This week I finished: In the Mood for Love, directed by Wong Kar-Wai: It’s hard not to first mention this movie’s style in the qipaos, hair, make-up, ties, and music. Each dress and hairdo must have taken hours to get right each time, looked sewn-in. The word I keep coming back to for the style is: perfect. What a beautiful movie. But the movie covers more than style. Who hasn’t[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: I’m sure I read this book before, but long enough ago that this time was almost anew. I’ve been reading about liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy. I’ve read and written about slavery and the Holocaust. Soviet / Stalinist gulags are on par, but different, and equally important to understand what a nation, or dominance hierarchy,[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended on It, by podcast guest Chris Voss: I read this book before recording the podcast with Chris and liked it, but not enough. This time I loved it. I think last time I compared it with Getting to Yes and thought it didn’t add much knowledge. It mostly promoted the value of practice and tactics beyond[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: This America: The Case for the Nation, by Jill Lepore: I’ve seen Jill Lepore’s books at the top of bestseller lists and read pieces she’s written in the New Yorker and probably other places. Her work seems to overlap with authors I’ve found valuable: Akhil Reed Amar and Gordon Wood. Her two big books These Truths and We the People are huge and daunting, though reviews[…] Keep reading →

Each Sunday I post selected books, movies, courses, and other media I finished that week. Today, I’ll see if I can pick the ones I liked the most. I’ll write the categories first, then fill them in after searching this year’s posts. I’m not sure which I’ll remember or forget. I don’t think I read many fiction books. I don’t usually note podcasts or short videos, but I listen to[…] Keep reading →

The more I see flying from the outside, the more I see it as the opposite of travel, or of achieving what people want in travel. First, if you walk somewhere, or bike or even ride a horse or sail a boat, you are traveling. That is, you are actively causing yourself to move from one place to another. When you get in a vehicle like a plane, train, or[…] Keep reading →

First, context: When, over a decade ago, I started my experiment avoiding packaged food for a week, I discovered why my mind debated with itself over minutia like “should rubber bands count as packaging,” “what about stickers on fruit,” “what about food already in my cupboard,” and so on. As soon as I started, I found I could answer all those questions by doing. Most didn’t matter. Those that mattered,[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: As of today, Sunday, my usual day to post on what I finished this week, my solar battery is very low (as I posted yesterday: And just like that, I’m almost out of power for a couple days. Batteries have a lot of problems), so I’m limiting my time using the computer. For now, I’ll just post the works. When there’s more sun, I’ll write more.[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: I Am Not Your Negro: directed by Raoul Peck, based on James Baldwin’s manuscript Remember This House: You can probably tell that Baldwin’s views resonate with me. How he describes the perspective from the bottom of a dominance hierarchy. He attributes it to color, which I see as a proxy for access to a resource with no alternative, but the view is the same. Partly it[…] Keep reading →