About the only thing I didn’t check before the missus and I left for a short road trip last week was the weather forecast. So no, I wasn’t expecting triple-digit temps at Ohanapecosh Campground. Nor did I think I’d see six feet of snow two days later at Paradise. And when the mercury dropped to the low fifties on the California coast at Fort Bragg (no relation), I figured Mother Nature was done messing with me.

But it turns out the 112° near Mount Shasta on Saturday was just preparation for the simmering hellscape that greeted us on our return to Spokane last night. Who knew this place could be so unforgiving?

All is not lost, however—provided you’re well-stocked with the necessary supplies. Just as emergency candles and wool blankets can be deployed during the cold winter months, the best defense against this stupid “heat dome” is plenty of Campari, San Pellegrino, and ice.

After all, we’re supposed to stay hydrated.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“I am deeply resentful that others write my headlines,” says Peggy Noonan, “and deeply relieved I don’t have to.”

It’s rare for journalists to write their own headlines for at least a couple of reasons: (1) “Reporters are naturally promoters of their own work; if they could write the headlines, they would be likely to exaggerate the story’s appeal or importance,” and (2) “Bad headlines cost the paper credibility, or appeal, or clarity. The top editors have to be responsible for them.”

I’d add a third reason: Writing headlines sucks.

Give me an assignment to write 500 words on the genius of Jerry Garcia and I’ll have it on your desk in 30 minutes. Tell me to write the headline, though, and you won’t hear from me for a week.

Why?

It turns out that it takes a special kind of talent to be able to “entice, intrigue, or provoke”—and to do it in a minimum of character spaces. It also turns out that I do not possess this talent.

But hey, I’m devilishly handsome and a witty raconteur, so I’ve got that going for me at least.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

The answer to the question posed by the title of this piece is No. Full stop. You don’t have a duty to read anything. So feel free to ignore anyone who tries to guilt you into reading whichever “marginalized” group they pretend to speak for.

Read because you enjoy it. Or don’t. Whatever.

But honestly, if you’re sitting around keeping score on the gender or sexual orientation or melanin content of authors on someone else’s reading list, you might want to consider picking up a hobby or two—and leaving the rest of us the hell alone.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Following up on Tuesday’s post, which included some tasty cicada recipes for the whole family, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration offers a word of caution.

Yep! We have to say it!

Don’t eat #cicadas if you’re allergic to seafood as these insects share a family relation to shrimp and lobsters. https://t.co/UBg7CwrObN pic.twitter.com/3qn7czNg53

— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) June 2, 2021

Which raises some important questions: Are cicadas sky lobsters? Or are shrimp just…seabugs?

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Does an orchestra conductor matter? Consider the New York Philharmonic. After Bernstein left in 1973, writes Norman Lebrecht, “Pierre Boulez brought six years of modernist chic, followed by decades of torpor with Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel, Alan Gilbert and the incumbent Dutchman Jaap van Zweden (yes, who?). None of these baton wagglers grabbed the city by the love-handles the way Bernstein did, or tuned into its rhythms. Yet the Philharmonic plays on. It sounds more or less the same….”

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So this is a cool story. I’ve been in and around that area countless times—hiking, fishing, swimming—and had no idea. While we’re at it, National Geographic on our very own Channeled Scablands and the high school teacher who “dared to question the scientific dogma of his day.”

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Thomas Nagel on moral epistomology: “not the kind of epistemological question posed when we consider how to respond to a general scepticism about morality, or about value, but an epistemological question internal to moral thought.”

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Speaking of epistemic frameworks, here’s Tim Hsiao to remind you that your lived experiences aren’t special: “One cannot prove or disprove generalizations simply based on personal experiences. This is a pretty basic rule of statistical reasoning that seems to have been lost on many people who should know better.”

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Writing advice from the great Raymond Carver.

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Good to know: “The ‘humane’ way to kill cicadas is to place them in the freezer for a few hours. You then want to blanch them in boiling water for 5 minutes, cooking their insides solid and making sure any nasty bacteria they may be carrying are killed off.” But first, of course, “you want to make sure you get a cicada when it’s good and ripe.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

I’m…I’m just gonna reproduce this paragraph in its entirety:

When Einstein died, in 1955, his brain was removed during an unsanctioned autopsy at a hospital in Princeton. Later, at the University of Pennsylvania, a pathologist named Thomas Stoltz Harvey sliced it up for research purposes but kept some of the slivers for himself. In 1988, Harvey—who’d since been stripped of his medical license—moved to Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas, where he presented one of the slivers to local author William S. Burroughs, after whose death in 1997 it passed into the possession of…I’m going to stop now, because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. Let’s just say that when I was in Lawrence, teaching at KU, this was a thing that still happened, a hazing that was also an homage: You scooped the bit of Einstein’s brain out of the jar and shook off the excess formaldehyde; then, you put some salt in the crook of your thumb and licked it, after which you took down a shot of cheap room-temperature tequila and sucked on the brain-bit until your mouth went numb—until the formaldehyde paralyzed your lips and tongue and you couldn’t be understood, you couldn’t even feel yourself trying to make language.

Here’s the article from which it was taken.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“Something is terribly wrong with architecture,” writes Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs. “Nearly everything being built is boring, joyless, and/or ugly, even though there is no reason it has to be.” Worse, he adds, is that architects themselves seem unable to see the problem. Indeed, they perpetuate it by continuing to hand out awards for “pretentious and bland” work.

Robinson’s take isn’t a popular one—amongst some people, anyway:

There are so many incredible possibilities for architecture, but the minimalist consensus has got it stuck in a rut, spinning its wheels, producing weird new shape after weird new shape, because people are afraid they’ll be called backward if they admit they like mosaics and gargoyles and friezes and stained glass and other cool stuff. I like pretty colors or I like old things makes you a child, an idiot, someone to be laughed at.

That’s no exaggeration. I’ve published many controversial opinions, but the most vitriol I get is…from architecture snobs who think it is wrong and bad to have a negative reaction to things they have deemed correct. It’s truly vicious. If you’re going to join those who publicly admit they don’t like contemporary architecture, you’re going to be called stupid and reactionary and completely missing the point.

Like everything else, it seems, architecture has been politicized.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: architecture  |  comments(2)

“Reading a book requires, by today’s dismal standards, an enormous investment of time and attention,” writes Austin Kleon, “and the writer either honors that investment or suffers the consequences.”

I couldn’t disagree more.

Reading a book requires exactly as much time and attention as it always has. And if you’re too busy to read—hint: you’re not, because nobody is—that’s your problem, not the writer’s.

Look, if you don’t want to read, fine. Like kimchi or Throbbing Gristle or a college education, it’s not for everyone. But that’s on you. Just admit you’re a narcissist and quit projecting on the rest of us.

Even more mystifying is the notion that reading is somehow an investment. This is the language of the self-improvement fetishists; those who read not because it’s enjoyable but because it’ll make them more efficient or more productive or more likely to win an argument.

And therein lies the problem. Reading used to be viewed as an end in itself; now it’s more likely to be seen as a means to an end—a transactional relationship between author and content consumer. Just as we’ve done with our phones and our playlists and our social media feeds, we somehow think that our reading experiences ought to likewise be customized and “curated.” Which means if we don’t like ’em, we just look for alternatives that conform to our expectations and flatter our sense of self-worth.

What a boring way to live.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment