Bookish
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Fernando Pessoa, Creator of Indifferences
“You are no doubt asking me, within yourselves, what meaning these sentences have. Don’t make that mistake.”
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🏳️🌈 Bob Smith: Laughing Matters
Blazing a path as a gay man is serious work—unless you’re comedian Bob Smith.
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The More Things Change, The More I Write The Same
I went back in time 20 years and found something I could have written 20 minutes ago. (I’m talking about figurative time travel. My flux capacitor is in the shop.)
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Strike a Prose
Alexandra Jacobs’ new biography looks at how Madonna changed everything. Here’s how Madonna changed me.
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Books I Read in 2022
Groucho Marx famously said that “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Well, much of my reading this year was done next to dogs. In particular, these dogs: I completed 21 books in 2022. The five I’d recommend most highly are: The other…
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How I Feel About Stoicism
I recently finished Ryan Holiday’s “The Obstacle Is the Way,” a very popular self-help book about modern stoicism, and I’m scratching my head. It’s a good book — I highlighted many passages that seemed written expressly for me — but I disagree with the premise. The author seems to say that…
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Every Fog Has its Day
I have seen fog three times this week. Each time, this Carl Sandburg poem came to mind: The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. “Fog” by Carl Sandburg There is indeed beauty in fog, but there are plenty of other…
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You Can Take the Boy out of Britain, but You Can’t Take Britain Out of His Vocabulary
The first time I told the Complimentary Spouse I felt “a bit peckish,” he looked at me quizzically and asked what he had done wrong. His response confused me. Why would he think I was accusing him of something when I only wanted a snack? It turns out that he…
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Cults, Myths, and Conspiracies
On Tuesday, hundreds of Qanon supporters turned out in Dallas1, believing that John F. Kennedy Jr. would return from the dead and dance the batusi with Steve Buscemi.2 Spoiler alert: JFK Jr. didn’t show up. But the bigger picture is worrying. I’m not the first person to realize that, for…
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There Is Nothing Either Good or Bad, but Thinking Makes it So
I don’t have a successful relationship with self-help books. When I pick one up, it’s either because the name catches my eye — “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” comes to mind — or I hear about it from a friend. If the book resonates with me, I’ll…