Came across this article via Tracy Darnell's blog, and what an essay! A masterstroke of reflection on books that connects right into my brain-thinking.

I have new books to read, upcoming books I want to read, old books to read, and only one lifetime

Sure, you could say this about any format of media. But there's something way more visceral about the physicality of books. You can put them on shelves, pile them up on a nightstand, or optimistically smash them into your luggage. There is so much diversity in typography, images, color, sizes, and formats for books that it's a truly joyful medium to collect.

But is collecting books a problem when, as Molly Templeton admits, you don't get around to reading many of them, and instead, "think about them. Appreciating them, you might say." She "can’t wait to get lost in it. Just, you know… later." There are, alas, too many other distractions and demands of one's time, and books sometimes don't make it into your day.

Anyway, she nails it with this:

Can there be comfort in the things you’re not reading? Can they be books that are just waiting for you to find their moment? Stories you need, just not yet, like snacks you put in your pocket for later, stored up for when you really, really need them? I’m pretty convinced this is the case. Haven’t you ever picked up a book months, years, decades after it came out and found it was exactly what you needed to read just then?

Yes, there can be a comfort in the books you aren't reading, or the books you have read years ago that you probably won't read again but just maybe you might want to read again to revisit those feelings you had about it, or rather to simply meet the vibe of it. Books are magical, transporting, beautiful objects that require your imagination and literacy skills to unlock the potential of. Thankfully I've got some space still to store more of them and my partner isn't going to cast me out of the house (yet).

Love this sketch card of a classic Tom Bihn Synik bag and the things you can pack into it. Comes slotted into one of the cardholders in their equally classic Nik’s Minimal Wallet. Both amazing products for everyday and traveling uses.

You hit a certain age… and you start to think more about aging. So I’ve been savoring any article like this one from the Guardian.

Overall ➔ good to know vocabulary peaks at 65, and happiness in our eighties.

Great find from Kottke (actually a repost from a decade ago) about the Japanese artist using Microsoft Excel to paint. It’s a rather fascinating methodology, and I love the maximization of a tool within its limits.

The Economist has a fantastic focus in their latest Technology Quarterly about the pursuit of immortality.

In short, immortality is impossible, mostly due to physics and the human genome, but… extending life is very much a possibility and near-future reality.

While I rarely think about playgrounds (no kids here), from a zoning perspective and for children’s creative enjoyment, they are immensely valuable. This recent Axios article had me surfing through fond memories of running through the massive structures in Bloomington growing up.

I’m an idiot and have started curating a library of pull-tabs. If you’re into weird art, stupid gambling, dive bar culture, or all of the above, this is worth bookmarking.

Molly Young nails the feeling of paralytic anxiety many feel when confronted with high art of any kind that draws on prior knowledge of "original" art (sure, an "allusion"), and we all wonder how exactly we're supposed to enjoy and nod at the brilliance without effectively reading/seeing/experiencing everything that is alluded to.

This fact-laden piece by The New Yorker ("How Plastics Are Poisoning Us" by Elizabeth Colbert) spins another dark tale on plastics, the facade of recycling them, and how shitty they are to our planet.

We already know a lot of this — we collectively don't trust that plastics are being recycled (you really won't after reading this), corporations using plastic vessels and those creating them will never change their mind, and replacement materials are surprisingly less efficient or useful for plastic tasks. These are real, hardcore problems in displacing plastic.

But Elizabeth buries the lede at the bottom of the article:

If much of contemporary life is wrapped up in plastic, and the result of this is that we are poisoning our kids, ourselves, and our ecosystems, then contemporary life may need to be rethought.

Contemporary life is a ludicrously big statement. But what else is there to say? Part of what enabled the integrity of logistics for the global goods ecosystem was plastic packaging. How would we go about changing it?

Perhaps global ecosystems are a major part the problem. Maybe we need to focus more on local ecosystems, and here in the US, state-by-state or city-by-city. Let's focus more on local retail, local production, and local uses vs importing everything from everywhere. It can be an incremental, purposeful movement that starts small, but we know money is the only true lever. And by encouraging the adoption of non-plastic packaging for use in local/proximity environments, or accommodate other materials for storage/in-store shelving — especially for spoilable goods (subsidies, anyone?) — we can start to make the impact that compounds globally.

This headline had me second-guess an EV investment as my next vehicle…

replacing bumpers, fenders, doors and side panels following a collision can be more expensive because in an EV they are more likely to be embedded with sensors, cameras and other electronics costing from hundreds to thousands of dollars each… And labor charges for EVs are 50% higher

…so on the fence for either an EV or hybrid. Anyone have first-hand experience with repairing an EV?

CW&T just opened the door for orders on a new batch of their solid state watches, an eye-catching modification of the 1980s Casio F-91W wristwatch that can’t be “used” traditionally, but is fully waterproof. Worth a full read-through to understand the concept.

