Books of 2024

    It would be more accurate to title this post merely “Books I Read in 2024” because man oh man did I slack on reading this year. Long gone is my 80+ per year pace (pre-kids, crucially), replaced by not even hitting double digits. There are various reasons for this, but suffice it to say I hope to significantly raise that number in 2025.

    Here’s what I did read and enjoy in 2024:

    • BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman
    • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage
    • Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow
    • Creating Back to the Future The Musical by Michael Klastorin
    • Fear Not!: A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies by Josh Larsen
    • The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson
    • Long Island by Colm Tóibín
    • The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
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  • My sons’ media of the moment

    A spinoff of an ongoing series

    Yotos and Tonies. All day every day. Seriously great screen-free stories, learning, and music for the 5 year old, and something to hold and play with for the 18 month old. Great holiday gifts too for the parents/kids in your life.

    Card games. The 5 year old has gotten big into Uno and enjoyed learning others like Old Maid and Slapjack. It’s been fun to watch his strategy evolve to the point where I don’t even have to consider letting him win since he wins plenty on his own.

    Board games. While at the library a while back with the 5 year old, on a lark we sat down at their public chess board and I started teaching him the basics. He was hooked, so we got our own teaching set for home. Strategic thinking for chess has taken longer to develop but he’ll get there.

    Books. The 18 month old’s current favorites: The Shape of Me and Other Stuff by Dr. Seuss, Find the Duck by Stephen Cartwright, Moimoi—Look At Me! by Jun Ichihara, and more. The 5 year old’s current favorites: the InvestiGators comics series, Pokémon character books, and a variety of library picture books.

    The Wild Kratts theme song. Obviously we still watch the show itself often, since it’s usually the 5 year old’s pick for his limited screentime. But for some reason the 18 month old really loves the theme song, so when he gets upset while in the car (which is often), we’ll play a YouTube video that plays the song over and over again. Shoutout to whomever made that video!

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  • A giddy mass of waltzing things

    A quote about the earth from Orbital by Samantha Harvey:

    It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways—in rotation on its axis, at a tilt on its axis, and around the sun. This planet that’s been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines—the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.

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  • Media of the moment

    An ongoing series

    Midnight Mass. Loved this Netflix limited series for the same reason I love Darren Aronofsky’s Noah: it takes literally all the Bible’s very goth elements (“drink my blood”, the terror of angels, etc.) and transposes it into a deeply human modern story.

    Didi. This coming-of-age story set in 2008 featuring a teenager only a few years younger than I was at the time, so you know the use of AIM and Motion City Soundtrack songs were a bullseye for me.

    Nosferatu. Been knocking off a lot of classic horror blindspots and this 1922 F.W. Murnau silent version definitely qualifies. One favorite intertitle: “The Death Ship has a new captain.” 🤘

    Challengers. Just your typical sports movie featuring a throuple of sweaty, smirking scumbags swirling into a sadomasochistic, psychosexual spiral.

    Fear Not!: A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies by Josh Larsen. Strongly respect Josh’s perspective as a critic and Filmspotting host, so amidst my recent foray into horror movies I thought this short book was a helpful primer on the redemptive aspects of the genre.

    The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. Appreciated some historical bits in this but also skimmed over a bunch. Will it inspire me to get back into paper journaling? TBD.

    Night of the Living Dead. Some wild swings between “this looks like a terrible student film” and “holy schnikes”. I knew nothing of it besides being considered the godfather of zombie movies, so all the social commentary and 1968 of it all really hit.

    The Thing. My first John Carpenter movie and it was, uh, rather horrifying.

