By this time most years, we have visited the orchard at least twice, spending hours picking apples of every variety.

Our first visit, usually in September, brings us galas, empires, jonagolds, and cortlands. We roam the rows looking for the right apples to pick: crisp, bright, stems easily coming off the tree. We look for some lower on the trees so that Zoya can reach them; we look for some higher on the trees which haven’t been as picked over by the crowds. We fill a ten-pound bag (sometimes two), take some photos, and just relish being outside on the farm.

We don’t pick honeycrisps; those we buy already-picked, gathered in a bag in the farm store. They are the ones that get eaten the fastest in our house, and we trust the farmers to ensure we have the best ones.

Most years, after we have done picking, we head inside to the orchard barn where we pick up a baked good or two—apple fritters, apple muffins, apple pie are all for sale—and enjoy them in the café before heading home. (We made the mistake of ordering hot apple cider one year and realized it was made or stored in a coffee urn, giving the cider a distinct bitter taste.)

Our second visit usually comes in October, when we are lucky to pick ambrosias, fujis, mutsus, and a few other late season varieties. The weather is usually cooler, and our photos capture us in coats—sometimes toques—roaming through the rows, looking for the perfect apples to take home with us. When the neighboring pumpkin patch on the orchard is ready, we sometimes bring home a pumpkin. We enjoy the crispness of fall, of being outside at the cusp of the cold, holding on to the last vestiges of the harvest season before the frost comes and everything on the orchard changes.

There is a fun farm at the orchard, full of rides and slides and swings and toys. Some years, we spend some time in there, letting Zoya play among the hay bales and climb the wooden, seemingly-shaky, structures.

We take our bags of apples (and our unfinished baked goods from the café), and we head home, ready to make applesauce and apple crisp and apple cake and all sorts of other delights. (I’ve mentioned before that Lise is a wonder in the kitchen, and in the fall, she makes sure our house is immersed with apple aromas and delicious desserts.)

This year, our schedules conspired against us and we only made it to the apple orchard once, just this past weekend. The cold had settled in and we shivered from time to time as we wandered the rows of trees, picking some lovely late season apples, making sure we had enough to get us through the weeks ahead. There was no one picking the ambrosias (the rest of the orchard was busy) so for a short while it felt like we had the whole place to ourselves, the rows being empty aside from our own hands reaching for the reds and greens that glimmered from the branches. We picked and tasted and played. We enjoyed being outside, with each other, relishing the real arrival of the fall: after all, it doesn’t feel like the autumn has arrived until we find ourselves filling our bag at the orchard.

After a warm spell last week, it feels like the season is finally showing itself. The early morning walks to the bus stop this week have been snappy and brisk, and I have pulled the hats and mitts out of their storage spaces and back on our shelves for easy access. We are entering the wintering time, where we bundle up and brace ourselves for the chill every time we step outside.

We eat apples almost every day in this time of transition; they bring a warmth to our cold days as we remember the excursions we have taken to procure them. They remind us of days spent outdoors, days spent staring at trees, and most importantly, days spent together as a family. There is a coziness that comes from remembering those times, and that warmth comes in handy when the frost settles in.

Soon, our apple bags will be empty. Soon, the winter will arrive in full gusto. Soon, we will settle in on the coldest days, warm drinks in our hands, and remember the fall days on the orchard, and we will look forward to our next visits as autumn rolls around again next year.

A poem

How We Disappear
Alessandra Olanow

I am in the store touching things.
Linen napkins, a blue bowl.
The world is on fire and I am choosing between two kinds of soap.

Everyone here is doing this, filling carts with small comforts while somewhere a child goes to bed hungry, while the earth heats,
while men make decisions about who gets to live.

I know what this is, this careful arranging
while everything collapses.
This is how we survive.
And also how we disappear.

Some links

Having people over can be an effort. There is a case for low-stakes visits:

Low-stakes visits make maintaining a social life much easier. But if the casual visit is going to really take off, a couple of attitudes will need to change. One is the widespread sense that homes are sanctuaries reserved for oneself and one’s immediate family. The other is the pressure that many people feel, when they do host, to be at their very best. Fix those instincts, and hanging out might yet make a comeback. […]

Welcoming someone into the real, lived-in state of your home gives them permission to worry less about their own imperfections. The same goes for welcoming people into your life: Open the door, and don’t mind the mess.

Related; a breakdown of the reasons why we aren’t hosting people in our homes anymore. Among them:

Americans used to have many kids whom they cared for sparsely; now they have fewer children to whom they devote every minute of their lives. […]

Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others.

