Letter of Recommendation: "Less Wrong"
Hello hello! Fall is here, with its colors and its yardwork. This week I spent quality time raking leaves off our pavement and into flower beds. Last year our “leave the leaves” campaign paid off nicely. We ended up with a fertilized yard, smothered weeds, and a whole ecosystem supported by decaying leaf matter. On top of that little food web pyramid are birds like the humble robin, and potentially scarcer species like the Rusty Blackbird, which flips leaves in search of invertebrates in the fall and winter. (Alright, that little pyramid is nested within a larger pyramid headed by the local hawks, but we won’t worry about that too much.)
I hope that intro riff gave you 30 seconds’ respite from the “state of things.” And we’re back! I won’t sugarcoat it: rough news all around this month. I don’t currently have anything coherent to say about it other than pitch in, put your “shoulder to the wheel,” and look out for each other. And to recommend a newsletter just started by my friend Jim Santel, “Less Wrong,” which draws its title from a Thoreau quote — I’ll let him explain over there. I have always really enjoyed seeing Jim’s mind at work on problems large and small. He combines a historical lens, cogent analysis, and generosity of spirit in a way that is hard to find anywhere else. I’m excited to see where he’ll take “Less Wrong” and dead certain he’ll make your inboxes a better place to spend time.
Jim is also a wonderful writer of fiction, and we’ve been challenging each other to write a bit more lately. He pointed me toward George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which Saunders walks us through six classic Russian short stories, aiming to understand how to engineer yourself a successful short story. It has helped recharge my interest in writing, renew my faith in the human spirit, and clarify what I should be doing with my energy when it seems like everything is getting worse. Not to oversell it, of course. You can always just read a bunch of Chekhov stories on their own and get basically the same result, but you couldn’t ask for a better reading companion than George Saunders.
And one more recommendation. In Deez Links, the media newsletter you should be reading if you’re not (but you probably are already are) the ever on-the-ball Delia Cai cued me in on science writer Ed Yong’s newsletter, charmingly named The Ed’s Up. I’m a new subscriber and encourage you to do the same. (Like Possum Notes, he’s on Buttondown — cheers!) Yong is no longer at The Atlantic, a decision he explores in a recent talk. I appreciate him making a choice for his well-being after years of hard service on the COVID beat, and sharing his reasoning with us. Currently he’s mostly off social media and focusing on a book, birds, and other projects.
Maybe I should mention now that I left BirdNote to work in-person at a community college, because I missed working out of the home and working in education. All the best to BirdNote, they continue to do lovely stuff. I’m mostly off social media and focusing on other projects, which may or may not amount to a book by the time I’m 35. (George Saunders published CivilWarLand in Bad Decline when he was 37. I’m right on track, babyyyy.) And you can catch me writing about the birds of the season for the Omaha audience over here.
Anyway, thanks for reading, take care of yourselves, and go read something interesting. Here’s Chekhov talking about a winter sunset:
“A train was coming out of the station. Marya Vassilyevna stood at the crossing waiting till it should pass, and shivering all over with cold. Vyazovye was in sight now, and the school with the green roof, and the church with its crosses flashing in the evening sun: and the station windows flashed too, and a pink smoke rose from the engine... and it seemed to her that everything was trembling with cold.”
That view is the first spark of a personal epiphany for Marya Vassilyevna that you’ll understand if you read the story. May we all be as fortunate as Marya Vassilyevna this winter.
I read George Saunders’s 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain' when he first published it and enjoyed it thoroughly. I recommended the book to a friend who's a writer but has a hard time moving his plots along; I thought my friend would benefit, but he never read the book. I've read some of George Saunders's fiction, but I've found it nearly unreadable; what a contrast between 'A Swim in the Pond' and his fiction.