Category: essays

Recently I have been carrying 5 index cards in the back of my Field Notes notebook as a way of jotting down reading notes for audiobooks and magazine articles. Jotting down notes for a paper book is easy. I frequently make my notes in the margins of the book and go back through it later to see what is worth keeping. The same is true for Ebooks, although it is not quite as elegant at the margin solution for paper books. The challange, for me, has always been how to take notes for audiobooks.

I love audiobooks, They have been a game-changer in how much more I have been able to read in a given years. At the end of this coming January, I will have been an Audible subscriber for 10 years, and in that decade, I’ve accumulated nearly 1,300 audiobooks and read half that number. (It is always better to have books on my shelve–even virtual ones–that I haven’t read; those books are my anti-library). But I have always found it dificult to take notes listening to audiobooks. I think there are several reasons for this:

1. I am frequently doing other things while listening to an audiobook: walking, exercising, emptying the dishwashing, driving somewhere, grocery shopping, etc.
2. Unlike paper books, there is no margin in which to jot notes.
3. The features available for bookmarking a spot in an audiobook and making a note in the app are not particularly useful.

What’s a fellow to do?

I have mostly solved this problem with 5 index cards. Each morning, I put 5 blank index cards in the back of my current Field Notes notebook. That notebook is in my back pocket at all times. As I go through my day, if I am listening to a book and something I read is noteworthy, I’ll pause the book, pull out a card, and make a note using the following procedure:

1. If I haven’t already done so, I’ll jot the title of the book on a card.
2. I’ll make my note as a bullet (or two, or three) on the card.
3. If I think I want to come back to the particular passage that inspired the note, I’ll jot the timestamp at which I paused the book at the end of the bullet.
4. If I jot the timestamp, I’ll add a bookmark in the Audible app to make it easy to get back to.

These four steps have worked out great for me. If I am walking in the morning, and want to make a note, I’ll step to the side of the bike path, pull out my notebook and a card, and jot my note, and then continue on. It is far easier for me to do this than to try to capture the note in Audible, or any other app, for that matter.

Moreover, they have solved a particular problem: I am good notetaker when I read paper books, but not nearly as good with audiobooks, mainly because of the inconvenience of doing so. But I read more audiobooks than paper books these days, simply because I can multitask doing the former, which means I don’t take notes as much as I would if I read paper books. Since switching to this index card method, my notes for audiobooks equals my notes for paper books. I use a similar process when reading magazine articles, like the randomly selected article I read at breakfast each morning. I used to scribble notes in the margins of the magazine, but I find using the cards an easier method.

Why five index cards? When I started doing this, I tried to think of how many cards I’d need to carry around with me. I picked five, thinking that if I filled up more on a given day, I could add to it. So far, I’ve never used all five cards on a single day, and so five seems reasonable. And five cards fits easily into the back of my Field Notes notebook with a paperclip.

At the end of the day, I toss the cards I’ve made notes on in a box on my desk. I replace the cards in my notebook with blank cards. At the end of the week, I go through the cards in my box, reviewing them, and deciding if it is worth making a permanent note from them. This is a nice buffer that provides some distance between the time I record the note and the time I review it. For those cards on which I decide to make a permanent note, I transcribe the card into Obsidian. Here is the note I created in Obsidian from the card on the “Abandon Ship” article above:

So far, this 5 index card system is working out well for me. I enjoy scribbling notes on the cards, which encourages me to continue to do it. I also like going through the box of cards at the end of the week, and deciding which cards, if any, a worthy of a permanent note. It gives me an opportunity to review all of the notes I’ve jotted for the week and resurfaces the thoughts I had while I was reading.

Written on October 19, 2022.

A while back I mentioned on Twitter that I wanted to catalog all of the books in my collection. I was looking for the best tool to do the job the way I wanted to do it. (I tend to have very specific requirements in this regard). Then last week, I mentioned on Twitter that I had been spending time writing fairly sophisticated Javacript code for Obsidian’s Tempalter plug-in:

Yesterday, in a fit of creativity, I spent much of the day writing code for some sophisticated Templater functionality for @obsdmd. Once I have things working, I’ll post more about it. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/ARIoS4c0VY

— Jamie Todd Rubin (@jamietr) October 9, 2022

The net result is that for the past 3 weeks, I have been writing a ton of code for the Templater plug-in that would support my ability to have my entire book collection database stored in plain text files in Obsidian in a way that meets my own personal requirements.

Within the next week or so, I’ll have a much more detailed post on this. I’ll discuss what my requirements were, and how I came to land on Obsidian as the master database for my book collection. I’ll talk about data entry (which my code is designed to dramatically speed up) and I’ll use a single shelve of books as an example of what I have been able to achieve so far. I’ll also make my code available on GitHub to anyone who wants to use it.

Just wanted you all to know why I have been so quiet here the last few weeks. You can expect some (hopefully!) good stuff about managing my book collection and reading lists in Obsidian coming soon.

