I’ve fallen even farther behind than usual in my practice of recapping stuff on Substack. This is usually a weekend activity, but a couple of Saturdays ago we spent the day driving down to Yankee Stadium for a baseball game, which wiped out any recap blogging, and then this past weekend, I was recovering from Covid. I still am, actually, and as a result, cutting-and-pasting a bunch of links with minimal commentary is about what I’ve got brain for right now, so you get this mid-week instead of on the weekend.
Me on Substack:
— The Grad School Experience: What to expect when you head off to graduate study in a STEM field.
— Pop-Culture Archeology: White Men Can't Jump: My long-standing plot gripe with a thirty-year-old movie.
— The Fine Lines of Contemporary Art: Either burnishing or tarnishing my liberal-arts cred with some thoughts on a visit to Mass MoCA.
— Book Review: In The Shadow of Lightning by Brian McClellan: First in a new series from the Powder Mage guy.
— On College Pricing: Some thoughts in response to a Kevin Carey piece about financial aid.
— Stop Trying to Work the Refs: Either get mad about the thing or don’t, but don’t complain about how the press isn’t mad about the thing on your behalf.
—This Week in Wholesome Americana: Our trip to Yankee Stadium.
— All Covid and No Work Makes Chad Something Something: In which I became bored enough to root for people to send me work email.
— Review: The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett: A highly recommended fantasy series about our relationship to reality that manages to be grim but not despairing.
— Covid Binge-Watching Report: Brief thoughts on Outer Range and The Sandman.
Me Elsewhere:
— Celebrating Charles Todd and the overland telegraph from The Science Show on Australian Broadcast Corporation radio: I’m interviewed in the last ten-ish minutes of this very interesting program(me), talking about clocks and clock synchronization.
Links Dump:
—Jesus’ empty tomb and The matron of Ephesus from Kiwi Hellenist: An ancient parallel to a bit of the Gospels.
—We Could Use a Reinvigorated Skeptic Movement by Freddie deBoer: Did the assholishness of the New Atheists push culture too far in the other direction?
— Lessons from Financial Aid by Matt “Dean Dad” Reed: Another take on that Kevin Carey piece.
— Walking Across England: From Liverpool to Manchester, From Manchester to Wakefield, From Wakefield to Hull by Chris Arnade: I always enjoy Arnade’s travelogues.
— You’re Not Too Good for Tourism by Clare Coffey: Pretty much what it says, and a nice companion to the previous.
— Legacy cities and the changing nature of the good life by Ethan Zuckerman: Another interesting companion to Arnade’s ongoing project (I wonder if they’re aware of each other?)
— The deracination of literature by Mary Gaitskill: I’m not sure this isn’t overthinking a temporary aesthetic shift, but it was interesting.
— Fugue State from Listen Up Nerds: I don’t need any more T-shirts, but…
— What Counts as the Life of the Mother? by Annie Lowrey: This is a tough read, but excellent.
— Pumping a swing with parametric resonance by Jarrett Lancaster: A very math-y physics post to end on an up note.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Weeks:
This is a rainbow spotted on one of my first dog walks coming out of Covid isolation. The inferred location of the pot of gold would be the giant construction project going on at the high school athletic fields, which seems about right.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Weeks:
It remains a travesty that this all-time summer single didn’t sell a billion copies.
So, yeah, that’s a lot. I have a couple ideas for, you know, original content that I’m kicking around, but may not get to them right away as I slowly catch up after a week of deliberately exerting minimal effort. If you want to see them when they emerge, here’s a button:
And if you want to discuss any of the above, the comments will be open: