Two years ago this week, everything changed. We had heard the threats of COVID-19 for a couple of months by then, but by the middle of March, we were in full-blown pandemic mode.
I have been avidly following the saga of the young pair of Bald Eagles at White Rock Lake here at Dallas. A local school has a streaming webcam of their new nest.
Coastal metro areas continue to dominate the market for knowledge and creative workers. But other cities in the middle of the country are starting to gain ground.
First page of notebook found in Main Street Garden Park, Dallas, Texas
Stress can feel like a baseline condition for many of us – especially during a pandemic. But there are ways to help alleviate the very worst of it, whether through support, sleep or radical self-care
This woman was waving a turkey leg out of her food trailer. When someone came up to buy one, she said, “Let me get you a fresh one hon, this is my demo model, I’ve been waving it out this window for hours.”
Some powders and drinks boast all of the necessary nutrients a body needs — no grocery trips required. But it isn’t clear how drinking our meals might affect our health.
There is no doubt that resilience is a useful and highly-adaptive trait, especially in the face of traumatic events. However, it can be taken too far. For example, too much resilience could make people overly tolerant of adversity. At work, this can translate into putting up with boring or demoralizing jobs — and particularly bad bosses — for longer than needed. In addition, too much resilience can get in the way of leadership effectiveness and, by extension, team and organizational effectiveness. Multiple studies suggest that bold leaders are unaware of their limitations and overestimate their leadership capabilities and current performance, making them rigidly and delusionally resilient and closed off to information that could be imperative in fixing — or at least improving — behavioral weaknesses. While it may be reassuring for teams, organizations, and countries to select leaders on the basis of their resilience — who doesn’t want to be protected by a tough and strong leader? — such leaders are not necessarily always good for the group as a whole.
Woman writing in a Moleskine Notebook, Wichita, Kansas
Today, on Elizabeth Hardwick’s birthday, the best thing to do is to pick up a copy of Sleepless Nights, or perhaps her Collected Essays, and find a quiet corner in which to read them. This may, however, leave you wondering how such literary magic is possible, and maybe even wishing you had a small compilation of Hardwick’s comments about the art and the making of it.
Ruth and Naomi, Leonard Basking, 1979, Bronze, Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden
Micromanipulation is a subtle form of emotional abuse that narcissists use in their closest relationships to regain a sense of control: here’s how to recognise its damaging effects.
The screen fades to black and the words “The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.”
“I want each of you to ask yourself right now: am I the Blue Falcon Sgt. Johnstone is talking about? Do I have it in me to fuck over my buddy so that I can have an easier time? Because I’ll tell you right here, right now: it will come out in the wash. It always comes out in the wash. You might get away with it for a day, or a week, but it is our job to find you; and we are very good at our jobs.”
The trail runs through some thick woods between the train line and the creek south of Forest Lane. There is a nice rest area built there. This homeless guy was sitting in the rest area, reading and writing in his notebook. We talked about the weather and I helped him find a lost sock.
There’s money in it, administering programs which succor the homeless … which, if the homeless were ever successfully homed … would mean an end to that mission and money stream. So the civic powers that be have a vested interest in keeping those programs going, and even expanding them to minister to ever-increasing numbers of homeless. Which makes the powers-that-be feel all noble, responsive, responsible and unselfish-like … but which one commenter on the linked thread pointed out … for all intents and purposes they are farming people for a money crop.
For Christmas, my son bought me (and both my sons) tickets to the Kansas-West Virginia game at Allen Fieldhouse. An amazing gift. The three of us drove up to Lawrence, stayed in an Air B&B and walked around a very cold and snowy town. The game was a blast.
It reminded me of a time, almost fifty years ago, when I walked into Allen Fieldhouse as a barely 17 year old freshman for my first KU basketball game. It was one of the most amazing times of my life.
I’m old, old enough to remember the stagflation of the Carter years. It felt just like this. It isn’t a good thing – especially when you consider the pain (20% interest rates) that are necessary to get out of it.
If you’re like most people, you have a New Year’s resolution in place and you may have even stuck to it so far this year. Good for you! Realistically though, you’re going to fail. How long have you said you really should get in shape, or lamented the need for more quality time with family and friends? The fact is, despite the most earnest commitment, resolutions just don’t work.
