Eleven years ago this morning, I stood in front of a mirror in a hotel, slowly adjusting my collar and making sure my hair was not in disarray. The hotel was a short ride from the Aga Khan Museum, and I hopped in an Uber to get there early.

About half an hour after I arrived, a gorgeous white car drove up to where I was, and from it emerged the most beautiful woman I had ever seen: Lise, my wife-to-be, the light of my life.

We embraced and laughed — it was all caught on camera — and got ready for the day ahead: the day we were to get married.

That was eleven years ago, but it feels like yesterday. It feels like no time has passed because every day, still, I wake up excited to know that I get to spend my life with the person who brightens up my days most, with someone so beautiful that she makes me still discover awe and wonder, with someone who makes me want to strive to be the best person I can be.

This weekend, we are away enjoying a few days exploring and relaxing and eating good food, but mostly just relishing in each other’s company. After eleven years, we still get giddy with being with each other, and know that will continue for the rest of the years to come.

A poem

Courage
Lee Herrick

I almost stopped believing in the ocean.
Imagine that. I almost stopped believing
in the music of such massive natural splendor.
I had lost sight of it, lost sight of hope
because innocent people were killed
by people in masks, hiding their faces,
their shame parading as providence,
their weakness posing as policy.
But then, I remembered the tides.
I was restored by the courage of poets
whose songs sounded like ocean waves
guided by the moon. Even now, there is music.
Children laughing on the swings, a student
learning the saxophone, a woman reading
her rough draft by the lake, a father whistling
a love song in his native language.
Courage is from the Latin word cor,
which means heart, which means we are a heart of poets.
As in, take courage, take heart. As in, the widow
was grateful for your encouragement, your giving heart.
As in, the heart of your convictions.
What I mean is: we are made of love
and therefore larger than their terror.
As a great poet said, they can cut back all of the flowers,
but they cannot hold back spring.
We are a massive natural splendor, too.
In the end, all we are is love and love and love.
In the end, the ocean and the music might save us.
Meet me at the beach. Bring your light.
Bring your songs. I'll wait for you.

Some links

Local Wikipedia: a Wikipedia for things that are within a thirty minute walk from where you are.

Railpass: look out the window and see what passengers see on a variety of rail travel corridors across the world.

What America is Living Without: a look at what people, many of whom make much more than me, are foregoing now that the cost of living is soaring.

Forgive the Bad Texters: I have a small delay in responding to my texts, but I’m usually pretty good at getting back to people promptly. Some of my friends, however, take ages (months!).

The New Canadian Canon: a survey at what CanCon from the past 25 years are unmissable. As always, I’m glad CRJ made the list.

Mid—Showa-era lottery tickets from Japan.

Gallery of the World Chocolate Masters 2026 Design Challenge.

Is it worth it to be friends with someone when you know you are going to do all the work? Another gem from Mike Monteiro, this time about the life cycle of friendship.

Who’s your Uber driver on the phone to?

Because the point is not the actual chat. It is a broadly phatic – that is to say language used for bonding – form of communication, an exercise in yearning and homesickness. It helps us bridge a gap between long distances and absences, and simulate a proximity that is so deeply longed for.

This “brutal” Harvard humanities class that everyone wants to take sounds like most of the classes I took in undergrad: lots of reading, mandatory attendance, in-class discussion, etc.

Every restaurant is asking for your phone number these days because gathering (and sharing and selling) data on customers is how many of the big reservation platforms (which are now more than just about reservations) make money.

Related: we have friends who have a fancy credit card that gives them access to reservations at popular restaurants before the rest of us. For those of us that can’t afford these luxury cards, you start to wonder when dining out will just be completely dependent on what card you have and what socioeconomic class you are in:

Even if there aren’t specific partnerships, many credit cards offer some sort of extra points or perks around restaurant dining. To eat at the coolest and most popular places, you increasingly have to have the right credit card. This has led the entire restaurant industry to bend, willingly or not, to the whims of banks. And even if you aren’t participating in the race to the best reservations, you’re probably paying for it anyway. Surely that can’t be good. […]

Emphasis on chance. Like everything in the economy, we are increasingly paying not for ownership, but for access. Having an Amex Platinum card, with its annual fee of $895, does not actually guarantee you a reservation at Le Bernardin. It just makes it a little bit easier. Though you’ll never really know how much easier — credit card companies don’t have to disclose how many people actually get the reservation or the Taylor Swift tickets. That is great for credit card companies. “Part of the appeal [for credit card companies] is that it sounds good to say that your credit card gives you all this special access, but it's potentially a lot cheaper if only a fraction of your credit card users might actually get those perks,” says Mayyasi. You don’t, the banks have learned, actually have to give them anything but hope. […]

Reservations, “once a simple agreement between you and the restaurant, are now a commodity that other people can profit from,” wrote former New York Times critic Pete Wells in 2024. Turning the elation of getting a prime reservation into something as black-and-white as a matter of having the right credit card, and having those credit cards’ fees impact everyone who wants to dine out, means banks and credit cards get to have undue influence on the entire restaurant industry. It allows them to decide which restaurants get big payouts that allow them to keep running, even how many reservations are available on a given night. This influence touches consumers too, because if you do save up, as every purchase is in some way being siphoned off to give someone else cash back rewards, your chances of spending that money at a worthwhile place are that much slimmer. The people who already could afford this level of dining have a better chance at doing so, while everyone else falls a little farther behind. […]

The credit card wars have only revealed what’s been hidden the whole time: That reservations, on some level, have always been a matter of status, and the meal that might be great has become secondary. Not that most of us will ever know.

“Career pressure in any context drives people to places we would rather they not go” The always amazing Mandy Brown on how the career ladder forces people to make bad decisions.

Only 31% of the voting public showed up for our municipal elections in London. That’s not good enough:

Candidates need to give people a reason to show up. London is a big believer in failing upward, or sideways: people who don't work out in one public-facing role lean on their networks and social status to slide into a similar one. New ideas and fresh energy struggle to catch momentum.

My media diet from September and October.