I'm back! For the first time in 394 weeks, I took two months of from this Friday email. For anyone following my professional boosterism on LinkedIn, I took two months off from that, too.
Usually when people return from their sabbaticals, they report having done something. Take a semester off from teaching? Use it to write your book. A month off of work? Ideally, you completed one big project and/or several big trips. Unless you have a good excuse, taking a break seems a risky behavior—somehow doing nothing doesn't justify your existence. And earning our keep seems to be a paramount value.
Breaks make space. Not doing things frees your attention. Free time is vanishingly scarce and thus precious. Newly found space or freed attention doesn't need to be redirected towards something useful. Summer is when you need to be set loose. Go outside and don't come in until the streetlights come on, we tell our kids. I think we could tell ourselves the same thing: you don't need to work every minute to justify your existence. Just being is enough.
With these few modest omissions of good things, this summer, I found time. Mostly, that time wasn't productively used. [The first link below, by a rabbi about sabbath, reminds us that this is exactly right.] We had a long, lazy lake vacation. I worked a little less than normal. My golf game plodded along, sporadically as ever. Maybe half the home projects envisioned occurred (the house was painted, although not by me). I listened to a lot more Phish and Trey Anastasio than I had previously. What fun! None of this smacks of optimization or productivity that usually creeps in when I press pause.
I rested; I read. Without applying a filter of "could I write an essay about this?", my reading mostly took the form of books. It was a nice mix of fiction and non, with the latter a set of categories I've been mostly ignoring this year. I'll spare you a full recap, although I can wax eloquent about the debates regarding homesteads and land use in the latter part of the 19th century, as the final stretches of the west were settled; I also have a lot of opinions about urban planning in the 1960s, thanks to Jane Jacobs.
I've talked about Tom Wolfe before and it was fun to see David Brooks revive his memory in the book review this summer. [The second link below.] After struggling through Wolfe's terrible Miami book (a total failure), it's good to remember his journalism and truly great writing. The Times released an interactive of their 100 books you should read. It was really enjoyable to have read more than a few of them; more than challenging to see just how many I have left to read.
What's the right reading companion? A better question might be, "who": talking over books with my brother and my friends this summer has been a delight. My notebook plays a big part, too, but I'm not completely old-fashioned: Readwise, an app where I put the good quotes, sends me regular emails from the treasure trove of my past reading. Reading those quotes almost make the authors seem like old friends you visit from time to time. When you have a little tech, though, you open the door for a lot. Do you like talking about books with friends? Why not use AI to make pretend friends out of "famous" people, all to help you feel smarter? The final link below tells the story of the startup making notable authors into make AI reading companions. Frightening or futuristic?
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Many summer Friday mornings, I thought about you all, my faithful readers and about what form this little weekly missive might take. A perusal of the archives show a fair bit of unwitting foreshadowing and its opposite: when I worked in politics, I shared a lot of links about technology; when I switched to tech, my emails became almost exclusively political. I used to send a longer hodge podge list of links (look at the Wolfe email linked above!). But the emails that are most fun to send, the ones it seems like you enjoy most, are these longer, more personal essays. More of those could be fun.
I like good writing and sharing too much to avoid links at the end of the email, but look for this top matter to continue to grow in the coming months. To do that, I may have to do less. A weekly essay might be a bit much for your humble correspondent. We'll see.
One thing is for sure, now that we're on to the fall: I'm back in the writing and email sending groove. It's been good to think through the essay above and the links below. I'm back!
I welcome your thoughts on sabbath, reading, and how this little email evolves. Reply at your leisure.
Reading
We All Could Use More Sabbath Fundamentalism
To borrow from an old ad campaign, you don’t have to be Jewish to observe Shabbat. All you have to do is turn things off, and tune in to the people and the world around you for one day a week.
The Secret to Tom Wolfe’s Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop
How the author of “The Right Stuff,” “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” and other classics turned sociology into art.
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Lena Dunham, Roxane Gay: We’ve all agreed to be turned into AI reading companions by a mysterious company called Rebind. I report from the inside.