It’s been a cold, rainy spring day in DC today, but just a few weeks ago we had this. Isn’t spring great?
🏀 With the Nuggets and the Knicks both knocked out of the playoffs on the same day, my basketball-watching season is officially over. Let’s see what 2024/25 brings to everyone, the Wizards in particular.
That’s it! I tend not to abandon books half-way through, but I just couldn’t swallow these three.
Should I revisit? Emerson had some good quotes, apparently, and Campbell (seems to have) inspired many good stories although his own did not persuade me.
But Catch-22, dear oh dear. You could not pay me to start reading that piece of work again.
🍿 The Shining (1980) came out many decades ago, but from the opening I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-a-drone bird’s eye views through the masterful tracking shots of the Overlook Hotel to the anxiety-inducing stills of Jack Nicholson and his eyebrows it beats any and all of the modern-day perfectly-shot too-slick-to-be-real CGI trickery. I have been rewatching the movie several times over several decades and the cinematography is getting comparably better and better — quite damning for Hollywood.
This time around, however, I could better appreciate what’s truly scary about the movie: not the blood-filled hallway, or the hag soaking in that bathtub, or even the haunted twins*, but rather the ease with which a middle-aged man becomes bitter and starts blaming his family for holding him back. Not everyone is capable of extinguishing a star.
It’s been a cold, rainy spring day in DC today, but just a few weeks ago we had this. Isn’t spring great?
I wanted so very much to like morgen for its calendar helper services like automatic travel time, prep time, flexible meetings, etc. But then it throws this alert window with no explanation whatsoever for why on Earth it would need to access my microphone and nope, no way, hard pass.
The Beatles wanted to do a LotR movie, starring:
McCartney as Frodo, Starr as Sam, Lennon as Gollum and Harrison as Gandalf. The Beatles’ choice of director? Stanley Kubrick, fresh from making 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But Tolkien didn’t like the idea of a pop group being associated with his books. I am not sure about that cast either, but just imagine Kubrick’s Lord of the Rings. In the style of Barry Lyndon, perhaps? (ᔥMarginal Revolution)
Some of the books I’ve added to the pile since January:
And more! How many days in a year again?
📚 Finished reading: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt while trying to avoid confirmation bias since we are of the same mind on phones in schools and I was very much on his side during on of the most interesting and least civil Conversations with Tyler (Cowen).
The last third of the book — calls to action — was too much of a laundry list for my taste, but I was pleasantly surprised by Haidt’s take on spirituality with which he concluded the middle section.
Apparently, this book was supposed to be only the first chapter of Haidt’s next one, about the influence of smartphones and social media on everyone’s lives. I suspect that here, too, we will agree, though I had only written about the destruction wrought upon the older generations (present company included) in Serbian.
Steven Johnson is one of the rare writers whose Substack newsletters I follow, and his most recent post will give you a good idea why. It is nominally about “The Infernal Machine”, his new book out today, but it is also about how he writes, and why, and has room for a story and a poem which both pack a punch. Recommended.
🏀 The craziest end to a half-time in a long long time happened last night in Minnesota and even if you are not a basketball fan I am sure you will appreciate the cinematic quality of the scene starting at 1:17. But do watch the whole thing, it is only 90 seconds long.