The Weekly, January 6, 2025
Hi all,
Apologies once again for the extended (and unplanned) hiatus. I’m still not entirely sure how to set the right rhythm for this particular project. I enjoy it and I can see the value pretty easily, but figuring out where it fits into life is the trick.
The most direct route to a sustainable rhythm, I think, is going to be built around a) using it for short personal reflections of the sort that would at one time have gone on my Twitter feed, b) using it to track my reading which I am already doing as part of my job. So that’s where we’re going to be headed this year, I think, and hopefully having a bit more discipline about that model for this will allow me to be more regular as well.
Books
I finished Brad Edwards’s forthcoming The Reason for Church last night and sent him an endorsement for it. You’ll want to preorder that one. I have a few books I’ve been working through slowly for awhile that I hope to wrap up this week. I’m also deliberating whether or not to attempt Bullinger’s Decades this year—I’ve not read it before and Bullinger is a major figure in the Reformed tradition. So not having read him is a bit of a blind spot for me.
Articles
I’ve built up a bit of a backlog here, but there’s a lot of great pieces here that are worth your time:
Kathleen Stock on trans day of remembrance
Samuel James on boredom
Freya India on needing adults
Anthony Scholle on meaningful work
Paul Kingsnorth on St Moses the Ethiopian
Ross Douthat on the persistence of liberal democracy
Maria Baer on learning the violin
John Gray on Jordan Peterson
Matt Crawford on bullshit jobs
Amelia Buzzard on redeeming bullshit jobs
L. M. Sacasas on enclosure and the human psyche
Matt Walther on reading 100 pages a day
Elsewhere
I made a very close variation of this last week and, remarkably, everyone in the family liked it. (Finding a dish everyone will enjoy is… not easy.)
I didn’t make fresh naan with it since we had some flatbread in the breadbox already.
For drinks—I’ve recently discovered the Army and Navy, which is a really enjoyable drink that is bright and cheerful, though not at all a winter drink. So if you’re looking for something that feels more seasonal, this ain’t it. But if you like drinks with gin and lemon, this is a fun one: the main twist is the addition of orgeat. (I used the Liber and Co orgeat and was super happy with the result.)
Under the Mercy,
~Jake