Happy New Field Notes Day to all who celebrate!

Pecans.

“Don’t let the crazies make you crazy.”

-Ryan Holiday

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

• Dwight D. Eisenhower

My first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man My first allegiance is not to democracy or blood It’s to a king & a kingdom

-Derek Webb

Alan Jacobs on being “informed”:

“We have a responsibility to be informed!” people shout. Well, maybe, though I have in the past made the case for idiocy. But let me waive the point, and say: If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated. Try giving yourself a break from it. Look at this stuff at wider intervals, and in between sessions, give yourself time to think and assess.

Via Patrick Rhone

A Post-Election Liturgy

“The best way to resist the despair of Empire is to lean into the life that Jesus liberated us for - life to the fullest. Like bullies, nothing infuriates oppressors more than watching the people they seek to oppress flourish. What does it look like for us to resist the American Empire over the next four years by “building houses to live in them” and “planting gardens to eat what they produce”?”

-Joash Thomas

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”