Have a great week!

Written on October 17, 2022.

Earlier in the month, I wrote about one small way I am battling decision fatigue: I wrote a script to select one random article from the magazines I read. Each morning, I run my script, find out what article has been selected, and the locate the magazine. I take it out on the deck along with my breakfast, and proceed to sit in the quiet morning air and read the article. Usually, I’ll snap a photo of the article and post it on Twitter. For instance, here is the one from this morning

This morning’s breakfast reading on the deck is “Saving the a night Sky” by @josh_sokol with photos by @vincentlaforet in the Oct. @sciam pic.twitter.com/AAwqHaTtkt

— Jamie Todd Rubin (@jamietr) September 25, 2022

I have been reading random articles from my subscriptions for the last month, and I am really enjoying it. I went into this simply trying to eliminate a decision from my day, but it turns out there has been a number of benefits.

First, because the selection is random, and because I am committed to reading whatever is selected each day, I’ve ended up reading articles I wouldn’t have selected on my own–many of which have turned out to be fascinating, well written, insightful, and even heart-wrenching. The randomness, and the commitment to read whatever is selected expands the range of what I read, which is a good thing.

Second, it provides a nice break in my morning routine. I usually end up reading my article just after my morning walk and just before my workout; or just after my workout and just before I start work for the day. It is a nice buffer to have.

Third, because I post what I am reading on Twitter, I pay closer attention to the authors of the articles. If they have a presence on Twitter, I try to tag them, and searching for them helps me learn more about them, and I discover more of what they have written. An unexpected side-effect of this is that sometimes my post reminds writers that there are people out there reading what they have written. Just this morning, for instance, I saw this quote tweet about the post I made on yesterday’s morning reading:

As a freelance, WFH writer, it’s easy to forget what you make in the dark of your quiet home office is a thing that exists in the world. Which is why tweets like this can feel extra special. I’m honored and humbled to see my story side-by-side with someone like @samknightwrites https://t.co/ydhS3wISVI

— Michael VM (@Christglider) September 25, 2022

There is a problem, however. I find that though I am reading at least one feature article every day, The list of articles to read seems to grow week-to-week. I blame the New Yorker. It is a weekly magazine, instead of a monthly. Where I might get 4-6 features in a regular monthly magazine, I get 4-6 features a week in the New Yorker. It also skews the random selection a bit: with more New Yorker articles, there is a greater chance that there will be a New Yorker article selected. I’ve considered possible solutions to this, but haven’t come up with a good one yet.

My script automatically removes a selected article from the “to-read” list, but I still track this in the magazine itself. When I finish reading an article, I cross it off in the table of contents, like this:

One unexpected side-effect of this is the joy I feel upon crossing off the last feature article in a given issue. This happened recently with an issue of Outside Magazine. I’d read all of the articles, and crossed off the last one. I took the magazine off the pile and added it to the week’s recycling.

At present there is a fairly large stack of issues with some, but not all, of the articles crossed off. The pile seems to grow, but skimming through it, I can see at least a half dozen issues where only one or two articles remain unread. I imagine there will be a week in the near future where I may complete 4 or 5 issues and the pile will suddenly shrink.

Until now, I have had to run my script on my local computer, which meant that when I was away from home, I’d have to run the script in advance to know what to read each day while I was gone. But this weekend, I fixed that problem. The text files I use to maintain my “to-read” and “read” lists are stored in Dropbox. I created an Apple Shortcut that does essentially the same thing as my shell script. I now can say to my phone, “Hey Siri, select a random article” and Siri will reply with the name of the random article I should read (the shortcut also moves the article to my read list).

Geeky technology aside, I am really enjoying my mornings on the deck reading random articles. Looking ahead, I’m trying to figure out what I’ll do once the temperature really starts to drop. Probably I can just sit out there with my coat and hat and enjoy the cold fresh air. That sounds good at the edge of summer when the temperatures are still uncomfortably warm, but we’ll have to see how that works in practice.

Written on September 25, 2022.

Back in February when I had my annual physical and was not yet 50 years old, my doctor said it was time for me to have a colonoscopy for screening purposes. I said, “I kind of figured that, what with me turning 50 next month.”

“The guidelines have changed,” my doctor said, “Now they recommend 45.”

He told me that I should try to get one scheduled by the end of the year. He gave me a sheet of paper with local gastroenterologists, and said, “You might want to call sooner rather than later. I’m hearing that a lot of these places are, um, backed-up.”

Fast-forward seven months. I turned 50, went on vacation in Ireland, and when I got back, I finally decided to schedule the appointment. The colonoscopy took place last week. The results were all good. Here are some notes and observations for anyone who might find them useful.

