For new readers who found this newsletter thanks to the book or recent book events, welcome! You’ll get two articles a month from this address, with premium subscribers receiving one bonus post a month (today’s post is that one for May). This is a reader-supported newsletter! If we lived in a world of thriving magazine and book publishing, and well-funded public institutions, I wouldn’t need to ask for a cent. Unfortunately we don’t, and I appreciate your support. 

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism,” stated British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in 1911, “repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. “The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”