Washington Post: “An 8-year-old slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist.”

Austin Kleon recommends studying something you love in depth - and it just so happens that I’m reading through the collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. I’m keeping notes in Craft and hope to turn those notes into occasional posts. There are themes running through his work that very much interest me.

I’d also love to do something like this for the albums of Over the Rhine, or blog through the Tao Te Ching. Blogging through books (in the style of blockquote followed by commentary) was very common on the blogs I used to read fifteen years ago. I miss that sort of amateur scholarship.

From The Revenge of Analog by David Sax, on the story of digital progress:

Our world would be successively rendered into bits and bytes, one program at a time, until we reached a state of digital utopia, or the Terminators came for us.

The Revenge of Analog presents a different narrative, however. It shows that the progress of technological innovation isn’t a story of a slow match from good to better to best; it’s a series of trials that helps us understand who we are and how we operate.

This brings to mind an analogy to evolution by natural selection. It’s often misunderstood that evolution represents a sort of upward progress to perfection. The reality is that it is progress toward reproductive fitness, integrating whatever allows a species to propagate. An evolved species is not ideal in every way. Rather, in some ways it may be worse off than its earlier iterations. (See Breath by James Nestor for examples of how our evolutionary adaptations have actually devolved our breathing functions.)

Technology evolves, but its latest iteration may not be ideal in every way - may be worse in some important ways. This is where human judgement about the purposes of life and technology must engage, refusing to allow ourselves and our world to become slaves to our technology.

Plans for the next issue involve cardboard and spray paint.

This is a great presentation by Doug Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope, on the way people can begin repairing ecosystems in our own yards. I often feel my powerlessness to do anything about our rolling ecological disasters, but this offers a way to do small-scale, realistic good. I’m excited to get started on expanding the native species plantings in my yard. The presentation, by the way, was hosted by Sycamore Land Trust, an awesome local nonprofit that is protecting land from development one plot at a time.

Fantastic documentary: Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski

I received my order from Half Letter Press, which focuses on booklets and independent publishing. Check them out, lots of interesting stuff there.

Robinson Jeffers, standing beside Tor House and Hawk Tower, his handmade stone outpost on the Pacific Ocean. (Image source)

“I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore, the very turn of the world, the long migration’s / End” (Jeffers, “The Torch-Bearers’ Race”)

The IRS will require you to use ID.me to access your taxes online. Last year, ID.me was locking people out of their unemployment benefits due to facial recognition failures. I had to set up an ID.me account to opt out of the child tax credit advance payments and it was indeed a cumbersome, annoying process. What really bothered me, though, was giving so much critical information to a third party contractor.

Chilly hike at Spring Mill State Park today