Category: interesting-reads

Here are five more interesting reads I’ve come across recently.

1. “Essay: The digital death of collecting” by Kyle Chayka. A fascinating look at how digital media is killing the concept of “collections” as maintainable things under your control. (Fortunately, I looked at the bookshelves that surround me in my office after reading this and felt a sense of relief.)
2. “A Full Life” by Joe Posnanski. Remember Buck O’Neil fifteen years after his death.
3. “Grading MLB Umpires: Meet the Humans Behind the Twitter Bots that Track Balls and Strikes” by Stephen J. Nesbitt (in The Athletic). A fascinating piece on the perceptions and misperceptions of how well umpires perform when compared to objective measurements. H/T to my dad for calling this one to my attention.
4. “Stephen King takes us inside the process of writing Billy Summers” by Adrienne Westenfeld (in Esquire). An interesting interview with King where he discusses how his most recent novel came to be, and how he wrote it.
5. Minor Threat by Will Bardenwerpter (Harper’s, October 2021). A down-to-earth look at what MLB has done to the minor leagues.

If you’ve got any of your own interesting reads you want to share, drop them in the comments.

Here are five more interesting reads I’ve come across recently.

1. “Writing Things Down in a Paperless World” by Robert Breen. He is another Field Notes fan; and he has some interesting things to say about where paper fits in a paperless lifestyle.
2. “COVID Pioneer Families” by Deborah Fallows. Deborah coauthored with James Fallows, my favorite book of 2020, Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey Into the Heart of America. For a while (even before the Pandemic) I daydreamed about moving to a rural place with lots of open space. As Deborah writes about in this piece, some people are really doing it.
3. “Confessions of a Sid Meier’s Civilization Addict” by Spencer Kornhaber, in the October Atlantic Monthly. I think I may have played an old version of Civilization decades ago. But I recently saw that Sid Meier has a new memoir out, and I picked it up because I’ve got a kind of fascination about the behind-the-scenes world of game development. I haven’t read it yet, but reading this piece made me want to bump up Meier’s book on my list.
4. “Farewell to a Lewiston Pawnshop” by Jaed Coffin. Down East Magazine is my monthly escape to Maine when I can’t otherwise be there. I just like this little piece on what a pawnshop means to a small town.
5. “Simple Mathematical Law Predicts Movement in Cities Around the World” by Viviane Collier, in the October Scientific American. With Apple TV’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation finally released, I’ve been thinking a lot about those old stories, and of the statistical science of psychohistory that forms the basis of the storyline: a mesh of mathematical models that can predict the future of humanity. Every now and then, it seems, little pieces of the equations of the fictional science of psychohistory popup in the real world. I collect them as a hobby and this is one of them.

If you’ve got any of your own interesting reads you want to share, drop them in the comments.

Since I’ve collected another five interesting reads, I figured I might as well share them. Five at at time seems just about right: enough to warrant a post, and not too much to overwhelm. Incidentally, I’ve been categorizing these posts as “interesting-reads” and you can use that category if you want to see all of the posts.

1. Over at Marginal Revolution, I read this short excerpt on barbarism and immediately thought of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The passage explains perfectly the development of Asimov’s Periphery and even why power seems to shift from the center of the empire to the Periphery, while wealth moves in the other direction. Of course, Asimov based is fall of the Galactic Empire on the fall of the Roman Empire, so maybe this isn’t much of a coincidence.
2. In the Washington Post, this opinion piece by George F. Will on “The Pursuit of Happiness,” which is based on his new book American Happiness and Discontents. I’ve enjoyed Will’s baseball writing (especially his book A Nice Little Place on the North Side).
3. This one in the New Yorker by Haruki Murakami, “An Accidental Collection,” amused me because I tend to collect t-shirts and baseball caps from various places I’ve been and products I like. Not too long ago, I read Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and it made me want to be a runner, if only I could skip all of the building-up-to-it, and you know, just run.
4. Another one from the New Yorker, this time a long profile of Colm Tóibín, “How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann’s Head” by D. T. Max. I’ve only read one Cold Tóibín book, The Testament of Mary, but I really enjoyed it. I found this piece interesting because it delves a bit into how another writer works and I always enjoy reading that kind of stuff.
5. Finally, courtesy of a coworker, this fascinating piece on “Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman’ movie on quartz glass” by Jennifer Langston. All about how Microsoft and Warner Bros. are collaborating on storing data on pieces of glass. Really, about the possibilities of long-term data storage.

If you’ve got any of your own interesting reads you want to share, drop them in the comments.