• There really should be a service that you can subscribe to which handles all medical related appointments and forms. I, for one, would gladly pay for a service which would have access to my calendar, and could handle all of the back-and-forth involved in finding, screening, and scheduling an appointment, and filling out the necessary forms, and dealing with the insurance company.
• Everyone I talked to who’d had a colonoscopy warned me that the “cleansing” was the worst part. Back in high school, I worked in a pharmacy and I remember people coming in for that 64-oz jug of Golytely with the powder on the bottom. I heard that stuff was terrible. My prep was as follows:
  • Liquid diet only beginning the day before the procedure. Since my procedure was on a Thursday morning, it meant a liquid diet beginning first thing Wednesday morning.
  • At 3pm on Wednesday afternoon, take 2 Dulcolax tablets.
  • At 5pm on Wednesday afternoon, drink 32oz of regular Gatorade laced with a bottle of Miralax.
  • At 5:30am on Thursday morning, drink another 32oz of regular Gatorade lacked with a bottle of Miralax.
• It was impossible to find a 64oz bottle of Gatorade anywhere. It was impossible to find a 32oz bottle. Ultimately, I ordered 2-32oz bottles from Amazon. I quickly discovered a problem. The bottle of Miralax contains 238grams of very fine, flavor-free powder. The 32oz Gatorade bottles are filled to the brim with Gatorade. Adding the powder to the bottles would displace the Gatorade. What I did was this:
  • Drank down about 1/5th of the Gatorade to make room for the powder.
  • Added the powder and shook up the mixture.
  • Drank the rest of the Gatorade mixture. It tasted like… Gatorade.
  • Opened the other bottle of Gatorade and poured half of it into the first bottle.
  • Added half of the remaining powder to each bottle.
  • Returned them to the fridge for the following morning.
• At some point during the evening, someone took my two bottles of Gatorade out of the fridge to get the milk. They left them on the counter all night. In the morning, I had drink 32oz of warm Gatorade.
• I drank my first bottle of Gatorade at 5pm Wednesday afternoon. Given what everyone told me, I expected something on the order of volcanic eruption with significant magma displacement. What actually happened was not nearly that dramatic, or even particularly inconvenient. I was warned to stay near a bathroom after taking the medicine, but I could have gone out for my morning walk with no ill effect. Kelly says this is because I have an unusual digestive system to begin with. I was kind of let down by the whole thing.
• The worst part of the process by far was not eating. On the Tuesday before, we had a remarkably busy schedule with 8 overlapping events that for some reason we had to attend. I had no time for dinner, and it wasn’t until 9:30pm that I finally wolfed something down quickly. That was the last solid food I had until about 11:45am on Thursday. All day on Wednesday, I was so hungry. I saw food everywhere. I thought about food constantly. It was miserable. Far worse, in my mind, than the cleansing phase.
• My appointment was for 10:30am on Thursday, but for some reason, I had to be there an hour early. The reason: I had a bunch of forms to fill out. The the very first bullet above.
• I had a fantastic anesthesiologist, Dr. B., who was funning, charming, and engaging. She explained everything and said that the hard part was over and that now I’d earned a good nap. They used Propofol to knock me out. I’d been under general anesthesia a few other times so I knew the drill. The wheeled me into the room where they perform the procedure. I talked with Dr. B about Ireland. I remember I explaining to her that the day we went to the Cliffs of Moher was the only foggy day we had. And then, I was in the recovery room.
• I wolfed down the crackers and water they gave me, while the doctor came by and told me that I had one of the best colons he’d ever seen. “No one’s ever said that to me before,” I told him.
• When I got home a little while later, I made myself a ham, turkey and cheese sandwich. It was one of the best sandwiches I’d ever had in my life.

It is a week later as I write this. There were really no ill-effects to the entire process, other than being hungry for 36 hours. And the fasting even knocked off a few extra pounds.

Written on September 21, 2022.

Recently, in my reading, both James Boswell and Edward Gibbon keep popping up. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is frequently referred to as the ultimate in biography and Boswell the ultimate biographer. Meanwhile, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall comes up again and again as one of the best histories ever written. Moreover, many people I admire have read and enjoyed the latter, not the least of which are John Adams and Isaac Asimov. I have wanted to read Decline and Fall for some time now. A while back, I acquired a 6-volume set of Everyman’s Library editions. And while visited a used bookstore recently, I obtained a copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Both books would be huge undertakings, and I’ve already got a fairly long list of books taxiing to the runway ahead of these. So the two questions that remain are: when can I read them, and which should I read first, Boswell or Gibbon?

Considering this, I remembered that my friend Bart told me about a book called The Club by Leo Damrosch, which is about a gathering of great minds, among whose members were both Boswell and Gibbon. I decided that I would read that book before either of the other two, and make my decision based on whatever direction that book pointed me in. That is a much shorter book, and I figure my book-traffic-controller can slot it in after Fairy Tale by Stephen King (which I hope to start today), and Hell and Back by Craig Johnson, which I plan on reading right after King.

This still leaves the problem of when to read Boswell and Gibbon. Given the speed at which I typically read, I expect I’d need to set aside 7-10 days for Boswell, and possibly twice as long for Gibbon. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of books coming out this month that I want to read. I think December would be the earliest at this point. It might be a good time since I will be on vacation for several weeks in December and might be able to read more than I usually do.

