• Joan Westenberg: I Deleted My Second Brain (ᔥMatt Birchler)

There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts. But there is a special anxiety reserved for unread lists of unread things. My reading list had become a totem of imagined wisdom. A shrine to the person I would be, if only I read everything on it.

When I deleted that list, I lost nothing real. I know what I want to read. I know the shape of my attention. I do not need a 7,000-item database to prove that I have taste or ambition.

• Victoria Song: AI doesn’t belong in journaling

There’s one quote in the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that sums it up for me. “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort — which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”

I don’t always agree with author Oliver Burkeman about this. I find no meaning in toiling over hand-washing dishes, and am eternally grateful to the inventor of the dishwasher. But as it pertains to Big Tech’s never-ending quest to simplify writing with AI, I wholly agree that the struggle is what makes the process worth anything.

• Anna Havron: Personal Productivity Analysis Paralysis

I personally abandoned digital for tracking my projects and tasks because I can think of infinity things I would like to create and get done! My imagination is THAT good and ambitious! Thank goodness for paper, which forces me to edit, thank goodness for the friction involved in recording and transferring thoughts and ideas. It keeps me semi-reality-based.

Out today in Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology: Durability of Response to B-Cell Maturation Antigen-Directed mRNA Cell Therapy in Myasthenia Gravis. It only took 18 months to get here from the pre-print but hey, we were able to get longer follow-up!

📺 Dept. Q, Season 1 (2025) was as good as a Netflix show gets. Which is to say, not exactly to the level of Slow Horses (Apple TV+) and certainly not Mare of Easttown (HBO), but with a cast that good I had to give it a pass for the occasional plot hole and choppy pacing.

This past June was my 15th anniversary of being a resident alien in the US, and just yesterday I have completed my longest trip to Europe since my move: eight whole weeks. Here are a few things that I missed during my (working) vacation:

• Being served clean tap water and unlimited supplies of ice by default as soon as I sit down in a restaurant, free of charge and often without even being asked.
• Not being exposed to tobacco smoke anywhere, but particularly while sitting down in a restaurant, coffee shop, pizza place, at the beach, the pool, the doctor’s office, and even the hotel room balcony.
• Air conditioning being present; and when being present actually being used; and when used not being told how bad it was for me, and how unnatural it was to require it.
• Having access to a variety of national cuisines when eating out, and a variety of ingredients from all around the world when cooking at home.
• Air travel being accessible to the majority of the population. Americans bemoan their airports as dumps compared to those in Europe and (especially) Asia, not realizing that the target audiences for the two are completely different. I would much rather live in a country where air travel is so commonplace that airports resemble bus stations more than luxury resorts.

There is more, of course, just not top of mind right now. And I could have written the counter post about things available in Europe and not in the US but for the most part people in Europe do know how well they have it in those regards (better tipping culture, fewer shootings, more walkable neighborhoods, saner size of cars, etc.) and they are happy to rub it in the Americans' faces during online interactions so there is no point in bringing it to anyone’s attention.

✈️ Travel day today, from Serbia to the US of A. From an authoritarian regime in its terminal stages to one that is just starting out.

Regardless, after 7 weeks away and living out of suitcases we can’t wait to go back home.

🍿 Black Bag (2025) was a breath of fresh air: sleek, well-written, well-acted, well-executed, vintage Soderbergh.

This week was a good one for learning about new apps:

• Zen browser puts an Arc skin over a Firefox core. It has already become my default browser. (ᔥBen Werdmuller)
• Macrowave enables AV streaming to anyone. I do plan on using it to stream but for now I am just marveling at the WinAmp esthetics. (ᔥGus Mueller)
• Inksightful digitizes paper notes. I am on the waitlist for the beta. (ᔥThe Iconfactory)

On the topic of apps, here are some fairly new ones (i.e. I have been using them for less than 5 years) that are passing the test of time, with honors:

• Tot, which is still my default for digital note-taking on the both the Mac and on iOS
• Flighty, which is invaluable for those flying in the US. Alas, it is not as useful, I have been finding out this summer, for travel in Europe. Those Europeans are not very good at updating their systems.
• The Cardhop/Fantastical combo, without which I could not imagine juggling between four different contact lists and a half-dozen calendars.
• MarsEdit, which I missed out on listing initially even as I was using it to write this very post. It is that essential that I consider it a part of the OS at this point.

And the apps that make me stick to the Mac even though I entertain from time to time the possibility of switching over to Linux:

• MailMate (since 2013)
• DEVONthink (since 2015)
• OmniFocus (since 2016)
• Tinderbox (since 2017)
• Audio Hijack and Sound Source (since 2020)

As much as I like the Mac hardware and the sleek aluminum esthetics, it is the software listed above that keeps me in the ecosystem. None of it is made by Apple.

What I found at this newsstand in Serbia did not give me hope for the future:

• Exhibit A: an Italian Brainrot sticker book.
• Exhibit B: “How to help a child who wants to be an influencer” as a front-page headline in Serbia’s oldest daily. And no, it is not about counseling.