Nothing tonight
by Anton Zuiker on March 26, 2019
I’ve hit a wall. I’m tired today. No ideas or stories or conversations to chronicle here. Tomorrow’s another day.
Day of sun and silence
by Anton Zuiker on March 25, 2019
The Mueller report and Washington intrigue. Science integrity and a major settlement by Duke University. Technology giants and their plans to rule our lives.
I’m not in a place to dwell on any of that. I’ve spent today with other people and with different priorities. It’s a day enjoyed for where I am, a peaceful calm far removed from those other issues.
That’s well-being, and I am grateful for this opportunity.
Intermittent contemplation
by Anton Zuiker on March 24, 2019
Colleagues keep recommending articles in the Harvard Business Review, so I picked up a copy. I had some time to read this morning and sat with a cup of coffee reading from the front of the March-April 2019 issue. Nearly every page seemed to have an insight or tip or quote that made me pause, take a sip of coffee, and consider how I might apply that idea to my work. I especially liked a short item on intermittent collaboration, a summary of a longer research study (How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence) that recommends independent “exploration and social learning.” Basically, work on your own, then bring your ideas to the group. That’s a concept I can send to my colleagues as a way to coordinate a couple of different working groups that I’ve been invited to be on.
I expect to have more time tomorrow to sit and sip and read and contemplate. I’m not even half through the HBR, so I’m sure I’ll be full of new ideas when I get back into work.
Hear the leaves falling
by Anton Zuiker on March 23, 2019
Even with a dozen big trees now gone from our property, there still will be a lot of leaves to fall from the many dozens of oak, elm, maple, and other trees that remain. The last few times I’ve visited the hardware and garden stores, I’ve looked over the selection of gas-powered backpack blowers, expecting I’d purchase one so that I can keep the yard clear this autumn. But in the April issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows argues against leaf blowers.
Their high volume, which I had long considered their most salient feature, is only their second-most-unusual aspect. The real marvel is the living-fossil nature of their technology. And because the technology is so crude and old, the level of pollution is off the charts.
Fallows was part of a small group of people and elected representatives to successfully advocate against leaf blowers in Washington, D.C. Kudos to them for making their communities less polluted with gas fumes and low-decibel noise.
I knew that two-stroke engines weren’t great for our environment, but I thought, wrongly, that they were getting cleaner. Fallows set me straight, and that’s enough for me to not get one of those backpack blowers. The other facts he shares—about an increase in hearing loss in the U.S. and how a blower’s motor will surely damage my ears—settles the case. I’ll be looking at the battery-powered blowers from now on, and grabbing for the metal rake that’s worked quite well for the last few years.
The convenience of books
by Anton Zuiker on March 22, 2019
Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, and she’s one of the best journalists I’ve read over the last few years. Her feature about the potential of a devastating earthquake in the coastal Northwest, and her reporting about the stink bug invasion, are perfectly excellent. The March 25 issue includes a shorter memoir about her father’s love of books, and how he stacked them up, around, and down the sides of a bedroom dresser.
There’s a paragraph in the middle of Schulz’s piece about the novel Middlemarch, which her father regarded as the greatest in the English, and others found near it. “I don’t know if he had completed either of the other two books, or even begun them. But it doesn’t matter, I suppose. No matter when my father died, he would have been—as, one way or another, we all are when we die—in the middle of something.” Sublime.
Schulz’s description of her father’s books took me back to the literary cocoon of my friend Richard Gildenmeister, whose apartment in Cleveland was crammed full of books (and more). That short profile I wrote about him in 1996 is still one of my favorites. I’m glad, too, that I recorded Richard telling me some of the stories about the famous writers he met in his long career as a bookseller. Schulz tells of the stories her father told her when she was young. “I regret to this day that none of us ever thought to write them down.”
Erin has kept a running list of the wondrous and humorous sayings of our children. She wasn’t with us tonight when, after a long day of travel, Oliver said of this place we’ve come to visit, “There are so many convenient things here that I haven’t noticed before.” I heard him later in bed, reading from a book.