Despite it being 80F here in Ohio today, it’s time to search Apple notes for @patrickrhone’s hot toddy recipe.

“The election is not up to us. A pandemic is not up to us. A collapse in public trust, public kindness, public responsibility—these things are not up to us, not as individuals, that is (of course, we all share the blame collectively). As individuals what is up to us is whether these bad times make us a bad person, whether hard events harden our hearts, whether the wrongs of the world make us do wrong.”

Ryan Holiday in the Daily Stoic newsletter.

Alan Jacobs on ‘“Joan Didion’s most famous sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”’

“That is, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” because there is no story outside of our minds: “We live entirely…by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images” (emphasis mine). Our endless telling of stories is, then, the product not of delight but of despair: of our inability to face the chaos of what is. If people knew the context of the sentence, they wouldn’t be putting it on T-shirts. Instead, they’d be driven to therapy, to alcohol, or to church…

On Wednesday, November 6, 2024, millions of people whose political affiliation is their religion will also be in great need of a new story: maybe those who are at this moment writing that Kamala Harris will win and they know it; or maybe those who have assured me that Donald Trump’s survival of his assassination attempts proves that he is the Lord’s Anointed. But many Americans will soon find themselves feeling the need to impose a narrative on the blankly disparate images that march down the screens of their phones. If politics is your life, then you must tell yourself a political story in order to live.”

Read the whole post here.

Empire is nothing without spectacle.

No Fate but What We Make

“America got lucky. It won’t get lucky again. Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies.”

Read the whole article here.

Via Kottke

Light in the Shadows.

Leaving.

Falling.

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”

~Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

“Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.”

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.

Via

“It’s a healthy reminder that not everything needs to be a battle. As parents, we can get better at picking our moments. If it doesn’t truly matter, if it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme, why not just say yes upfront?“

-Ryan Holiday

It’s a shame that the new “Hide distracting items” feature in Safari doesn’t work in Apple News.

“People who pay for shoddy products or careless services and people who are robbed outright are equally victims of theft, the only difference being that the robbers outright are not guilty of fraud.”

Wendell Berry in “The Two Economies”

Friday Night.

Reading by the riverside.

“A priest and the Baptist are sitting together on the plane. The priest orders a glass of wine, the Baptist a 7-Up. The Baptist says, “Christians should not touch alcohol,” and the priest says, “Jesus drank wine.” The Baptist says, “Yes, and I’d have thought better of him if he hadn’t.”

• as told by Garrison Keillor

““When you have gone too far…the only mending is to come home”

From Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry