The Weekly, August 12, 2024
Hi all,
I don’t recall where I first came across this tip—it sounds like a Cal Newport thing, but I’m not sure—but lately at night after kids are down I’ve been keeping my computer at a small little bistro table we keep in the corner of our living room and then having the books I wish to read on a little end table by our couch. Outcome: I’m getting the writing done that I need to and am not killing all my plausible book reading time by getting distracted online.
Simply having a specific space designated for each thing has helped immensely—when I’m sitting at the table, I’m writing. (Writing, not watching cooking or mixology stuff on YouTube or reading things I have saved in Pocket.) When I’m at the couch, I’m reading a book.
Part of the reason I think we have wisdom literature in the Bible is that often healthy forms of life are simply the result of simple, ordinary choices rather than anything large and revolutionary. This, of course, is also the appeal of someone like Peak Jordan Peterson—though easily parodied, the wisdom of “make your bed” is helpful precisely because of its simplicity and tangibility. Tish Warren has a similar sort of encouragement in her much loved Liturgies of the Ordinary after all.
The physical acts that go into our work are easily ignored for knowledge workers, and yet they are often enormously important and formative.
One other practice I’m trying to do more regularly: I’m taking the bus when I leave the house to work instead of driving. There’s a level of forethought and scheduling that is just non-negotiable for making that work—Lincoln’s bus’s mostly run once an hour so if I miss the bus, my whole schedule has to be redone. But the time on the bus also allows for a different sort of commute than driving. And there’s usually some amount of walking to and from the bus which is also helpful for beginning and ending the day.
None of this is radical stuff, obviously. But they are small simple ways of trying to live as a creature instead of a disembodied knowledge economy drone on a stick. And I’ve found them helpful both in terms of managing my own energy throughout the day and, ironically perhaps, actually getting more work done.
Books
I finished Alan Jacobs’s Breaking Bed with the Dead, which I found delightful. There are authors you read because you just want to read that one book they wrote because the book itself is of interest. Then there are authors you read because you admire the way their mind works and wish that yours worked more like theirs. This is always how I explain the appeal of slogging through Oliver O’Donovan to people: You won’t understand everything in O’Donovan, but that isn’t necessarily the point. What you get will be beneficial and will help you in a holistic way as a thinker. Jacobs is a far better writer than O’Donovan, but the appeal he has for me is similar; I want to write and think the way he does.
I’m also reading Holly Coolman’s Parenting book and am dipping back into Wendell Berry’s first collected volume of essays, The Long-Legged House.
Articles
Onsi Kamel on Arabic as a Christian Language
Maggie Appleton on home-cooked software
Maureen Swinger on the teacher who never spoke
Addison del Mastro on who needs a car
Peter Hitchens on saying grace
Wendell Berry on loving a dying world
LM Sacasas on re-sourcing the mind
Andrew Chow on how large-scale Bitcoin mining operations have disrupted the life of a small Texas town
Brad East on the theotokos and abortion
Christine Emba on the fertility crisis
The New York Times on how trolls use deepfake pornography to target and abuse women
Elsewhere
Here’s an interesting one:
The Sawyer
2 oz gin
½ oz lime juice
½ simple
½ oz Angostura bitters
¼ oz Peychaud’s bitters
¼ oz Orange bitters
You’ll need to take the dasher tops off your bitters bottles to make it. But I really enjoyed it—the baking spices from the Angostura and the botanicals in the gin are the dominant notes, but you get some complicated citrus notes from the orange bitters, and just a trace of licorice at the end from the Peychaud’s. The lime was fairly invisible, but my hunch is the acid in the lime juice is mostly there just to balance everything, which is generally how acid is meant to be used in cooking. So on the whole the cocktail works together surprisingly well.
Thanks for reading!
Under the Mercy,
~Jake