Summer is saying goodbye here in New England, there are pops of red and yellow among the green and the weather is starting to get cooler (while staying more cloudy than I would like it to be). To me, summer felt like a long period of rest, and though COVID still abounds, life is more normal now than not. I have something of a social life again, I’m going out to restaurants (though preferably outdoors, while the weather holds up), and I’m going in to a physical office a couple days a week. Life finds a way.

Today, we have a couple of closely related articles, and after a long time, some book talk. By the way, I realized that I have access to a New York Times subscription via my institution, so expect to see more links to their articles in the future. Since they will be paywalled to most readers, I’ll try to keep them from taking up too much space.

Keep Track of the Tiny Details and Keep Keeping a Logbook

The first of these was from the beginning of the pandemic, when as the sameness of the days kept building, time seemed to become meaningless. The second is from now, when I, for one, have been having a hard time readjusting to the flow of time, and trying to keep at bay the feeling of it slipping through my fingers like so much time. Like the author I find keeping a log of some sort to be helpful. One day I might go back through them and take a look at all the entries, but for now it reminds me that today I did and experienced things I did not yesterday.

The Inner Ring of the Internet and Rewilding Your Attention

Attention is, of course, intimately related to the passage of time. After all, what is attention but the investment of time (intentionally or not)? These days, as the ills of algorithmic social media become increasingly apparent, reclaiming our attention seems to be coming to the forefront of our collective consciousness. As these posts tell us, being aware of where our attention is and why is crucial, both in terms of creation and consumption. In particular, while algorithms may be tuned to show us what’s popular, that’s not necessarily the same as what’s good or important.

Epicene design information

The unassuming title of this articles belies the rich treasure trove of history and culture that it contains. I am certainly a type nerd, though I’m not always interested in the history behind particular designs or trends. But this piece managed to weave together the history of a set of typefaces, the social, economic and political contexts surrounding them, and placed them in relevant cultural contexts of gender and changing tastes. It’s a long read, but very much worth it.

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

I finally managed to finish Olivia Laing’s wonderful book on loneliness, which as I’ve mentioned before, defies neat summarization. It’s a memoir, a history book, cultural and artistic critique, and much more than the sum of its parts. Though maybe not quite as relevant as it was a year ago, I think we will come to look at it as being essentially timeless.

I decided to revisit my youth by picking up a copy of the Silmarillion that I’m now pouring through. That being said, I think I ought to finally read Dune before the movie comes out.

#sundays

The Scholars of Night, by John M. Ford

I’ve been a science fiction buff since I was child, growing up on classic writers like Heinlein and Asimov (yes, I’m excited about the Foundation TV series, no, I’m not getting Apple TV just to watch it). But I admit this was the first time I ever heard of John M. Ford, even though he seems to be highly regarded by some of my contemporary favorites like Neil Gaiman, Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow. It seems like most of his literary works have been in legal limbo for the last few decades, but new editions of his writing are being released. Doctorow’s brief blurb about Scholars of Night sounds very interesting and makes me want to read the rest of his work.

Having Too Much or Too Little Free Time is Linked to Lower Subjective Well-being

I found this paper via Cal Newport on the source of the desire to be productive. As the title suggests, both having too much and too little time results in people reporting lower levels of well-being. So the possibly multi-million-dollar question: how much free time is “just right”? The answer seems to be a little more than two hours a day, but less than five hours. Of course, the definition of “free time” is complicated, and there are a number of complicating factors, as the paper explores in detail. This adds some fuel to a pet theory I’ve been developing: the term “productivity” is overloaded and we really should be using more fine-grained terms for the different kinds of activities we’re talking about.

Understanding ProRAW

With new iPhones just released, this seems like a good time to talk about a feature Apple announced with their previous round of iPhones: ProRAW, a new format for digital images that combines raw data from the camera’s sensor, with some of the computational smarts that Apple has been hard at work on. Even if you have only a passing interest in photography, computational or otherwise, this is a very interesting read.

