“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

Remember Prince’s guitar solo during the performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony? There’s a brand-new director’s cut on YouTube:

If there were any doubt as to the Purple One’s awesomeness, this—the shredding commences at the 3:29 mark—ought to put those dark thoughts to bed for good.

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

This, from a Twitter user named Jared, apparently took the social media platform by storm a year ago—but because I’m perpetually behind on pretty much everything (Happy Valentine’s Day, honey!), it was new to me:

The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing. To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct. A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it. The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.

Truth. Simple as that.

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

Over at Wired, Andy Greenberg explains “how one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.” It’s as bizarre and maddening as it sounds.

You’re no doubt familiar with the old saw, “Ignorance is bliss.”* Or maybe you’ve heard Bismarck’s “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” That sentiment is never more true than when I’m reading stories like this. The more I dig, the more rotten people—and institutions, and corporations, and pretty much everything—turn out to be.

Best not to dig, then. The only way to stay idealistic is to not pay attention.

*A college friend of mine actually perfected this, saying, “If ignorance is bliss, then stupidity must be ecstasy!”

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Wilf Davies has lived in Wales’ Teifi valley for all of his 72 years. He’s never been married (“it’s not something that I’ve ever regretted”), and, apart from visiting a farm in England 30 years ago, he’s never left Wales.

It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that he doesn’t deviate much when it comes to meal time:

I have a routine, just like nature. That extends to what I eat. I’ve had the same supper for 10 years, even on Christmas Day: two pieces of fish, one big onion, an egg, baked beans and a few biscuits at the end. For lunch I have a pear, an orange and four sandwiches with paste. But I allow myself a bit more variety; I’ll sometimes have soup if it’s cold.

Asceticism apparently runs in the family. “My uncle, a bachelor and farmer like me, had…bread, butter, cheese and tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner (although he would bring out the jam for visitors).”

Mr. Davies looks after 71 sheep, and “they never ask for anything different for supper,” so I guess it makes sense, really.

I’m not sure if it’s courage or stubbornness, but there’s something admirable in knowing exactly what makes you happy, doing it, and not caring one whit what other people think about it.

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Andrew Blum on fusion: “On the evening of March 18, 1987…three thousand [physicists] crammed into the Hilton ballroom for the High Temperature Superconductivity Symposium, while hundreds more watched on TVs set up in the hotel corridors. In a marathon session that soon became known as the ‘Woodstock of physics,’ fifty-one separate presentations went on until 3:15 am, with example after example of new superconducting feats. It became a singular event in modern science, its legend fueled by a Nobel Prize that year for Bednorz and Müller and a cover story in Time magazine (‘Superconductors!’).”

Christina Rawls on a philosophy of sound: “The mystic Eckhart Tolle…noted that some of our most profound moments are those we encounter without description—such as any new (positive) experience in a place we’ve never visited before, or delicious meals we’ve never tasted before, or beautiful sounds and instruments we’ve never heard before. The unnameable and the unfathomable can be striking, affective; not all sounds need to or can have names, and yet we both experience them and also learn from them. New research on binaural music—where the frequency of sound is slightly different in both ears—suggests that such noises can alter our brainwaves and mental processes for the better.”

Adam Kirsch on “getting” poetry: “Most Americans first encounter poetry as a classroom subject, and it never loses the associations of dutifulness and dullness. American adolescents make their way through ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ and ‘The Road Not Taken’ the way Victorian schoolboys were made to construe Homer: the language may not be dead, but the context is equally remote from real life.”

Gina Kolata on the woman who may very well have saved us all: “On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. ‘Oh, it works,’ she said. ‘I thought so.’ To celebrate, she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts. By herself.”

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I learned a new word today. (Don’t get excited—I’m usually the last one to learn anything, so y’all are probably already up to speed on this one.)

Anyway, here’s American Heritage:

ret•ro•nym n. A word or phrase created because an existing term that was once used alone needs to be distinguished from a term referring to a new development, as acoustic guitar in contrast to electric guitar or analog watch in contrast to digital watch.

Here’s another example that occurred to me as I was writing this: manual transmission, or stick. In olden times, when there was only one way to deliver power from the engine to the wheels, people just called it a transmission.

Which has me wondering what we’ll eventually land on when electric vehicles become the norm. Fingers crossed for something cool like gasmobiles.

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

I’m not the kind of person who stresses out about his age. Not much I can do about it, I figure. Plus, the benefits of middle age—like, say, giving far fewer f**ks about pretty much everything—far outweigh whatever advantages youth may once have held. (Honestly, I can’t remember what they were.)

There is, however, one alarming development. With every passing year, I get the sneaking suspicion that—to steal a title from Macon Blair’s directorial debut—I don’t feel at home in this world anymore.

It’s not that everyone is terrible (though I admit there’s an avalanche of evidence that indicates otherwise). It’s stories like this.

Had the video spread no more widely than Royce’s followers, a low-stress exchange of ideas might have ensued. Instead his video quickly garnered many thousands of likes and shares. Supporters deemed the term super-straight an ingenious gambit forcing dogmatic social-justice advocates to live by the same standards they enforce on others. Royce also drew a lot of critics. Haters argued that super-straight was a cruel parody of all LGBTQ people. The video quickly disappeared from TikTok, perhaps because many users flagged it as violating the app’s rules. It reappeared about a week later, presumably after human content moderators reviewed it. That’s when it went massively viral. My TikTok feed, usually a respite of surfing highlights, recipe ideas, and Generation X nostalgia, was overrun by super-straight. Fans and critics alike commented on and shared videos about the subject—or posted their own. “Let me break this down: trans women are women,” declared the TikTok creator @tblizzy, who currently has more than 425,000 followers. “So if you’re a heterosexual man and you said you wouldn’t date a trans woman because it’s a preference, that’s just transphobia, period.”

Here’s the thing. This is something that apparently warrants coverage in a national publication, yet (1) I have only the vaguest notion of what they’re talking about, and (2) even if I did understand, I still wouldn’t care. Oh, and (3) the story pretty much proves that everyone is, in fact, terrible. So there’s that.

Question: Is this what all old people go through?

First you realize that pop culture and social change are moving at such a rate that you can no longer keep up with who’s who and what’s what. This alarms you—at first. Then you realize that pop culture and social change really aren’t worth thinking, let alone caring, about. Relieved, you believe this new, improved attitude will bring you peace and enable you to focus on the things that really matter.

Instead, you increasingly find yourself a stranger in a strange land.

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