In the meantime, does anyone have thoughts or opinions on which to read first, Boswell or Gibbon? Let me know in the comments.

Written on September 7, 2022.

Over the weekend, while visiting a friend from high school, I learned of the horrifying revelations of grooming and abuse in my high school program in the time just after I was there. Seyward Darby spent 9 month investigating this abuse and exposed in a recent piece of journalism that rivals anything that Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens achieved in their day. Though it is painful, I urge you to read her piece, “Fault Lines” on the Atavist. Indeed, if you have to choose between this piece and hers, read hers.

I spent much of last night thinking about my own experience in the humanities magnet program at Cleveland High in Reseda, California. I attended the school between 1987-1990, and I have written about the positive effects the “core” program had on me. Darby’s piece was like seeing that program through a mirror, darkly.

Before I continue, I want to make a couple of points upfront:

1. I have no words to express the horror that the students who experienced abuse by teachers in the core program must have felt, nor can I adequately comprehend the bravery it took to come forward. I can try to comprehend what these students experienced through the distant gulf of biography, which while descriptive, certainly doesn’t come close to conveying the true horror of living it and living with it.
2. As a straight, white male, I play the game of life at the lowest difficulty level, to borrow a phrase from John Scalzi. My experience at Cleveland (and in other areas of life) is through this privileged perspective. Being aware of that is important.

During my time at Cleveland, I had several of the teachers mentioned in the piece. I had Ray Linn as a teacher in both 11th and 12th grade, if I remember correctly. I had Michael Helwig for some math class, I can’t recall which. I honestly can’t remember if I had Chris Miller, or not, but I certainly remember him. After my friend told me about Darby’s investigation, we sat around talking, he and his wife and me and Kelly. I tried to explain the program to Kelly, though she’s heard me talk about it countless times. My friend mentioned the way Ray Linn frequently denigrated students, and my response was almost exactly that which appears in Darby’s piece, “He taught through the Socratic method.” Ray Linn was something of a character in the school, and I always took his jaded view of the world to be a persona that couldn’t possibly represent who he was when he was at home.

My friends and I all knew about Miller letting kids out of school through his window. That was about the worst-kept secret in the program. There was a familiarity among students and faculty that I hadn’t experienced before that. I can’t remember if students referred to teachers by their first name, or not. I know that I never did. Back then, all adults were “Mr.” or “Mrs.” or “Miss”; it was unthinkable for me to refer to any adult, let alone a teacher, otherwise. But I don’t doubt that it happened.

I frequently speak fondly of my time at Cleveland, and I’ve often attributed my ability to write essays to that core program. I must have had some natural talent as a writer before entering the program, but it was that program, and the essays tests we took that shaped that raw talent into something more. Would I have been able to write and sell stories and articles without the program? Would I have maintained a blog for 17 years and more than 7,100 posts if not for that program? It’s hard to say, but my gut says no. The thing I’ve often thought is that the core program made us feel special. Perhaps I should just speak for myself and say, it made me feel special. That is the closest I can come to understanding how teachers went about grooming students for abuse. It was a window of access, that feeling of being special.

Even within the school, the “core” program was, as Darby states in her piece, “a school within a school” and I recall times when Neal Anstead would bring guest into our classes to see us in action, something that I imagine did not occur in the standard English and History classes outside the humanities program. Many of our classes were discussions, in particular our philosophy classes, and once, I remember Ray Linn going off on something (I can’t remember what) when Neal Anstead and a guest crept silently into the back of the classroom. “Their just a bunch of fucking idiots,” Linn said to finish his tirade. Then he paused, glanced toward the back of the classroom, and with a mild look on his face, said, “Oh look, it’s the boss.”

In 12th grade we were studying Renè Descartes. We had intense discussions in Linn’s class about existence, whether or not you can trust your senses, and perhaps this is all a dream: Descartes, cogito ergo sum. Darby writes about Miller lining up girls in order of attractiveness. I have no doubt that happened. There were other ways we were competitive. Writing essays was one. All of our core tests were essay tests and we were expected to write essays that made use of all of the disciplines we were learning: philosophy, literature, social institutions and art history. Linn’s essay question for the essay on existentialism was put to us as follows: “Prove you don’t exist. If there isn’t blood on the paper when you turn it in, you can’t get an A.” There wasn’t blood on my essay back then, but it feels like there is blood on this essay now.

After our essays were done, we commiserated on how long they were. It wasn’t uncommon for us to write 8-10 handwritten pages in the 2 hours we were given, but there some students who could write much more.

Though I went through the program feeling that “core” made us special somehow, I never felt particularly noticed by teachers. There are only two teachers I can think of who probably knew my name, otherwise, I felt I was just an anonymous face among many students who shined more brilliantly than I ever did.

