Nathanael Yellis

Over the summer, my book club read a book set in occupied Amsterdam during the Second World War. It was mostly an unremarkable book: the heroes were actively part of the resistance; the villains were Nazis; the plot was exactly what you'd expect. In it, no Nazi sympathizer went unpunished nor did any of the heroes pay the price of resisting the occupying regime. As a result, this historical fiction was entirely ahistorical: the vast majority of actual people went along with the Nazi regime and almost no one actively resisted it. While there are some great stories of heroes resisting the Nazis and hiding Jews, historical reality is far more grim: 75% of Dutch Jews died in the holocaust.

I've only been listening to Grateful Dead music for a few years. I'd been hearing about them for a longtime, but something made me find a best of playlist while making pancakes for my kids on Saturday morning and I've been hooked since. Now, when we load into the minivan to drive down the mountain towards civilization, Jerry Garcia sings, "Long distance runner, what you standin' there for? Get up, get out, get out of the door..."

In Washington, just as the weather gets cool in early autumn, political staffers remember that their bosses are elected, and hustle off to "the district" to "work on the campaign." It's easiest for people working directly for the Congress: they'd done just about nothing for a few months. Once summer finally ends, almost everyone feels a need to get back to work. The staffers had be seen by the boss as helping out when it mattered most: the final desperate rush to win re-election. One of my friends was so eager to "get back to the district", that left this car illegally parked: it accrued so many tickets, towing, and storage costs that he owed the city more than it was worth.

I'm getting older. I read the obituaries in the paper and think about where in life I am compared to the recently departed. I'm surprised how often the occurrences noted in the obit happen before age 40. I also note precisely what people die of, and how old they were, and make the quick calculation about whether I'm likely to meet the same end. Right around the time you get this, I'll have emerged from an appointment with my doctor. This is the sort of thing that matters to us oldsters.

I like finding contrasting stories on a similar theme. It's informative to see how similar contexts, approached differently, result in divergent narratives. These twin-bill stories tell us a bit about a writer's biases and they show us ours.

Looking back, I've sent your attention, through these weekly links lists, to far too many political stories that were of the moment. There was some decent writing in them: nothing motivates a journalist so much as thinking they can move the political needle. But you don't really remember the stories, aside from those that, entertaining as they were, were infamously wrong. Even the best political writers tend to keep their aperture too narrow to write anything that lasts. (This is probably because they're on a recurring deadline.) And, if you wait a few months, most of those of-the-moment pieces turn out to be, if not wrong, woefully incomplete. What kinds of stories last? The aperture needs to be a little wider than what's happening write now.

This year, as the sun lifted in the sky and Winter gave way to Spring, I read Suzanne Skees's God Among the Shakers. Perhaps it was more the hopefulness of the lengthening days, but she and the Shakers peaked my curiosity. Rather than laughing at the gradual dying out of the celibate sect, I found something resonant about their total absorption into community life and religious practice. When traditional religion leaves so much to be desired, the relative newcomers are interesting.

This week has found me at Boston's Convention Center for another INBOUND conference, my eighth since joining HubSpot. For me, the event is a compressed few weeks of my normal job: meeting HubSpot's larger and more complex customers and helping them understand how to accomplish their goals with our software. For almost all the rest of the fifteen thousand attendees, the event is a hype train.

What is Red Lobster?