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  • My favorite picture books

    I’ve encountered a lot of board books and picture books in my nearly six years of parenting. Many of them are bad, with either poor writing or an off-putting illustration style or both. But several of them hit that sweet spot of beautiful design and quality storytelling. Here are some of those:

    • Counting with Barefoot Critters by Teagan White
    • Jazz for Lunch by Jarrett Dapier
    • How Beautiful by Antonella Capetti
    • The trilogy of Creepy Carrots, Creepy Pair of Underwear, and Creepy Crayon by Aaron Reynolds
    • Up the Mountain Path by Marianne Dubuc
    • The Book with No Pictures by BJ Novak
    • The Rock From The Sky by Jon Klassen
    • This Moose Belongs to Me by Oliver Jeffers
    • Spider in the Well by Jess Hannigan
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  • A BoyDad reads ‘BoyMom’

    I recently read BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman, a journalist and mom of three boys who wrestles with her own fears, frustrations, and biases as an avowed feminist raising boys in a world with conflicting views of modern masculinity.

    As the father of two young boys myself, I found the book deeply relatable, validating, challenging, and illuminating. It facilitated a lot of great discussions with my wife as we try to envision a better, more wholehearted life for our wild and wonderful boys.

    Here are some random thoughts and takeaways.

    The ‘buddy’ system

    Whippman shares an anecdote of her preschooler’s male teacher welcoming students into the classroom, greeting the girls with nicknames like “sweetheart” but the boys with “buddy.” It’s such a small thing, but it’s an example of how language can create emotional distance with boys compared to girls from a very early age, and set an expectation for which terms of endearment are acceptable for each gender.

    After reading that, I realized I too call our 5 year old “buddy” (and our 1 year old “mister”) almost unconsciously. So I’ve resolved to start training myself to use different nicknames that aren’t gendered (Bun and Muffin) so that they know they’re much more than my buddies.

    Breaking the wheel

    A key point Whippman makes is that the movement to counteract “toxic” masculinity with more positive alternatives like “healthy” or “aspirational” masculinity is, though well-intentioned, a kind of half-measure that still perpetuates the expectation of fulfilling prescribed masculine ideals. Instead:

    Boys don’t need more masculinity, but freedom from that paradigm; they need permission to be fully human without the pressure to conform to oppressive masculine norms.

    This idea reminded me of the Daenerys Targaryen line in Game of Thrones: “I’m not going to stop the wheel—I’m going to break the wheel.”

    Stopping the wheel isn’t enough, because it can always be restarted or rebranded using the same structure. We need to break it altogether and offer alternate modes of transportation, so to speak.

    Too much of a good thing 

    There’s a book called Too Much of a Good Thing: How Four Key Survival Traits Are Now Killing Us by Lee Goodman, and it lays out why some of humanity’s behaviors and biological functions helped us thrive as hunter-gatherers but are detrimental for the sedentary office workers we’ve become:

    • Overeating was good when every calorie mattered, but now causes obesity.
    • Preferring salty foods helped retain water, but now causes high blood pressure and heart disease.
    • Blood-clotting saved us from bleeding to death from injuries, but now can cause heart attacks and strokes.
    • Hyper-vigilance and aggression saved us from predators and enemies, but now make us destructive to others and ourselves. 

    I think about gender in a similar way. Whatever combination of nature and nurture that modern masculinity and femininity entail, they contain evolutionary adaptations developed over tens of thousands of years. That’s not something you can fundamentally alter or remove overnight. (As E.O. Wilson wrote: “The real problem of humanity is we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.”)

    What are the good and useful elements of masculinity that helped us survive and evolve as a species? Which of those elements can still be used for good today? And which are now too much and have become detrimental—to both men and women? How we answer those questions will determine what masculinity will look like for current and future generations.

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  • Life’s too short to read books you don’t like

    Back in June, I took an early morning walk with my 1 year old and had the sudden inspiration to whip up an Instagram Reel on a topic I care deeply about: telling people that it’s OK to stop reading books you don’t like:

    This might sound familiar because I’ve done a similar one before. But in this new one I called upon my authority as a librarian to issue absolutions to struggling readers:

    • You’re not being graded.
    • No one cares if you don’t finish a book.
    • The author isn’t going to find out.

    Apparently this message resonates, because in the last few days the reel has jumped to (as of this writing) 16k views, over 1k likes, and 350 shares—all by far the biggest responses I’ve ever gotten on a social post. The shares metric is most rewarding to me, because it shows how many people felt compelled to forward it to others through DMs or Stories.