There was one teacher my friends and I liked particularly in our senior year. After our graduation ceremony, we went to a friend’s house to celebrate. It was an evening pool party, and this teacher was invited, and much to my surprise, showed up at the party. I always felt there was a social gulf between teachers and students (I do so even today when I find myself talking to my own kids’ teachers) and so it was a little odd to see this teacher there. But he was invited and as I recall, he didn’t stay very long.

I mention this for the same reason I mention Linn’s essays question and that “special” feeling we had being “corebabies”: all of it was cast in a new light after reading Seyward Darby’s piece. It is why I wholeheartedly believe the women who have come forward. Even though I didn’t experience the grooming and abuse they did, the environment that made it possible was there in the years that I attended. Three decades later, as a middle-aged parent with a teenager and two younger daughters, it seems to me I should have recognized it for what it was, but I didn’t. I was a teenager myself with no worldly experience to speak of.

It is a shame. I believe the interdisciplinary program we had is what we need more of in education. In grade school I learned to read. In high school, in Cleveland’s humanities program, I learned to think critically about what I read. It seems to me that this critical thinking is more important than ever. Lack of critical thinking leads to what Michael Rich, president emeritus of the RAND Corporation, and his colleague Jennifer Kavanagh refer to as “truth decay.”

I am grateful for my experience in Cleveland’s humanities program. To this day all of my best friends were the friends I had during my years at Cleveland. Yet I am horrified by what students who came to the program shortly after I graduated had to endure and live with for decades thereafter. I hope that somehow they can find peace in all of this, but I also know that isn’t always possible. All night I have wondered if there was anything we did to foster the environment that made core students feel special. After all, we participated in that familiarity and camaraderie with the teachers in our classroom experience. Did that help make it seem okay to cross a line? I like to tell myself that it takes a certain kind of person to cross that line, and that it would have happened with or without us, but it is impossible to say.

If you have read this far, please, please, please take the time to read Seyward Darby’s “Fault Lines” as it is the only way to truly see what the environment was like, and what these women had to endure.

Written on September 6, 2022.

On August 28 I finished reading The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough. It was a milestone read in that it was the last remaining McCullough book I had to read. Having read it, I have read the complete David McCullough–at least his books. Since he recently passed away, unless he has a book in press, there won’t be another. Sadder words are hard come by for a reader such as me.

For those curious, I read the books over a long period of years and in the following order:

Title	Date first read
John Adams*	7/2/2001
Truman*	7/15/2001
Brave Companions: Portraits in History	5/8/2018
1776	3/14/2019
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris	3/18/2019
The Pioneers	5/10/2019
The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For	5/11/2019
The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge	9/21/2020
The Wright Brothers	9/26/2020
The Johnstown Flood	8/12/2022
Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt	8/18/2022
The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914	8/28/2022

My favorite of all McCullough’s books is also my first, John Adams, which I have read 3 times and from which I feel I profit more from each reading. Truman is another that I have read more than once, fascinated by the depth and detail. Both these books made me feel as if I was living in the times in which they take place. Both The Great Bridge and The Path Between the Seas are biographies of engineering marvels, each filled with fascinating details. Despite these books being history, in both cases I was, at times, on the edge of my seat wondering if these great works would ever be completed.

That is the power–the gift–of the writer. And McCullough was a gifted writer, biographer and historian. Certainly he was one of my favorites. But why was he so good? I’ve been giving that some thought lately and I think it comes down to four factors:

1. Quality of research. McCullough immersed himself in research, focusing on primary sources, including diaries and letters from people where were there. He often identified multiple sources or witness accounts of the same event and used them to suss out the truth so far as it could be determined–something he was always careful to mention when certain facts were in question or uncorroborated. He was patient, and didn’t rush the research. He worked part time on his first book, The Johnstown Flood. When he came to write the biography of Truman, he spent ten years on the research.
2. Remarkable storytelling ability. McCullough had a remarkable ability to synthesize all of that research and find within it a compelling storyline. All of that painstaking research, all of those gathered facts and corroborations combined with an unusually gifted talent for writing and storytelling to put the reader in the middle of everything. Reading John Adams, I felt I was standing in the room while the debate of independence was carried out. When describing the digging of the canal, I felt I was out there among the man and mosquitos.
3. Courage to explore. McCullough took the time and space he needed to explore all aspects of a subject. As asthma played a significant role in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, he took time in his biography of the young Roosevelt, Mornings on Horseback, to do a deep dive into the history of asthma from ancient times to the present. Similarly, one can’t discuss the digging of the Panama Canal without discussing disease, and one can’t discuss malaria without at least mentioning the mosquito. McCullough took a fascinating deep dive here as well.
4. A knack for choosing interesting subjects. McCullough picked subjects that were both interesting and lesser-know. Even now the only other biography of note I can thing of with respect to John Adams’ is Page Smith’s, which was published some 40 years before McCullough’s biography came out. The Johnstown flood had been virtually forgotten.

