A beautiful day in DC, which I have spent running just to stay in place:

• replaced the microwave control board (thank you, YouTube)
• figured out which parts to order to repair broken shades
• repaired busted French door hinges
• declogged drains
• packed and stored the aquarium (RIP, little fish)

All the while evading my progeny’s attempts to rope me into a game of Foresaken, which is apparently what children do these days instead of running around in back alleys and playing hopscotch.

• 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.

• Nick Maggiulli: Optimizing Ourselves to Death. This is nothing new, of course. Modus omnibus in rebus was first written down some 2600 years ago and has withstood the test of time. It is good to have an occasional reminder.
• Joe Stone: A moment that changed me: I resolved to reduce my screen time – and it was a big mistake. Case in point to the above. Smartphones are magical, when you remember to tone them down.
• Dwarkesh Patel: Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. Moderation in everything, even in moderation. Here are two examples of people, Johnson and Caro, who did not hold back on their own thing, with great success.

Robert Caro’s books are about formidable, single-mindedly devoted characters with storybook life arcs. It may be the case, then, that the only person who could write the biography of Robert Caro is the man himself.

• John Gruber: Gold, Frankincense, and Silicon. The amount of money and power one obtains in life are proportional to the size of frogs — or, if you are feeling less charitable, turds — one swallows throughout life, and at some point you either acquire a taste for frogs (maybe you’ve always liked them!), spend a lot of money on therapy and/or drugs, or drop out. And Tim Apple hasn’t dropped out just yet.
• John Gruber again: OpenAI Brings Back Legacy ChatGPT 4o Model in Response to Outcry From Users Who Find GPT-5 Emotionally Unsatisfying. To quote Gruber, “These people need help, and that help isn’t going to come from a chatbot.”
• Duncan McClements: The Sun Never Leaves. The subtitle is “How emigration ended the British Empire”, and it could not have happened to a nicer bunch of overindulgent cut-throats.

Happy reading.

Nori Parelius wrote a thoughtful article about taking notes, managing slip-boxes and “working with knowledge” in general. It matches my experience fiddling with various methods: what should be a playful exploration of ideas can easily become laborious bookkeeping. *Caveat scriptor!(ᔥZettelkasten)

I have updated my now page. The last update was in March so let’s call this my Quarterly-ish update.

I have tons of free time, as is evidenced by (a) that I’m spending a half hour writing this blog post and (b) that I spent a couple hours earlier this week reading Atlas’s book, for no other reason than I felt like it. And this wasn’t even the only pleasure book I read over the Thanksgiving weekend. But I’m also in a continual time debt, a veritable treadmill of time commitments. I’m in the middle of writing 5 books and a few dozen research articles, and I keep taking on new projects. No way I can do all of these! But, as with Atlas and his finances, somehow I keep going.

Andrew Gelman describes my life, basically.

Don’t feel obliged from Oliver Burkeman is on my list of things to occasionally re-read. High school was the right time for me to hear this advice from one of his Guardian editors: “if you can’t do something, saying no right away usually makes it much easier for everyone."

A few changes to my iPhone setup, courtesy of a YouTube video which is itself c/o r/dumbphones:

1. Dumbify, which is exquisite.
2. SocialFocus is quite good as well.
3. Only Tot remains in the dock, and thank goodness it has a grayscale icon.
4. Goodbye, silicone case — I’ve gone case-less.

So far so good.

It was time for my quarterly now page update. Ludus longus, vita brevis.

I have a rarely-updated list of articles I look at once a week, and randomly pick one to re-read. This week it was time for the first one on the list, which is Paul Graham’s Life is Short. I have obviously been ignoring it, likely because of its position, because I haven’t been following the sage advice:

The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to be consciously aware of it. Back when life was more precarious, people used to be aware of death to a degree that would now seem a bit morbid. I’m not sure why, but it doesn’t seem the right answer to be constantly reminding oneself of the grim reaper hovering at everyone’s shoulder. Perhaps a better solution is to look at the problem from the other end. Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don’t wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don’t need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn’t wait. Just don’t wait.

In 2023 there was an exhibit of Leonardo DaVinci’s sketches in D.C., three blocks away from me. But I didn’t see it, because one thing or other kept getting in the way until the very last day, which was so packed with meetings that the work ended after the last admission time.

Lesson learned, right? Well, no, because just recently there was another big show close by (I won’t tell how close lest I allow your, reader, to triangulate my home address). This time we did go, only to balk at the overly long lines and go see something else at the National Art Gallery (incidentally, a work of Leonardo’s). Which was good! But then picking the time when we wouldn’t need to wait was impossible, and we never got to see that exhibit either.

So yes don’t wait, and also when you read and re-read an essay try to at least remember the highlights. This is a memo to self not advice, but could serve as one.