1 / Reading

Tore through some books this month:

• Liaquat Ahamed's 1873
• Robert Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment
• Katherine Blunt's California Burning
• Alan Lightman's Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

2 / Building

Completed work on a new personal website, migrating to a static site from WordPress after 13 years.

Now that Claude Code can handle laborious coding sessions quickly, the overhead expense of WordPress made little sense—especially since several of the projects I've launched (BJJ Tracker, Book Catalog, Thucydides Daily Reader) use static site infrastructure because WordPress was too ponderous.

It's faster, cleaner, and with no tracking of any kind: no analytics, no cookies, nothing watching what you read.

It also allows me to automate updates across my projects. The /Studio page features a fresh Thucydides passage each day, the latest Bits posts, and recent books added to the catalog.

And, it clears the way for a separate, immersive webspace for my book.

Check it out at caseyjr.org.

Also!

I'm going to be in the Bay Area next month, in part to attend the RDI Agentic AI Summit at Berkeley.

Let me know if you're in town/around!

3 / Listening

Rinzen's Sunset Beach Set in Santa Monica.

Particularly enjoyed the tracks around 11:07, 1:23:06, 1:44:45, and 1:59:00.

4 / Number

9

African teams made it to the Round of 32 in the World Cup. Sensational!

Thanks for reading!

Hit reply! I read every response.

Let me know what you’re reading, building, and/or listening to.

Abrazos,
Mike