Combined, it is no wonder that McCullough was as successful a writer as he turned out to be. It was inevitable. And yet, I wish he could have written more. Once, I saw an interview where he mentioned having dozens of projects listed out that he wanted to tackle. It turns out there just wasn’t enough time. In idle moments, I wonder what those subjects might be, and what wonderful books might have emerged from them.

Written on August 31, 2022.

When I read I am always trying to learn. In particular, I try to take practical, actionable lessons from my reading, especially when reading biographies. Recently, I was thinking about what would make a truly great president, and since I have read quite a few presidential biographies, I considered what I have learned from them, and what specific lessons I have taken from them. I came up with a list of 5 traits that I have admired in U.S. presidents over the history of the presidency as they related to the five presidents that I think best expressed those traits

1. John Adams’ character. Of all presidents, I admire John Adams most for his character and integrity. The most obvious display of this was when he agreed to defend the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, and used his formidable intelligence and legal prowess to either get the soldiers acquitted, or greatly reduced sentences. He put the rule of law above all else, believing that it was strict adherence to the rule of law that provided a strong foundation for any form of government. He took on the defense knowing that it could make him unpopular among Bostonians, but he did so because it was the right thing to do; there was never any real choice in the matter for him. His diaries and writings are filled with similar (if not so spectacular) examples of character. One of my favorite Adams’ stories can be found in David McCullough’s masterful biography John Adams:

Long before, on his rounds of Boston as a young lawyer, Adams had often heard a man with a fine voice singing behind the door of an obscure house. One day, curious to know who “this cheerful mortal” might be, he knocked at the door, to find a poor shoemaker with a large family living in a single room. Did he find it hard getting by, Adams had asked. “Sometimes,” the man said. Adams ordered a pair of shoes. “I had scarcely got out the door before he began to sign again like a nightingale,” Adams remembered. “Which was the greatest philosopher? Epictetus or this shoemaker?” he would ask when telling the story.

2. John Quincy Adams‘ intelligence and introspection. Given what I have read about JQA, as well as what I have read that JQA has written himself, particularly in his vast lifelong diaries, it is my opinion that he was most intelligent president we have had to date. I can’t think of a single president comes that exceeds JQA’s intellectual ability, although a few come close. I’ve written in the past how I admire really smart people, so this should come as no surprise. But I’ve also been heavily influenced by JQA’s introspection. His diaries read like person never satisfied with the status quo, always striving to improve himself in one way or another. Perhaps because I am the same way–my diaries are frequently filled with frustrations about why I am not better at something than I want to be, or that I am constantly trying to improve, even upon things I am good at–that I admire this trait so much in JQA.
3. Abraham Lincoln’s writing and wit. There are many traits one could take from Lincoln, but the ones that I most admire in him was his way with words, both in his writing and his wit. Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln is filled with stories Lincoln told, often witty or humorous, to help make some point. It seemed like any subject reminded him of something. I admire his writing for its compactness and brevity. He could say with fewer words more than many could say in volumes, and do so with an elegance and style that has no equal that I can think of for that time. Many times when I am writing and feel as if I am going on and on, adding words for the sake of words, I ask myself how Lincoln might treat this subject.
4. Theodore Roosevelt’s energy and breadth of knowledge. I remember reading in one of TR biographies (I’ve read a few) that at some point in his life, TR was convinced he was going to die at 60, and indeed, he was 60 years old when he died. I don’t think this was a self-fulfilling prophecy so much as a man who burned his energy fiercely throughout his adult life. How he went from a sickly child, to the rough woodsman, hunter and naturalist is one of the more amazing transformations in presidential history–one that it told particularly well in David McCulloughs’ Mornings on Horseback. But it is TR’s breadth of knowledge that astounds me. John Quincy Adams may be the most intelligent and intellectually gifted president we’ve ever had, but TR was, as far as I can tell, the only polymath to serve as president (Jefferson might be close in this regard). I’ve often argued that there is no previous training or experience that can possibly prepare one to be president. It is a unique job. That said, a polymath like TR, who has a wide-ranging experience, provides an example of what a suitor to the presidency should look like.
5. Franklin Roosevelt’s natural ability to lead. People love or hate FDR. He has many flaws, as most people do (presidential flaws tend to be more public than most). But despite those flaws, he had a gift for leadership. He led the U.S. out of a depression, and through a World War the likes of which the world had never seen before. And in between, he did the business of managing the affairs of a rapidly growing nation. The nation hadn’t seen such a leader before. Washington and Lincoln were great leaders, but there was something about FDR, his ability to relate directly to a wide variety of people, that puts him a step above all of the others in my book. The lessons I’d like to take from FDR are those leadership lessons, and though I’ve read many FDR biographies, those lesson elude me–and I think it was because it was a natural gift, like John Quincy Adams’ intellect, or Theodore Roosevelt’s energy.

