📖 What I’m Reading:

​Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us – The New Yorker​

• Profile on the author of The Overstory. “We play to keep on playing.”

​How to Succeed in MrBeast Production – MrBeast​

• Leaked onboarding memo. Some interesting stuff.

​A modest tax reform proposal to roll back federal tax policy to 1997 – Owen Zidar & Erick Zwick​

• Interesting proposal. I don’t agree with all of it—and certainly wouldn’t call it “modest”—but it’s fun to see the math and history laid out. The media often acts like tax changes are shocking and unprecedented; the reality is we’ve done all kinds of different stuff over the years, and it’s helpful to study those examples.

Book finished: The Control of Nature by John McPhee: 3/5

• John McPhee pioneered creative nonfiction. I wanted to read an example. This book tells three stories about humanity’s war with nature: (1) holding the shape of the Mississippi River; (2) cooling lava in Iceland; and (3) confining massive debris flows in the mountains near Los Angeles. Bit of a slog to read. I could not follow the engineering jargon. Overall the book conferred a deep respect for nature and the people combating her, but got very bogged down with technical stuff. Really could have used some pictures or diagrams for us normies.

☝️ Word of the Week:

insouciance (n) in-SOO-see-uhns

Careless indifference.

From French in (not) + soucier (to care).

“Chamberlin had planned the meeting as a trap to try to shatter Holmes’s imperturbable façade, and was impressed with Holmes’s ability to maintain his insouciance despite the rancor in the room.”

💬 Quote of the Week:

“The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.”

-Stephen Jay Gould

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ps: punk performance of the week (YouTube)

pps: whales are notes in the music of God (X)