The rise of AI is making everything the same, leading to an age of “bleh”:

A 2026 Nature report found it takes shockingly little time for skills to atrophy once AI has been introduced. This coincides with the anecdotal feeling knowledge workers increasingly report around AI use and it making them feel, well, dumber. In a 2026 survey of 2,500 employees, 39% said their reliance on AI was actively making them less intelligent. In this way, airbrain also captures how AI use is eroding the cognitive skills people were hired for in the first place. This should concern organizations: when they eventually wish to return to human-generated solutions and content, they might find they need time to rebuild the skills that most directly contributed to their differentiation in the first place. […]

Knowledge Work organizations will come to the same conclusion. Once every player in an industry is leveraging AI, any competitive advantage it offers is neutralized; they will return to uniqueness — in content, in strategy, in solutions — as a competitive advantage. Since LLMs do not do this differentiation well, companies will return to seeking humans who can offer the type of differentiation only humans can. And it will mark a return to valuing unfiltered human judgment, perspective and taste as the fundamental drivers of differentiation in the eyes of prospects and customers.

Relevant to AI and how they are trying to get us to use it more and more at work: Cookie Monster tries to meet his AI mandate.

Also because of AI: everything online now is fake:

We must return to 1990s-type hysterics with regards to the internet. Refuse to take anything or anyone at face value. Assume that everything you see is a falsehood tailor-made to mislead or manipulate you. If it seems too good to be true, if it reinforces your beliefs in a neat little way, it's probably AI-generated.

Is this an exhausting way to live? Of course it is, which means probably just spending less time online in general.

My Instapaper queue is overwhelming, but I’ve come to peace with that knowing I don’t have to read everything; I can treat my reading pile as a river:

I assume you'd agree that the problem of your to-read pile is very much not one of filter failure. It's not that you're deluged with things you don't care about, and need help figuring out what's truly of interest. It's that you're overwhelmed by things you do want to read. All the books on your bedside table, all those bookmarks in your browser, or articles saved to Instapaper – all of them seem like they might be right up your street, or crucial to your professional success, or might contain some nugget of wisdom you'd benefit from absorbing. The problem, as the critic Nicholas Carr explained, isn't filter failure. It's filter success. In a world of effectively infinite information, the better you get at sifting the wheat from the chaff, the more you end up crushed beneath a never-ending avalanche of wheat.

Why aren’t smart people happier? An interesting look at how we measure intelligence and what it all means:

There is, unfortunately no good word for “skill at solving poorly defined problems.” Insight, creativity, agency, self-knowledge—they’re all part of it, but not all of it. Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they’re also everyday questions like “how do you host a good party” and “how do you figure out what to do today.” […]

This is why the people who score well on intelligence tests and win lots of chess games are no happier than the people who flunk the tests and lose at chess: well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills. Life ain’t chess! Nobody agrees on the rules, the pieces do whatever they want, and the board covers the whole globe, as well as the inside of your head and possibly several metaphysical planes as well.

A Bluesky thread of people sharing their family “dialects,” unique words, terms, or phrases will just be universally understood by most or all of at least a nuclear family.

So much of our technology runs on code looked after by a handful of people. Here’s a look at some of those individuals keeping our phones and computers running.

Another incisive piece by Mandy Brown, well worth reading in its entirety:

Our language about work has become intensely output focused in recent years, and for reasons: to talk of the impact of the work without talking of the process is very convenient for capitalism, which is always trying to externalize any effect not profitable. We measure revenue going up; never mind the people injured in the process, or the pollution released to the air, or the neighborhoods no longer inhabitable after fracking has spoiled the ground water.

On the trend of fine dining restaurants going for more casual and affordable approaches, and what that says about our economy and society.

“I want to embrace minor discomforts if doing so can make me feel even slightly more alive and engaged in the world.”

Visualization tools that measure and explore the potential impacts of tariffs on jobs and businesses across Canadian cities and communities.

“Some hobbies wait for life to make room for them, and others require life to move aside.”

An excellent piece by my friend Sean Boots (the legend) on institutional reform and things learned while trying to build a better public service — and where to go next.

My friend Jenny Zhang gave an amazing talk about tech worker organizing and organized labor and how it can help fix the era of the oligarchy we find ourselves in.

An incredible essay detailing what it’s like to be on a cruise filled with celebrity impersonators and a look into the psyches of impersonators themselves.

One of the things I strongly believe is we need to stop privatizing government functions and instead build capacity in a strong public service. This piece dives into why that’s a good idea:

The problem is not just that privatization is often inefficient because it adds a nontransparent layer of profiteering on top of government functions. The problem is that government loses basic capacity. This, of course, was an explicit goal of the right. […]

Public is usually better, as well as fairer.

Cory Doctorow looks at how Amazon and Expedia have made everything everywhere more expensive because of pseudo-monopolies and “most favored nation” clauses.

A harrowing account of what’s it’s like to have your whole digital identity (passwords, accounts, everything) be exposed to nefarious actors on the web — and how it has ramifications even outside of your online life.

Something I had never thought about: how many shots are in the average movie, and how has that changed over the years?

Speaking of movies: who is the actual Kevin Bacon, the person most connected to everyone else in Hollywood?

Jason Kottke shared this over on Mastodon, from a post he saw on X:

Influencers are the private equity of culture: draining whatever's 'cool' until higher prices and worse experiences push out the original fan base. Then they move on to the next thing, leaving the original to die as fans lose interest or the ability to participate.