It occurred to me, having outlined these traits, that my ideal president would combine all five of them: high moral character, intelligence and introspection, a good and witty communicator, high energy and an unusual breadth of knowledge, and finally, a natural ability to lead. In some ways, this describes Roman rulers that I have read about, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a president that combines all of these traits, and I’m not sure we ever will.

In the meantime, I do my best to learn from these men, to take practical lessons and constantly try to improve myself and align myself with these traits. In some places I’ve had moderate success. In other areas, will alone doesn’t seem to be enough. Natural ability is the missing ingredient. Even so, I try.

Written on August 30, 2022.

I don’t know about you but I have been afflicted with decision fatigue for a long time now. Some of it comes from my job as a software project manager. There are constant decisions to be made every day, from what to tackle on a given day, to how best to organize my day based on the tasks that I need to complete, to many smaller decision: delegation, who to include in a meeting, whether or not something is worthy of sending an email. Outside of work, it seems, there are just as many decisions to make each day, not the least of which include adjudicating the numerous daily court battles between the kids, or deciding what to make for dinner. If we go out to eat, a dozen more decision spill into the cut like a decision-landslide.

It is for these reasons that I seek out routine. I’m tired of making so many decisions, especially trivial ones. I generally go long stretches eating the same thing for breakfast and lunch because that simple act eliminates many decisions throughout the week: not only what to eat, but what I need to buy at the store. When it comes to clothes, I keep things simple, too. For 8 months of the year, I put on short and a t-shirt, often grabbing whatever shirt I happen to reach for without much consideration. For books, the decision of what to read next is often made for me through the butterfly effect of reading. When that fails, I make the decisions in bulk, outlining a list of books to try to read in the coming season.

Finding ways to battle decision fatigue helps reduce the stress of the day, but the routines can become monotonous. Which is why the solution I came up with for deciding what magazine article to read in the morning has been such a success for me.

In addition to book reading, I try to keep up with a variety of magazines. With magazines, however, my goal is to spend that time reading completely off-screens. Thus, I subscribe to quite a few magazines that arrive in the mail. These include: Scientific American, Smithsonian, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Down East, Outside, and WIRED. I subscribe to The Atlantic as well, but that one is online-only. I also subscribe to 3 Substack newsletters, which I consider to be similar to magazine subscriptions: Joe Blog’s, a sports newsletter by the great sportswriter Joe Posnanski; Breaking the News by James Fallows; and The Long Game, a baseball-centered newsletter by Molly Knight.

My goal is simple: read one feature article each morning. Typically, after my morning walk, I’ll head onto the deck and sit with a magazine to read an article. But which magazine? And which article? More decisions!

To eliminate these decisions and add some spontaneity to my day, I recently wrote a script that selects a random feature article for me. I don’t have to pick a magazine or an article. I just run my script in the morning and it spits out what article to read and where it can be found. For instance, here is the result for this morning’s article:

How does my script know what magazines and articles are available? For this I make use of Gina Trapani’s todo.txt system. Each time a new magazine arrives in the mail, I add the feature articles to a toread.txt list using the simple commands in Gina’s system. For a typical magazine this takes less than a minute. Then, when I run my “article” script each morning the selected article is removed from the toread.txt list and added to a read.txt list, which gives me a nice history of the articles I’ve read.

Putting the script together was easy. It is only 9 lines of actionable code, after all. And rather than re-invent the wheel, I made use of todo.txt to manage the entries in the list. Doing this not only eliminated several decisions from my day, but it added some spontaneity and surprise. I never know what article will come up. Moreover, the script is not as discriminating as I might be. Its selection is completely random and I’ve promised myself to read whatever it chooses, so I get more variety than I might otherwise get if I was choosing on my own.

This has turned out to be a fun experience. I wake up in the morning eager to know what article it is I will be tackling out on the deck as I eat my breakfast. Right now, I run the script manually, but I am planning on having it run automatically overnight, and emailing me the result, so that no matter where I am, I can check my email in the morning to see what it is I’ll be reading about. It eliminates just a couple of small decisions each day, but those add up. Over the course of a year, this little script of mine saves me from making 730 decisions.

If you happen to be curious about what article I end up reading each morning, I generally post it on Twitter along with a picture.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an article to read about carbon stored up the rock beneath the gulf coast.

Written on August 28, 2022.

I try to reading 8-10 books per month. With school starting on Monday, and summer winding down, I’ve started to think about what I want to read in the fall. Much of my reading is dictated by the butterfly effect of reading. So lists like the one that follows are subject to severe winds and shifts in the reading weather. Still, looking at what’s sitting on my shelves, and considering what I have been reading lately, along with what I know is coming soon, here is a list, in no particular order, of the books I’m currently planning to read this fall.

