I now find myself with some time on my hands.

It feels not unlike the early days of the pandemic, if I’m being honest. Back then, I was looking for a job, trying to figure out what this newsletter was going to be, watching Tiger King, and largely avoiding other hobbies that seemed to be catching on like wildfire.

I’m once again looking for a job, which remains one of the most demoralizing and frustrating processes out there.

I’ve pretty well settled on the format of this newsletter (even if I can’t stick to an dedicated day of the week on which to publish), but back then, I was trying to push out a newsletter every single day. I might continue to toy around with daily publication of something, but it will largely be on my blog, not in your inboxes.

No crazy bingeworthy documentary series that I’m currently watching, but I am excited for the premiere of Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery tonight.

But I have found myself giving in to the pull of those new hobbies though. (I already told you about my newfound tennis obsession.)

Here I am, coming back (typically way behind the curve) to cool stuff folks found out during the pandemic: Baking bread is fun and delicious.

I’ve made two loaves of bread in two days, and I’ve got to say, folks: I think I’m getting better. Not good, mind you, but better. (Did we eat the “first pancake” loaf? You know it. It was still really good.)

No moral to this story; just going through a rough patch over here, so I’m here to remind myself how thankful I am that I’ve got people who love me and keep me sane through all the ups and downs and, now, some new hobbies to break up the drudgery of applying to jobs. I hope you have the same (minus any drudgery).

Ten Worth Your Time

1. A typically smart, empathetic, and human conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and John Stewart seemed appropriate for the one-year anniversary of the war in Gaza.
2. The thing I can’t stop thinking about: This Atlantic article talking about elite college students who can’t read books. (Insert the callback to the “Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too” here.) That’s the title of the article, so the “can’t” there is doing a lot of work. Of course, they actually can read it, but they’re not prepared or conditioned to. They weren’t required to read entire books in high school, so the requirement feels onerous in college. It is a fascinating roundup of interviews from these elite institutions, and it feels good to know that, while some complaints like this are as old as time, there is something different happening out there in higher ed. The pandemic is the still the easiest answer, but I think the educators I’ve spoken with (and many more, likely) would concede something was already in the air before the pandemic. Spoiler alert: The article’s best guess? Our phones and the way they’ve destroyed our attention spans.
3. The catch-22 of Facebook when it comes to the news: It’s undeniably a vector of misinformation, but we’ve (meaning both producers and consumers of news) become incredibly dependent on it. A law passed last year in Canada saw Facebook banned from posting news into its users’ feeds unless Facebook paid the publishers for the content, and this Columbia Journalism Review story is a brief dispatch on how things are going since, from the vantage of one small town. Here’s a sampling: “That has turned Canadian newsgathering on social media into a game of telephone—out-of-context photos and summaries absent links to the articles from which they’ve been sourced—that few even know is being played. “It would be one thing if they made the absence clear, but they went from blocking the news to facilitating the bamboozling of the news,” David Beers, the founding editor of The Tyee, told me. “If you were an old-fashioned Orwellian dictator, you couldn’t come up with a more clever plan.”
4. What happened to Tucker? Well, if he were anybody else and you were talking about an inexplicable change in politics (and baseline sanity) over the years, you might say: Facebook (or social media, more generally). But he’s not just anybody; he’s part of the problem. He’s Tucker Carlson, and this profile in The Dispatch sounds familiar to anyone who remembers the young magazine writer of the early 2000s, or more likely, anyone who’s looked askance at longtime friends or family members and wondered “Where did that come from?” when they offer a new political hot take.
5. Came upon this slightly later than its publication date would suggest because I found it in the print edition of GQ. But it’s a great magazine feature subject: the rebuilding of Notre-Dame after the devastating 2019 fire.
6. I’m currently listening to the masterful audiobook of Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl. Somewhere in the book’s first 30%, there’s a mention of the USSR’s early propaganda efforts when it heard of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and simply wrote it off as a result that could never happen in a USSR nuclear reactor because its scientists, engineers, and technicians were so much better educated and trained than the Americans. I heard that anecdote shortly after it was announced that Microsoft was going to help bring one of the reactors at Three Mile Island back online to provide the company with all the energy produced in service of its artificial intelligence operations. This episode of Slate’s What’s Next podcast overviews the news, not so much the novelty of the reopening but as a reminder of just how much energy AI requires.
7. Speaking of energy needs, did you hear the news that the United Kingdom is the first G7 nation to phase out burning coal to generate electricity? First in, first out, and it’s a big step that perhaps the rest of the world can and will emulate. I found this article by Carbon Brief from the always-excellent Browser newsletter. “From 1882 until Ratcliffe’s closure, the UK’s coal plants will have burned through 4.6bn tonnes of coal and emitted 10.4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) – more than most countries have ever produced from all sources, Carbon Brief analysis shows.”
8. The Strange Romance of Seahorses in Nautilus is a revealing look at a truly unique phenomenon in the animal world. “Male pregnancy had already been confirmed for pygmies from museum specimens, but their natural behaviors on the coral reefs of Southeast Asia had remained a mystery since their rather accidental discovery in 1970. I couldn’t have predicted, therefore, that my notes on the species would read more like a novel of the Fifty Shades series than a scientific record, revealing many of these mysterious animals’ darkest secrets.”
9. A spooky season science entry: Was a giant reptile, nicknamed “Dracula,”largest flying creature? This nice little story from Atlas Obscura explores the possibility.
10. I absolutely devoured The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. I’d heard it hailed as the book of the summer, and it did not disappoint. I loved hearing her on The New York Times Book Review podcast. Spoiler warning: It does pivot to talking about the ending of the book in the final few minutes of the podcast. They’ll give you a nice warning to help you dodge it though.

Culture Diary

Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past week.

The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.

9/30:

10/1: Slow Horses, S4 (AppleTV+)

10/2:

10/3: Survivor, S47 (Paramount+)

10/4: Only Murders in the Building, S4 (Hulu); Nobody Wants This (3) (Netflix)

10/5: Tennessee Vols vs. Arkansas Razorbacks

10/6: The God of the Woods, Liz Moore; Nobody Wants This (7) (Netflix)