Book excerpt I enjoyed:

I only began to enjoy studying after I got through the educational system and became a so-called member of society. If something interested me, and I could study it at my own pace and approach it the way I liked, I was pretty efficient at acquiring knowledge and skills. The art of translation is a good example. I learned it on my own, the pay-as-you-go method. It takes a lot of time to acquire a skill this way, and you go through a lot of trial and error, but what you learn sticks with you.” (Haruki Murakami and Philip Gabriel, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)

Quote I’ve been thinking about:

Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action.”

Walter Anderson

Doom scrolling:

Being informed is a virtue. It helps us make better decisions and encourages us to take action.

Getting hooked on an endless scroll of media inputs is not the same as being informed. There’s long been a business model of urgent news (“man bites dog!”), but now it’s been leveraged, amplified and optimized to suck people in for hours at a time. And division is much easier to sell than progress.

If it’s not helping you take action to make things better, what’s it for?

Love that last line.

Lots of ear candy recently:

There seems to have been a surge of new music entering my earspace over the last couple of weeks. Lots of new and old-but-new-to-me. Last week it was Bob Dylan, Moodymann, Oddissee, Blu & Exile, Amerigo Gazaway, Lester Young, Terrance Martin, and Charlie Parker.

Also, if you are looking for some great electronic music, my friend Maxeus has been putting out a great series of mixes on Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/Maxeus/

Reading about jazz music:

I’ve been reading How to Listen to Jazz off-and-on over the past several weeks (great), and this reading list of additional jazz reading caught my attention this week:

The joy of weird and wonderful sci-fi:

A father’s newfound feminism:

Jon Hamm voices a father meeting his daughter’s boyfriend, flipping the stereotypes of the encounter on their head, in this adaptation of Sophie Kohn’s Daily Shouts column.

HT to Ben

https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/shorts-murmurs-a-fathers-newfound-feminism

Lastly, check out what we’re up to now.