intellectual obesity, keep going to college, unusually formed novels, books i don't read

6 things worth sharing this weekend + what I've been reading/watching/listening

Traveled to the beach for a few days, hence the late arrival of this Saturday newsletter.

Walked on the boardwalk, jumped in the water, stared at the ocean.

1. The man who couldn’t stop going to college at NY Times

   • 14 advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale, etc. He likes learning! But now his main occupation is teaching other people how to get into college. I don’t know seems like a vicious circle. Learning for the sake of learning.

   • He will always be the best/worst trivia partner.

   • Sharing b/c I’m probably a little bit jealous TBH

2. There’s an intellectual obesity crisis at The Prism

   • Common types of junk info include gossip, trivia, clickbait, hackery, marketing, churnalism, and babble. But in fact, any information that you can't use is junk info. A typical example on social media would be a photo of a freshly cooked burger, captioned with “Look what I just made!” but posted without a recipe so you can't even recreate it. Such an image might make you briefly salivate, and possibly spur you to make a burger of your own, but it provides no discernible value to your life.

3. Novels in unusual forms by Lincoln Michel

   • Novel as endnotes

   • Novel as a spaceship employee interview

   • Novel as workplace Slack messages

4. 7 reasons why you stop improving by Scott Young

5. Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley

   • Bloom reached out to the common reader. He concentrated on readers uncorrupted by theoretical prejudices. Ironically, today, it is those readers who are enabling the humanities to thrive online…Whatever the arguments on campus, readers carry on reading. And they are finding, discussing, and writing about the great works using the technologies Bloom thought would be most detrimental to the continuance of literary culture.

6. Here’s a list of the type of books I don’t read (by me)

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Notes on reading/watching/listening

Finished The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

• Took this to the beach and knocked it out

• Ironically, the Lincoln Michel article also mentions this book, it goes so deep into minutiae of shoestrings and CVS layouts, I really enjoyed it all the way through

• Here’s more from Lincoln on the joys of this book

• I’m a sucker for chain store references, this passage made me laugh

Started The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon

• Begins with a description of a middle-age British woman who dies in front of her television set and isn’t discovered for 3 years

• This is more of a sociological novel, diving into the loneliness and disconnection we all felt during the pandemic

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Last Thing

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” — Abraham Lincoln

Keep going-

- Josh Spilker