    Back in my bookfluencer era, baby!

    [8/27/24 update: 417k views, 25.5k likes, and 8.3k shares. Wowza!]

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  • Media of the moment

    An ongoing series

    The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson. Another brilliant narrative nonfiction saga from Steven Johnson that weaves multiple historical threads together to tell the riveting story of how dynamite, fingerprinting, anarchism, information science and other seemingly disparate forces all conspired to create what would become the modern surveillance state.

    BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman. Highly recommend this new book for my fellow parents of boys especially, but also anyone interested and invested in a more wholehearted masculinity.

    The Bear season 3. Carmy needs to chill out and call Claire.

    Civil War. Alex Garland’s latest and rather (unfortunately) timely dystopian drama shows what would happen if Ron Swanson from Parks & Recreation became president instead of Leslie Knope.

    Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. I’d have to do some research on this, but I suspect the five-act structure of this saga could align rather nicely with the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible. Furiosa? More like Mad Moses.

    The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Might be the most ’70s New York City movie ever?

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  • Don’t have a reading goal

    If you want to enjoy reading, don’t have a reading goal.

    If you want to read more books by female authors or explore a new genre or something like that, go for it. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Once you say “I want to read X number of books this year,” whatever that number is, you’ve turned what should be an enjoyable, enriching experience into work.

    Just read what you like and read often—that’s all.

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  • Trust the turning of pages

    Austin Kleon on a recent episode of the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast:

    I truly believe that with a book, on a sentence to sentence level, I trust the turning of pages. There needs to be a momentum. If you’re turning pages, the book is good, and that includes the trash reading. I do my fair share of it. But I really trust the turning of the pages.

    This is a beautiful phrase and important if counterintuitive concept. He was talking specifically about how quitting more books actually helps you read more because you’re much more likely to finish a book you actually like.

    Certain kinds of reading are naturally more arduous than others, as this lover of presidential biographies can attest. But that’s the thing—I actually enjoy reading those weighty tomes, so even the arduous elements are still worth the effort and usually don’t stop me from keeping those pages turning.

    So many people have this misbegotten belief that even reading for pleasure has to be hard work to be worthwhile. It’s often a vestige of schooling, where you’re assigned books and forced to read and write about them regardless of how much you like them. There’s a different kind of value in that exercise, but when we’re talking about reading for fun outside of educational or professional obligations there’s just no excuse for it.

    See also: stop reading books you don’t like.

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  • Scientific achievements that deserve their own ‘Oppenheimer’

    I half-joked in my Oppenheimer blurb that I have a long list of history books that also deserve to be turned into IMAX-worthy epics.

    Well, I’m happy to report my favorite author Steven Johnson is also on board with this movement—specifically for the story of penicillin and other incredible scientific achievements:

    If Nolan can create an IMAX blockbuster out of quantum mechanics and Atomic Energy Commission hearings, surely someone could make a compelling film out of this material. There’s even a crazy subplot—that I also wrote about in Extra Life—where Hitler’s life is saved by American penicillin after the 1944 Wolf’s Lair assassination attempt. And yet, for some reason, those films just don’t seem to get made. 

    We get endless entertainment offerings about the Apollo missions, but nothing about the global triumph of eradicating smallpox. We get big-budget features following brilliant scientists as they figure out ever-more-effective means of conducting mass slaughter, and not films about brilliant scientists collaborating to keep soldiers and civilians from dying horrifying deaths from sepsis and other infections. Apparently, we like rockets and bombs more than pills and needles—or at least that’s what we’re told we like. 

    Johnson’s books are great examples of nonfiction page-turners that could easily be movie material, from the pirates of Enemy of All Mankind to the epidemiological murder mystery at the center of The Ghost Map. Not to mention any number of the threads within Extra Life or How We Got to Now that show the unlikely and riveting origins of miraculous innovations we now take for granted.

    There’s also the books in my Technically First series, several presidential biographies, a multitude of microhistories… all surefire $1 billion blockbusters in waiting if you ask me.

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