Love this 1980s scan of an ad for the Twin Ports up in northern Minnesota/Wisconsin.

(via Perfect Duluth Day)

One of my favorite bag brands, Evergoods, has announced a new line of products under the banner “Undyed Collection”. This is terrific for a few reasons:

• We all want to put our money where our mouth is – they started down this path with the Solution-Dyed variant for their black-clad bags, and this is a formidable advancement of this by way of not dying materials at all
• They’ve taken a realistic approach to doing this that avoids the common trap of greenwashing – it’s a reduction of process and resources that makes perfect sense for optimizing their current manufacturing process

As they describe:

Once the kinks of solution-dyed were worked out and the program was running reliably, it seemed a natural step to replicate this dyebath-free process with regular undyed yarn. Our mill had already anticipated this and had sample yardage available in short order. We unrolled the first lots on our cutting table in Bozeman.

The dull, off-white raw material had an experimental NASA feeling to it and was somehow more interesting and nuanced than the black we had been staring at for the past year and a half. It also came with a disclaimer from the mill. “Inconsistent color quality, staining, dirt, machine oil and other defects that would normally be washed out or covered over during the dying stage are to be expected and considered unavoidable.”

And as a YKK zipper fanatic, I love this small detail about trying to work with the Japanese company to get a raw cut version of their zipper to reflect their approach for this collection:

We exclusively use YKK zippers, and while they offer a variety of finishes, some of which appear more like raw cast metal, they simply would not supply us with unfinished sliders for this project over concerns about quality and long-term performance. I guess I can’t blame them. Everyone would be bummed if the zippers got weird, and it would all end up a waste anyway. So I respect their position.

Looking forward to seeing the product drop and their photography of the new products, which happens tomorrow (August 15). It’s phenomenal to see a great brand continuing to iterate and improve their processes for the betterment of the planet while retaining integrity within reason.

Cuts right to the chase.

Fascinating global race for lithium battery recycling and closed-loop supply chains. USA is getting an injection of action from an Inflation Reduction Act clause, which should mitigate an over-reliance on China.

Another cinema rant: Khoi Vinh observes Wes Anderson like he truly is, for better or worse:

Anderson is essentially a children’s storyteller. For my money, he’s most at home when he’s telling stories through the lens of child characters

I haven’t seen Asteroid City (honestly, not planning on it). But… Barbie and Oppenheimer were fantastic.

We’re finally starting to see a contraction towards pragmatic efficiency in the VC market.

Globally, venture-capital investment in the first half of this year was $144bn, less than half of the $293bn raised by startups in the same period in 2022. Companies that do manage to raise funds are seeing their valuations squeezed.

This shouldn’t be seen as a trend — doing more with less is accelerating as a result of factors like AI usage and Wall Street favoring profitability vs unsustainable growth.

While I enjoyed Oppenheimer, Keith Harris’s full review here helps solve my askew feelings about it.

Nice to see Japan Airlines’ sustainable traveling push (by way of carbon reduction) by encouraging passengers bring only essentials and rent their wardrobe upon arrival, which is sourced by second-hand stores and excess retailer inventory.

Negotiating with AI companies for licensing IP to be fed into LLMs is a slippery slope, especially since fundamental components of those models were already informed by mass website data scraping. I’d be quite surprised to see this shake out in anyone’s favor other than for AI tech.

Fantastic sale on Micro.blog, an exceptional, independently-run content management system for short and long form blogging. It’s everything you need in a minimally rich product.

Tom Leighton’s (@tomleightonart) Geomorphology photo series is stunning.

If I’m reading this piece right, it appears fine dining has eroded quick serve’s and fast casual’s lead in off-premise eating since the pandemic derailed people’s preferences. And now… there’s a problem with filling restaurants’ capacities. Which… we all guessed was happening?

🔗 Concerning piece by Fionn Pooler on “coffeewashing” practices in the industry. A Short Introduction to Coffeewashing - by Fionn Pooler

More on the “why” of the Lincoln Project, explained by Vox. This point is apt:

Liberals who oppose the Lincoln Project object to its core conceit: Trump, and Trumpism, are a cancer on the Republican Party, and by removing him and his ideas, things can perhaps go back to normal. In the conservative group’s mindset, Republican presidential candidates like John McCain and presidents like George W. Bush exemplified the best of American conservatism, while Trump is an aberration: a former reality show host with divorces, affairs, and affronts to “traditional morality” aplenty.

But as historian Eric Foner argued in 2016, Trump can be seen as “the logical conclusion of a lot of things the Republican Party has been doing” for decades, with predecessors like Richard Nixon’s “law and order” presidential campaign, rife with racist implications, and populist appeal as a businessman railing against Washington corruption. To many liberals, Trump isn’t an aberration; he’s the culmination of a decades-long political project.