Odds & Ends // 2017.08.31 // Summer Doldrums

Like it says: odds & ends; I’ll try to post this once a week to track things I read, quick updates, thoughts, links, etc.


Listens

  • Black Mountain – Set Us Free

Reads

  • Thought Catalog: 10 Ways You’re Making Your Life Harder Than It Has To Be

    3: You fast forward to apocalypse.

    I have a bad habit of fast forwarding everything to its worst possible outcome and being pleasantly surprised when the result is marginally better than utter disaster or jail time. My mind unnecessarily wrestles with events that aren’t even remotely likely. My sore throat is cancer. My lost driver’s license fell into the hands of an al-Qaeda operative who will wipe out my savings account.

    Negativity only breeds more negativity. It is a happiness riptide. It will carry you away from shore and if you don’t swim away from it, will pull you under.

    I do this too often and it’s a tough habit to break.

  • Aeon: How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free

  • The New Republic: The Rise of the Thought Leader

    The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.”

    Takeaway lesson: be skeptical.

  • Nerdist: Hear Kevin Conroy Read the Iconic The Dark Knight Speech

    When I hear Batman in my mind, that’s the voice, always.

  • BBC: Orpheus Underground

    Novelist Neil Gaiman explores the intricacies of the Orpheus myth, the timeless story of art’s place in trying to recover the dead.

  • Marlin Mann: On Chasing the Right “Zero”

    Put to best use, Inbox Zero is merely a philosophical practice of learning to be parsimonious about which and how many inputs we allow into our lives—and, then, to responsibly but mindfully tend to those inputs in a way that is never allowed to hinder our personal commitment to doing the work that really matters to us.

  • Spoon’s Britt Daniel talks latest album ‘Hot Thoughts’

    If a band is going to exist for a while, or an artist is going to put out record after record after record. what I want to see as a listener is that they’re throwing me a left turn every now and then — that they are trying something new, that they are not resting on what they know. When we came up with a song like “Us” for this record, which is a mostly instrumental piece, mostly based on saxophones … that was something like we’d never done before. When I saw that it could be something we could turn into a song, I jumped at it. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to make it into a song, but I think we did.

  • PBS: Neil Gaiman listens to these dramatic film scores while he writes

  • On the reading front, I’ve been working my way through The Familiar.

Views

  • I got to see the partial solar eclipse. The next totality is going to swing through Ohio in 2024, so maybe I’ll travel over there and see it.

Solar Eclipse, New York City, 2017-08-21 2:43pm

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Drinks

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Adventures

  • A bee did not appreciate my golf game.

Not quite a birdie…

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