Two perspectives on the designer who Steve Jobs couldn’t hire

Coming back full circle to giants in their fields who are relatively unknown, this article talks about Richard Sapper, a contemporary of Dieter Rams. Sapper is the designer of (among other things) the IBM ThinkPad 701 and the Alessi 9090 espresso machine. Though I’ve heard of both of those things before, Sapper was unknown to me. This article covers a number of his creations, his design philosophy and contains pointers to documentaries and books about him.

#sundays

Summer is drawing to a close in this part of the world, temperatures are starting to dip, and we managed to escape the worst of both Henri and Ida (though the ground is now thoroughly saturated with water). Meanwhile, the Delta variant continues to rage, though not as much as in some other parts of the country. Still, with college students coming back and schools reopening, numbers are probably going to get worse before they get better. That being said, I’m glad to be living and working in one of the most vaccinated communities in the country and am probably going to start going back to the office, at least for a few days per week. A large part of the reason I like being an academic is being surrounded by excellent colleagues and collaborators. It’s something I’ve sorely missed over the past year and half, and it will be good to be in that environment again.

Resilience is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure

The last year has probably left all of us tired and on edge, especially if you’re living in the US. And while there’s still a lot going on (and probably always will be), it’s not possible to be working all day every day, even on important issues, without burning out. Like many things in life, being able to rest and recover is a skill that we have to learn and practice.

7 Science-backed Methods To Get Out Of Your Head

For me, one of the side-effects of being home all the time is that it’s very easy for me to get stuck inside my own head. This past year has made me realize just how much I depended on being around other people to not get lost in my own thoughts (though writing for an unseen audience does help with that somewhat). Though I’m not a fan of this article’s click-bait-y title, the points themselves make sense, and some of them are things I’ve been trying to do on my own.

The Lonely City by Olivia Lang

Talking about being home alone, I’ve been working my way through Olivia Lang’s excellent book that talks about both her experiences of living alone in New York City, interspersed with detailed histories and observations about how various people and movements in the city’s past have dealt with being alone. Lang is a brilliant writer who manages to weave together personal anecdotes, biographies and social history into a diverse, coherent whole. It’s a highly recommended read even for people who don’t find themselves in lonely cities.

#sundays

We've had a couple days of actually good summer weather here, though we have a week of cloudiness to look forward to. I've been using the good weather to replenish my Vitamin D stores. Yesterday I ended up walking for 5 miles, got some ice cream, ate it outside and took a chunk out of my backlog of Brain Pickings articles. And that brings us to our first selection of the week:

The Woman Who Saved the Hawks

Though ostensibly focused on pioneering conservator Rosalie Edge, and her featuring in the book Beloved Beasts, Brain Pickings writer Maria Popova gives us also gives us a glimpse into the start of the conservation movement, through the eyes of Edge, Rachel Carson, and a number of both beautiful and horrifying images of birds. My long walk yesterday took me through some protected wetlands, and yes, gave me glimpses of a number of birds along the way, making this article particularly timely.

How to Find Focus

Like a lot of people, the last few years have done a number on my ability to focus. Even before the pandemic and political turmoil of 2020 and early 2021, doomscrolling, the addictive, engineered dopamine hits of social media threatened to make any kind of deep focus a thing of the past. While I'm working on improving my focus in the short time (mostly by staying offline as much as possible), this article talks about focus on longer timescales: focus (or perhaps more accurately, direction) can be a result of exploring a number of options first, and then deciding which ones are best for you.

In Times of Crisis, Draw Upon the Strength of Peace

While I've been enjoying the last few days, it's not lost on me that we live in complicated times (socially, politically, environmentally) and that we are likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. These times will be marathons, not sprints, especially if we want to achieve lasting positive change, and not just survival. In that light, it's important to “put on your own oxygen mask first”, make sure you do the things needed to ground yourself and maintain your own sanity and safety. As this article tells us, there is no way to peace, peace is the way. (An Anti-Mandalorian credo of sorts?)

#sundays