In all of the reading I’ve done over the years, I’ve collected certain quotes and passages that have resonated with me in some way or another. While I have a bunch of these quotes in storage, there are four that I come back to frequently, and which I would call my favorites. Some of these…
For the past week I have been in Florida with the family for the kids’ spring break. For Kelly and I this was less of a vacation than a change of venue. We both worked. The kids, meanwhile, enjoyed sunshine, warm weather, swimming pools and beaches. As you read this, we are driving home. It…
While reading the first volume of William L. Shirer’s memoir, Twentieth Century Journey, I was struck by a passage Shirer wrote about an Iowa friend of his, Grant Wood. Shirer wrote, Like [James] Thurber, Grant Wood was utterly dissatisfied with what he was doing [in Europe]. But unlike [Thurber], he had by the end of…
Here is what I read this week. Some of the articles/posts may require a subscription to read them. I also share my recommended reads on Pocket for anyone who wants to follow along there. Books Finished The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953 by Jeffrey Frank. This was interesting,…
William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich had been on my list of books to read for years. After reading The Rising Sun by John Toland, I decided that it was finally time for me to read Shirer’s book. I thought it was an excellent journalistic narrative history of Germany’s Third…
A couple of weeks ago someone on Reddit asked me to elaborate on my motivation for posting my Practically Paperless with Obsidian series. “Are you trying to make a course and sell it in the long run?” they wondered, “or build your brand.” My answer was fairly simple: (1) to document an experiment I was…
Each autumn as the leaves begin to fall from the trees and clutter the gutters, I start to grow a beard. I do this for entirely practical reasons. It gets cold here in the winter, and determined as I am, I still like to get out for my morning walks, despite that cold. (It is,…
I sometimes think the real reason that Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C. is not admitted to the union as a new state is because it would mean changing the flag. Changing the flag has two big problems. The first is rebranding. The second is that it is a huge undertaking. The last time the flag…
Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. In Episode 25, I described how I managed my “professional” writing in Obsidian. I also mentioned that I looked to Obsidian as the one place to do all of my writing. That includes the writing…
It sometimes seems as if everyone else in the world is better at critical analysis than I am. I’m in the midst of reading William L. Shirer’s 3-volume memoir Twentieth Century Journey, and even there, in a paragraph, Shirer comes up with what sounds to me like well-thought out analysis of the works of several…