Lots of words spent in the New York Times on how Starbucks lost its magic and not one mention of the most straightforward way to bring that magic back: have it be a coffee shop again, and not a drive-through dessert stand.

Is Yellowstone that good of a soap opera that a NYT reporter cries when interviewing the lead actress, who in turn reveals that she has to sleep for days after filming a particularly emotional scene. Or have we reached peak snowflake?

Woke up feeling like a steamroller ran me over and wondered “is this what middle age is like?” but no, Apple Watch soon notified me that my sleeping heart rate and respiratory rate both were higher than usual, so I am probably coming down with some virus or another. To which I say, bring it on.

Hell froze: I am about to link to hype-master Eric Topol in a non-judgmental way, because the article he is hyping is one that I co-authored. It’s titled “Engineering CAR-T therapies for autoimmune disease and beyond” and it came out yesterday in Science Translational Medicine as their one free article from the issue. I’ll stop there because it’s work-related and it’s good to have some boundaries.

No, I am not canceling my Washington Post subscription; the free one I had through my previous federal job expired and I never renewed it, so there was nothing left to cancel. My main source of local news has been Axios DC but The 51st popped up recently and is now getting amplified. It has fewer tips on where to get the best Cinco de Mayo margarita and more in-depth news, which is great. It also lists Old Town Alexandria as the number 1 spot for a fall walk around D.C. so they’re not perfect, but then no-one is. And of course, they are opportunistic about the recent local events (headline: D.C. Deserves Billionaire-Free Local News).

I have been reading Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals”, which builds on many of the concepts first mentioned in “Four Thousand Weeks”. One of them is looking at various aspects of life not as a to-do list that needs completing but as a river you dip in and out of as needed.

One big to-do list that has followed me for more than a decade now has been my ever-growing Instapaper queue. However, the river metaphor didn’t quite work there: the constant flow of a river implies I’d be looking at the newest thing each time I dipped in. But that’s what social media and RSS are for! Dave Winer himself has used the term River of News to describe a type of an RSS aggregator. What, then, to make of Instapaper and what purpose does it serve?

So here is how I’ve been thinking about it: Instapaper (or any other read-it-later service) is where all the hot takes I encounter go to cool down. The Senate of my reading Congress, if you will. And most things I put there will, in fact, turn out to be pieces of misshapen plastic not worth my time. But now and then a masterpiece may come out of the fire that will be worth sharing years hence. So, I really don’t care about the great resignation in academia all that much any more. C.S. Lewis talking about cliques? Yes, please.

Looking at years-old essays and blog posts removes current-event noise from my interpretation. Usually I also can’t remember why I saved an item in the first place. So, the piece will have to stand on its own without the benefit of my knowing that Tyler Cowen, or Cory Doctorow, or whomever else’s link blog I follow had put in a good word about it. Is QAnon destroying the GOP from within? I won’t have to read Ben Sasse’s ten thousand words from 3 years go on it because the answer was clearly “Yes”, and the deed is now done. How does Zeynep Tufekci keep getting the big things right? I don’t have to read the 4-year-old article now since there is a whole book about it (and not the one you think). Etc, etc.

The emerging pattern is that big news pieces in publications like The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic are the lowest yield, as they either become stale or discredited. Give me a thoughtful Substack newsletter any time! Better yet are items that were old when I saved them, like that C.S. Lewis speech from a few paragraphs up, or this brief remembrance of Paul Feyerabend that ends with a poignant paragraph:

Beneath Feyerabend’s rhetorical antics lurked a deadly serious theme: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble it may be, often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he actually believed it was no more valid than astrology or religion. Quite the contrary. He attacked science because he recognized—and was horrified by—science’s vast superiority to other modes of knowledge. His objections to science were moral and political rather than epistemological. He feared that science, precisely because of its enormous power, could become a totalitarian force that crushes all its rivals.

It was written in 2016. Eight years later, we are in for some crushing.

Day one of Apple Intelligence. Trying out writing tools first and apparently the professional version of the sentence “This is a text about something, nothing in particular.” is — drumroll, please — “This text is a general discussion about various topics without a specific focus or subject matter.”

So “make professional” is code for “bullshittify”. How delightful.

I enjoyed how this essay about Tolkien was progressing, and then it touched on Taleb and the Incerto and I fell in love:

So how is goodness preserved for Tolkien? This brings us to Tolkien’s great prayer. We are familiar with the idea of a catastrophe. Or, to use more updated terminology, we might adopt Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of a black swan. A black swan is a completely unforeseen and cataclysmic disaster, something that seems to unmake the world. But Tolkien also envisioned the opposite of such an event, in which the effect works in the other direction, in which “everything sad comes untrue,” as Samwise says near the end. This kind of event, which Tolkien called a “eucatastrophe”—the “hope unlooked for” when all seems lost—allows good to face evil even though history remains something of a long defeat.

“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

Yes, they’ve mangled their Talebisms a bit (catastrophe and eucatasrophe can both be black swan events) but that was a beautiful formulation of an antifragile way of life.

“What weather they shall have is not ours to rule” indeed. (↬John Brady)