The Weekly, January 22, 2024
Hi all,
We've had a handful of new folks join the list since the last issue, so I wanted to write something short about what this is and is not.
Briefly, over about a two-year period I became convinced that having the ability to broadcast to everyone anything that pops into your head or happens in your life at any time is bad for you.
Given that, being active on Twitter seemed like a bad idea.
So I initially curbed my activity there. Then eventually I just stopped posting there altogether, though I maintain an account so I can follow certain individuals and use the DM feature. I also basically have stopped using Facebook and am not active on any other social media platforms.
This newsletter is how I replaced all of that.
What I've found is two-fold:
First: Sometimes life happens and you don't have the chance to broadcast anything to the internet. And that's totally fine. Nothing will happen.
Our lives and thoughts just aren't meant to be broadcast all the time.
Second: When you have a limited supply of something, you're more careful with it. The potential of basically limitless broadcasting via social media lowers the bar for what we share. But when you have one communication that goes out once a week and can't exceed a certain length, you get a lot more thoughtful about what you do and don't post.
Of course, it should also be said: Twitter only creates the illusion of removing scarcity. Sure, you can broadcast as many messages as you want. There's no scarcity of supply, fair enough. But the scarcity just pivots to the other side of the equation in the form of scarcity of attention with your audience.
You can broadcast as much as you want. But people have limited attention—and even as we become more and more addicted to our devices, we still eventually find that we run out of time to consume all the content we want to consume.
This newsletter is my attempt to continue sharing good work with people who want to read things worthy of their attention. It's also a way for me to stay in touch with readers of my own work and friends of Mere Orthodoxy. And it's a format that allows for a much healthier sense of limits than social media.
Anyway, that's the background. What you'll get each Monday (usually) is a rundown of what I've been reading online and in books, perhaps a personal update or brief reflection, like the above, and then some grab-bag type stuff at the end of the email which will usually be something related to food or drink, though not this week. If you enjoy it, I'm pleased. Welcome.
Oh, and if you reply to this email it goes straight to my personal inbox so if there is something you enjoy (or something you especially disliked) you can let me know.
Reading
Books
I'm reading George Lindbeck now, as you likely intuited if you read last week's essay. I'm also working through Rowan Williams's Being Christian. The opening chapter on baptism is fascinating, but I think tries to pack too much in and in some ways glides too quickly to the social significance of baptism. There's nothing being said that strikes me as wrong—not that I feel terribly confident judging the work of such an estimable theologian anyway.
But there was also something in it that left me a little cold. My copy is a used one and at one point in the margins, as Williams described the way baptism is supposed to change our desires and habits, the previous owner wrote "I guess I should just give up then." Further down the same page in the margin is written, "This is so not how I am."
Maybe God was using this little book to convict and the effect of the chapter was to draw the reader closer to God—though in that case I would rather expect that they'd have held on to the book rather than gotten rid of it. But given how quickly Williams's discussion of baptism turned toward piety and outreach, I also couldn't help wondering if perhaps it didn't sit long enough with the reality that first drives us to need baptism—that we are born in sin and need rescuing by someone outside ourselves.
Anyway, what I've read so far has been edifying and helpful to me. But there are elements in it I want to poke at a little bit, I think, and some of the framing of the baptism chapter is near the top of my list, clearly.
Also, our church has a group reading Mere Christianity so I've dipped into that a little for the first time in probably 15 years. Lewis is a master.
I'm still working through Jeff Stout's Democracy and Tradition and, thanks to his nudging, I'm also looking at Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas.
Articles
A beautiful NYT report on a group in Austin providing homes for the chronically homeless
NS Lyons on right-wing progressivism
Freddie de Boer on gamifying the self
Catherine Ruth Pakaluk on declining birth rates
Freya India on not broadcasting your life
Paul Kingsnorth on what lies beneath
Travis Pickell on assisted suicide
Alec MacGillis on chronic absenteeism in American schools
Cal Newport on slow writing
Elsewhere
It's been bitterly cold in Lincoln lately. We've had windchills reach -40 on a couple nights, went almost a week without having high temperatures clear 10 degrees, and we also have gotten quite a lot of snow.
So between the extreme cold and the snow, we've been shut in a lot. When you're shut in and have four kids that are between 11 and 4, the easy move is to watch a movie, which we've done more of than I think either my wife or I would prefer.
That said, there are lots of options for what that time can look like. Here are a couple favorite recent discoveries in our home, both from independent producers on YouTube.
The first is a channel called Bushcraft GR. The man who runs it is a Greek man who seems to own some land on a mountain, where he presumably lives and where he builds some really amazing bushcraft shelters. He never talks in the videos, so all you have for sound is the sound of his work plus the sounds of nature. It's beautiful, oddly captivating, and quite relaxing. Here's one of his coolest builds:
The other channel we've been enjoying is called Lost Lakes. It's run by a Canadian man who lives in northern Ontario with his wife and goes on really long camping trips, often to large lakes nearby, and who also does some fairly extreme winter camping. What makes Lost Lakes wonderful is that in addition to being really savvy and knowledgeable as an outdoorsman, this guy (and his wife who often joins him on the trips and who is really impressive herself) is also an incredibly talented photographer and videographer. So the videos end up being part camping adventure, part nature documentary—and since it's on YouTube, all of it is free to watch.
When my wife and I were both sick last week we watched this with the kids after they got home from school:
I had never even heard of this lake before, and now I want to go.
Anyway, it may be odd to end an email that began with such hostility to Twitter by praising a couple YouTubers. But actually I think for a certain sort of person YouTube might offer some of the same benefits as email newsletters do for others. Broadcasting is complicated enough that you can't just do it into infinity as on Twitter, so the virtues of scarcity still hold.
But also if the format suits you, you enjoy it, and you take the time to create something actually worthwhile (as Cal Newport writes about so well in the link above), YouTube, like email, offers you the ability to create something that delights or helps other people.
It runs into the scarcity of attention problem, of course. But another way of saying that might be to borrow something from Newport: While there is tons of what Charlotte Mason would call "twaddle" fighting for our attention, there's actually a depressingly small amount of beauty asking for it. So the people who take the time to create beautiful things can usually find an audience because most of us are drowning in twaddle and are starved for beauty.
Anyway, that's it for this week. Until next time.
Under the Mercy,
~Jake