Suddenly the noise stopped and I was outside the plane.
I was in a freefall, strapped to my seat bench and hanging head-over-heels. The whispering of the wind was the only noise I could hear.
1️⃣ Baking Bread in Lyon | (New Yorker, 2020)
“The boulangerie was where the boys discovered the word goûter (from goût, meaning “flavor,” and probably the single most important word in the entire language). A goûter is an afternoon snack—eaten universally at 4 p.m., when children get out of school—and an exception to two of the city’s implicit rules about food: you do not eat standing up, and you never eat between meals. A goûter is devoured instantly. The boys discovered Bob’s pain au chocolat and didn’t understand why they should eat anything else.”
Caipirinha - Anthony Bourdain
2️⃣ Juliane Koepcke: How I survived a plane crash | (BBC News, 2012)
“Suddenly the noise stopped and I was outside the plane. I was in a freefall, strapped to my seat bench and hanging head-over-heels. The whispering of the wind was the only noise I could hear.
I felt completely alone.”
Chris Stapleton: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
3️⃣ Islands in the Stream | (Prospect, 2021)
“The music industry was once sprawling enough to accommodate a wide spectrum of artists. But artists today are beset on all sides by monopolists and oligopolists. Like so many sectors of our economy, government inaction has allowed the music business to consolidate, with devastating effects on musicians.”
Related: NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End Like This
Outkast - B.O.B (Bombs Over Baghdad)
4️⃣ Interview: Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe | (Noahpinion, 2021)
“I'm out of my depth commenting on what the US government should do. I'll just say that I find it somewhat discouraging that one of the biggest and clearest violations of liberty and human rights of our era -- the treatment of the Uyghurs by the Chinese government -- receives as little condemnation from those in power as it does. I get why, of course: it's bad for business. But I think that our support for human rights and liberty should be somewhat closer to an absolute. (On this topic, 70% of Americans agree.) In his commencement address at Harvard in 1978, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn claimed that civic courage was in decline. I don’t know whether or not it was (or is), but, whatever the trendline, it seems important to me to ensure that it doesn’t.”
Related: The End of Industrial Society
I was hiding under your porch because I love you.
5️⃣ how timeless is timeless advice? | (luttig’s learnings, 2021)
“A common defense for conventional wisdom is that it has withstood the test of time. And lots of advice is timeless, or what you could describe as Lindy. Eat your vegetables, for example. But some advice is timeful: relevant for a specific era, but anachronistic thereafter.”
Related: Productivity Anti-Advice
Daft Punk’s Homework - The Samples
6️⃣ Why History’s Greatest Innovators Optimized for Interesting | (Taylor Pearson, 2021)
“Interesting is an emotion that evolved to help humans optimize their fitness in an environment where external indicators were hard to measure.
Much of what we do that improves our information processing capacity as individuals (and thus fitness in Darwinian terms) is difficult to measure.
There is no easily measurable metric which Einstein could have optimized for that would have lead him to e=mc2. He just thought the problem was interesting. This is true of every major discovery or innovation in history.”
Guitar Teacher REACTS: Justin Timberlake & Chris Stapleton "Tennessee Whiskey / Drink You Away" LIVE
7️⃣ How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | (New Yorker, 2021)
“Loftus, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, is the most influential female psychologist of the twentieth century, according to a list compiled by the Review of General Psychology. Her work helped usher in a paradigm shift, rendering obsolete the archival model of memory—the idea, dominant for much of the twentieth century, that our memories exist in some sort of mental library, as literal representations of past events.”
Your mind is a wonderful place, Nick!