• Fairy Tale by Stephen King. The newest Stephen King comes out just after Labor Day, and as always, I am looking forward to it.
• Hell and Back by Craig Johnson. The newest entry in the Walt Longmire series also drops on the same day, which will make it really hard for me decide what to read first.
• This Living Hand and Other Essays by Edmund Morris. I’ve read several of Morris’ biographies, including the last one he wrote on Thomas Edison. But I’ve never read any of his essays.
• Roger Williams and the Creation of the America Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry. I read Barry’s amazing book on the 1918 flu, The Great Influenza. Growing up, I living in Rhode Island, where Roger Williams was an important figure. The zoo was named after him.
• The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism by Mark Zwonitzer. I’m nearly finished with David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas and John Hay makes an appearance in that book.
• Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson. Because it will be a while before Book 5 comes out–but “a while” is relative. Here, we’re talking maybe a year.
• Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw. I’ve been wanting to read this biography for a while now.
• Travels by Michael Crichton. One of the books I picked up at a used bookstore recently.
• Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell. I binged the two book’s Bythell has written about his bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland.
• Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen. In addition to history, I’m interested in the people who tell the stories, who write the histories.
• About the Author: Inside the Creative Process by Nicholas A. Basbanes. I absolutely loved Basbanes’ book, A Gentle Madness, and I am trying to read everything he’s written.
• Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century by Nicholas A. Basbanes. See above.
• Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Ditto.
• The Life of Johnson by James Boswell. Every now and then I have to tackle a Really. Big. Book. This one has been on my list for some time.
• The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor by John McPhee. One of the few McPhee books I haven’t yet read.
• The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present edited by Phillip Lopate. Just flipping through the contents of this book when I saw in in a used bookshop made me want to read it.
• Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing by Stephen King. A rare Stephen King book that I have not yet read.
• Back Where I Came From by A. J. Liebling. I loved Liebling’s The Sweet Science and have wanted to read more by him for a long time now.
• The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New HIstory, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us by Steve Brusatte. His book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs was the first dinosaur book I’ve read since I was a kid. It was a good book, and so I’ll take more.
• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I’ve had this book for a while, but it was an article in the September issue of WIRED that reminded me of it.
• The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 1+2 by Steven L. Kent. I’ve read a few books on the history of video games. This 2-volume edition looks to be comprehensive.
• No Plan B by Lee Child and Andrew Child. The newest installment in the Jack Reacher series.
• And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham. I can’t resist books on Lincoln, or books by Meacham.

Sometime around the winter solstice, I’ll post a follow-up, and we’ll see how many of these books I get through. In the meantime, you can always check the list of books I’ve read since 1996, or Goodreads, both of which I keep up-to-date.

Written on August 26, 2022.

Chatting with my son on Saturday morning, he told me that he thought he might want to be an architect when he grew up. This made a lot of sense to me. He’s always constructing all kinds of interesting things with Legos, or sketching out elaborate bases on paper. It also reminded me of a time that I wanted to be an architect. In 11th grade, I took Drafting as my elective. It was a great class, taught by a very good teacher, and in that class I learned how to draw floor plans and elevation, how to use templates and other tools of the trade. I had fun laying out imaginary houses, but I had even more fun drawing those houses from the floor plans I’d laid out.

Yesterday, while searching for some old letters, I found those drawings from 34 years ago. I thought I’d shared them here once before, years ago, but I could find no reference to them when I searched the blog, so I figured I’d share those drawings with you today. First, we have a pair of drawing I made of what the 16-year old version of me thought my house would look like when I was a grown up:

Next, we have what I was certain the back of my future house would look like, complete with deck, pool, and tennis court.

Compare and contrast to what my actual house looks like, some 34 years later:

Not quite what I imagined it would be as a brash 16-year old, although we do have a large deck in the back. No pool or tennis courts, though.

Okay, a few more of my drawings from that drafting class. Here’s one of a beach house I designed:

I’m not quite sure how to describe this next house, other than to see it appears very accordion-like to me:

This one is another beach house. Keep in mind that I lived in L.A. when I was making these drawings and we would occasionally drive past houses in places like Pacific Palisades and Malibu, and that might have had some influence on all of the beach houses I was designing.

This next one is what I’d call a “contemporary” style–at least for the late 1980s. It reminds me of the houses I’d see in the Chatsworth area of the San Fernando Valley.

Finally, I found one attempt I’d made at what I think is a Tutor-style house:

When I was taking this class, and making these drawings, I’d been working at a stationary store in the Northridge Fashion Center, so I had access to lots of drawing material at a discount. There was a record store near the stationary store, and I remember going in and buying Christopher Cross’s eponymous album, and listening to that album over and over while I made these drawings. Today, when I hear songs from that album, I am reminded of velum and the smell of pencil lead. I also recall buying issues of Architectural Digest and flipping through the magazine, clipping out pictures of places I thought I might own when I was a grown up.

My desire to be an architect did not outlive 11th grade, however. I moved on to other things, and when I entered the University of California, Riverside in the fall of 1994, a little over a year after making these drawings, it was as a physics major.

Still, I’m glad I found these drawings, and happier still that I was able to preserve them here. I showed them to my son, who responded with typical teenage brevity: “Cool!” he said.

Written on August 23, 2022.