After the sudden and intense drama of getting hit, they suffered from devastating symptoms that wouldn’t go away. It seemed like no one could help—until they found each other.
Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.
Bicycle Drag Races
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge
Dallas, Texas
Cycling definitely helps keep you in great physical shape, but that’s not the only benefit your favorite activity has on your body. According to new research out of Durham, North Carolina, aerobic exercise has some serious perks for your brain, too—like helping to reverse its age by almost nine years.
December 22nd will be the 50th anniversary of the release of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, a film so marked by violent killings and violent sex that, according to Peckinpah’s biographer, David Weddle, a third of the audience walked out of its premiere before the end.
Have you ever gotten into bed at the end of the day and realized that you haven’t spoken out loud to anyone since the day before? Or simply found yourself feeling completely and utterly alone?
What do I mean by “literary fantasy”? …, I am using it to mean works of fantasy that prioritize sentence-level craft and/or complex thematic structures, and/or that play with expectations and fantasy tropes, and/or that focus on characters and interiority as primary goals of the work. I don’t just mean “well-written fantasy” or “literary novels that have magic in them,” though both kinds of books can be found here. What I mean is books that relate to and pull from the conventions of both genres: fantasy and literary fiction.
Over the past year I’ve been working hard on moving better. I’ve gone from having shin splints and sore ankles when I run to bashing out 10Ks happy as anything. It takes a bit of work, but there’s a lot you can do to improve. And it doesn’t matter where you’re starting out, either.
The land of lakes, volcanoes, and sun. A painting I bought on my last trip to Nicaragua.
Scientists at the University of Southampton have discovered that two intense periods of volcanism triggered a period of global cooling and falling oxygen levels in the oceans, which caused one of the most severe mass extinctions in Earth history.
I’ve been thinking about friendship a lot lately—forming new ones, strengthening old ones, letting go of broken ones. I’ve been thinking about it a lot because I’m of the age where my friends are entering into different areas of their lives: getting married, buying houses, considering having kids. And, as such, it feels harder to maintain the same connection we had when we weren’t bogged down by responsibility.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
One of the cool things is that you could go down into a pit area and look at what was left of the vehicles after they ran their race. If their was enough left in one piece you could even sit in the driver’s seat and get your picture taken.
Or you could talk to the drivers. For some reason this driver, from a cheese-wedge shaped car that made it down quickly in one piece, seemed very popular in the pits.
Having good conversations — with strangers or with your closest friends — is an art. It requires attention, something that’s in high demand these days.
Electric bicycles, better known as e-bikes, have moved from novelty to mainstream with breathtaking speed. They’ve been a boon to hard-working delivery persons during the pandemic (and their impatient customers), and commuters who don’t care to be a sweaty mess when they arrive. And while the scoffing tends to center around the “purity” of cycling—the idea that e-bike riders are somehow lazy cheaters—that electric assist is actually luring people off the couch for healthy exercise. That’s especially welcome for older or out-of-practice riders (which describes a whole lot of folks) who might otherwise avoid cycling entirely, put off by daunting hills or longer distances.
Leonard Cohen in London in June 1974. Michael Putland/Getty Images
In the late 1970s, Leonard Cohen sat down to write a song about god, sex, love, and other mysteries of human existence that bring us to our knees for one reason or another. The legendary singer-songwriter, who was in his early forties at the time, knew how to write a hit: He had penned “Suzanne,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Lover, Lover, Lover,” and dozens of other songs for both himself and other popular artists of the time. But from the very beginning, there was something different about what would become “Hallelujah”—a song that took five years and an estimated 80 drafts for Cohen to complete.
Smoke, steam, and sulfur dioxide coming out of the volcano, Masaya, Nicaragua.
She was flying home from a holiday in Samoa when she saw it through the airplane window: a “peculiar large mass” floating on the ocean, hundreds of kilometres off the north coast of New Zealand.
I have a new place I just added to my Bucket List: Pyramiden
Note that this place is literally at the end of the earth – and yet, at a restaurant – he can pay with his Apple Watch.
Bill Chance 