The Weekly Review: Vol VI Issue 6
Currently…
I’ve enjoyed the newsletter of Alan Jacobs (named Snakes & Ladders) since he started it several months back. Not that everything he writes about is of interest to me, but the format of the newsletter itself is spot on.
One specific item I enjoy most is one he puts under the header of STATUS BOARD. It’s a little like the Now page that Derek Sivers made popular, but one a more frequent basis. I like the concept because my quarterly updates to my Now page feel forced and don’t give an accurate picture of the various things I’m putting my energy into or enjoying through the course of a year.
So I’m totally stealing the idea.
Reading
I’ve been working my way through RC Sproul’s Pleasing God while working on my current Sunday school class. It’s a book I read much earlier in my Christian walk and, while a fairly simple read, it’s worth revisiting.
During the Christmas season, I picked up a copy of The Shadow of What Was Lost by James Islington. The cover stated something akin to “If you loved The Wheel of Time, this is your new favorite series”. That sucked me in, but I should have known better. Not that the book hasn’t been enjoyable, but it’s not in the same sphere as WoT.
I find it moves far too fast (more like something from Terry Brooks) for my taste — I prefer a thorough character development over a breakneck plot. Islington moves the point of view from chapter to chapter, not an uncommon practice, but moves so fast that I struggle to remember newly introduced characters from the related thread.
But there’s enough substance that I have hope for the trilogy overall. I’m now on to the second book (An Echo of Things to Come).
Listening
We’ve been on a hip hop bend of late in our house. My boys all got into in recent months and one artist I’ve really come to appreciate is Trip Lee. If you want a rapper who can lay down the truth from God’s word in style, this might be your thing. Our current favorite track is Manolo from the Rise album.
Outer Peace from Toro y Moi has been getting a lot of spins as well.
Drinking
I chose to give up beer for Lent, so there’s been little to share from the last 6 weeks. But we had a family dinner out on Good Friday and I had my first taste of the sweet nectar of fermented wheat and hops.
I went with a Tail Slap IPA from Three Ranges Brewing. It was flavourful with just the right amount of sweetness. A fine way to get back to my favourite beverage!
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Items of Note
Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
Mairead Small Staid shares a brilliant piece of writing all about reading and its apparent demise. She frames the problem well:
The diminishment of literature—of sustained reading, of writing as the product of a single focused mind—would diminish the self in turn, rendering us less and less able to grasp both the breadth of our world and the depth of our own consciousness.
So, what we write and what we read helps shape our thinking and our very being? I like that. But Staid goes further — a lot further — and claims that the attack on reading is tied to topics like democracy and the environment:
And perhaps the greatest danger posed to literature is not any newfangled technology or whiz-bang rearrangement of our synapses, but plain old human greed in its latest, greatest iteration: an online retailer incorporated in the same year The Gutenberg Elegies was published. In the last twenty-five years, Amazon has gorged on late capitalism’s values of ease and cheapness, threatening to monopolize not only the book world, but the world-world. In the face of such an insidious, omnivorous menace—not merely the tech giant, but the culture that created and sustains it—I find it difficult to disentangle my own fear about the future of books from my fear about the futures of small-town economies, of American democracy, of the earth and its rising seas.
The remainder of the essay describes the experience of reading books, the immersive act that it can be when done rightly.
The heightened state brought on by a book—in which one is “actively present at every moment, scripting and constructing”—is what readers seek, Birkerts argues: “They want plot and character, sure, but what they really want is a vehicle that will bear them off to the reading state.” This state is threatened by the ever-sprawling internet—can the book’s promise of deeper presence entice us away from the instant gratification of likes and shares?
The alternatives like Twitter and news sites and talk radio (aka podcasts) cannot give this depth. They were not designed with this intention.
Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment. It’s a way to pass the time, not to live in it. Reading—real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned case for—draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and “where it does not assume depth, it creates it.”
I could quote this entire article (and nearly did). Please stop here and go read it in full. This is a repeated message in my space, but this message bears repetition. It’s crucial to remind ourselves that depth is important and worth fighting for.
Digital Minimalism and God (Or, is Social Media Undermining Religion?)
If you follow Cal Newport’s blog, you’ll know he writes often about the trends in our culture and the shift towards all things shallow. In this post, he addresses a chief concern of mine. He shares an example from the life of Martin Luther King Jr’s life to get to his point:
I’m bringing this all up because it provides background for a surprising claim that’s been growing online in recent years, and which seems self-evidently worthy of unpacking: social media might be accidentally undermining religion.
He began to notice a lot of the traffic for his newest book, Digital Minimalism, was coming from certain religious circles. After some thought, he recognizes this should not be a surprise.
Though there are many ways in which tools like Twitter or Instagram might work against (or in some cases with) the traditional objectives of religion, the issue that kept arising is the way in which the ubiquitous distraction they provide corrodes the contemplative life.
Courage, reassurance, revelation: these require a quiet mind capable of apophatic insight. One of the unintentional consequences of innovating an algorithmically-optimized, always-present source of attention-snagging noise is that this quiet disappears.
From my own experience, it’s tough to hear a still small voice amidst the mighty winds of social media and other tools that call for my attention.
In our culture of fake news and short, sensational sound bites, it’s refreshing to come across good reporting. This story is about a mobster who rats out his own father and goes into hiding for 9 years.
He always thought they’d come for him, and part of him still thinks they will. He wore a wire for nine months, logged over 400 hours of tape and became the U.S. government’s key witness in the case against aging mafia capo Sonny Franzese, a long-feared wiseguy who was once caught on tape bragging about his favorite way to dismember a corpse: chop up the body in a kiddie pool, dry out the bones in a microwave, then run them through a garbage disposal. John Franzese called him dad.
It’s a fascinating story about family, power, and addiction. But, above all else, reconciliation. And no one is beyond the redemptive power of the Gospel of Christ. If all reporting was like this, I’d probably read a lot more of it.
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Run of the week
I was stoked to hit my one speed focused PR that was a goal for the year. My previous best for a half marathon was 1:38 (98 minutes) and I wanted to hit 1:35 this year. I wasn’t planning to take a shot at it yet, but I was feeling really good last week’s long run.
The run was saved as 1:33:38, but that was not quite correct due to an incorrect first KM (damn GPS). But even with adding 1:20 to my time, it broke my PR by a long way and came in under 95 minutes. So I’ll enjoy this one for a bit (and try not to already start thinking at getting under 1:30).
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Quote of the week
Though many factors contribute to a project’s failure, nothing is more certain to cause a project to fail than a misunderstanding of the problem you are solving.
Lenny Rachitsky, A three-step framework for solving problems
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I hope you enjoyed a restful Easter weekend.