Thoughts for the week’s end

Time has been operating on a different scale since March. It’s yesterday, it’s tomorrow, it’s hardly ever today. I’ve blinked and here’s September.

One week has become 12. This is the third “Thoughts for the week’s end” draft in my posts list. Let’s see if it gets published. I cheated and copied one of the blurbs from an earlier draft. I then deleted the rest. Gasp!

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If you went back 10 years and told me that one day a simple CMD-Shift-n would restore an entire window of accidentally closed tabs in my browser…

I finished The Decadent Society this week months ago (book club!) and the main argument is that we haven’t really done anything Big since putting someone on the moon 40 years ago.

But I dunno…. restoring browser tabs? That’s a pretty big one.

The book itself was interesting and thought provoking. I did find myself shaking my head in disagreement more as it went on—I have a feeling he could expose himself to a wider variety of art to see that things have progressed since Star Wars, 60s rock, and the age of white male dominated fiction.

But! I appreciate some of the arguments and it sometimes does seem like progress has gotten stale. Maybe that’s how it works though. Stale until not.

If you want the book in a nutshell, the author wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times covering the concept.

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More recently I finished a series of unrelated, yet very related books that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since. I would recommend each:

• The End of Policing explores alternatives to the ever-growing multitude of things that fit under the “police” umbrella.
• I expected How to be Anti-racist to be excellent and it surpassed my expectations. I very much enjoyed Kendi’s narration of his work through things he thought he knew and things he learned along the way.
• One Person, No Vote made me angry and helped to convince me that Secretary of State may be the most important office in US state elections. The rampancy of active voter suppression is stunning.

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It’s probably me and my thousand tabs and not having restarted Firefox for a couple weeks, but Gutenberg gets really laggy when I’m several paragraphs into something. I just went through one of those 90s moments where I typed this entire sentence before it appeared on the screen in front of me. Hey, there it is!

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No previous version of myself before the last several years would have understood how interested I am in hearing Miley’s new material. The vibe from Midnight Sky is so great. It put Edge of Seventeen (which it samples) in my head and I ended up listening to a half-dozen Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks albums this week.

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I finished The Fly Trap this morning, a very readable and pleasant memoir by a Swedish entomologist. I could read books like this endlessly. More scientists should publish this style of memoir. Bonus: I’m pretty sure I had a hoverfly swing by and hang out with me for the last few pages.

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That’s that. Have to hit publish before I wait another week! 🚢