📖 What I’m Reading:

​A brief foray into Dallas, missing Kampala, and some thoughts on over-tourism – Chris Arnade​

• “You are cocooned in a perfectly sterile world of efficiency and luxury, with chance encounters, such as bumping into strangers, rung out of life. Almost all the messy parts of being human, the muddled sloppy and organic parts, have been eliminated, or at least minimized, usually justified by an appeal to safety. God forbid you should do something as crazy as trying to walk from your apartment to the strip mall, like I tried to do. Walking in Irving, Texas is the act of a mad man.”

​Hell Jumper review – the heartstopping tale of the volunteer who saved hundreds of Ukrainians – The Guardian​

• “When he took a break halfway through his hell-jumping stint to visit home, he had entirely lost interest in idyllic England, finding the comforts of the first world grotesque and meaningless. His fellow jumpers report the same, and it’s clear that this disaffection was within them already.”

​“Accelerating Wisdom” Episode 2: Revealing Attractors – Tom Morgan​

• A systems theory argument for trusting your interests.

Book finished: Trust by Hernan Diaz – 5/5

• Amazing. Like the Great Gatsby meets Succession meets a mystery novel. Some of the most satisfying and beautiful writing I’ve ever read. It’s a novel made up of four interweaving stories. I don’t think it really had anything groundbreaking to say about wealth or power or whatever, but the writing was just so good. To read it felt like a luxury experience.

☝️ Word of the Week:

Pollyanna (n) pol-ee-AN-uh

A naively cheerful and optimistic person.

After Pollyanna Whittier, heroine of novels by Eleanor Porter (1868-1920). Pollyanna is an indefatigable optimist and teaches everyone to play the “glad game.”

“So the doctrine of positive thinking does not require you to close your eyes and ears to the world. It does not require you to become a Pollyanna, calling everything wonderful, no matter how horrid it is.”

💬 Quote of the Week:

"The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night."

-Jean Baudrillard

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ps: contra screen time (X)

pps: exquisite house vocals of the week (YouTube) (Spotify)