A big pile of imperfect things

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. I loved reading all your recommended big books for summer! (I think I’m going to read Middlemarch the way Sarah H reads it with her students, over eight weeks: “one week for each of the original eight parts in which it was published from December 1871 to December 1872.”)
   
   

2. “What if you make a big pile of imperfect things?” Sarah Leavitt on joyful persistence.
   
   

3. Desert power: We finally watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which got me to finally pick up American Prometheus. A really interesting Oppenheimer-related read is a short essay from Ken Layne’s Desert Oracle called “Magic and War in Los Alamos with William S. Burroughs.” (Oppenheimer once wrote to a friend, “My two great loves are physics and New Mexico.”)
   
   

4. Auditory illusion: When I was flipping through a copy of The Nolan Variations, I came across the phenomenon of the “Shepard Tone” that Nolan loves to use in his movies. (Some call it the audio equivalent of a “Barber’s pole,” which has its own wild history.)
   
   

5. Ear candy: I made a new mixtape for May.
   
   

6. “Who is that kid? What’s he going to be?” My oldest son finished elementary school this week, and while I was watching his graduation ceremony with all his classmates, I thought of John Warner’s letter, “Who Are They Going to Be?” (Because we have a long, hot summer ahead of us, I re-read my list of “Summer (un)Schooling” tips and my notes from John Holt’s newsletter, Growing Without Schooling.)
   
   

7. “Most of us will have to build our cottage from scraps…” Alan Jacobs on building an attention cottage. (Because I recently had to explain how blood pressure works at the dinner table, I enjoyed this bit in particular: “The great artists and thinkers cultivate a systolic/diastolic rhythm, tension and release, an increase and then decrease of pressure.”)
   
   

8. TV: Hacks is back for a third season on Max and is as funny as ever. My highest recommendation — more half hour comedies, please!
   
   

9. Two new music documentaries that I can’t wait to watch: Stax: Soulsville USA on Max and The Beach Boys on Disney+.
   
   

10. A lovely thought to end on from @lauren_wilford: “big secret to happiness is just liking stuff. finding more stuff to like. finding ways to like stuff you didn’t before…”
    

That’s all this newsletter is, really: just me sharing the stuff that I like. It thrills me that what I wrote in Show Your Work! remains true: “Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.” 

So thanks for reading!

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xoxo,

Austin

photo: @derrickvfields