The Vague Mountain Chronicle
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Issue 17 - Head vs Heart
July 15, 2020
In my British youth, I remember frequently being told that Churchill once said: If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a...
Issue 17 - Encouragement
July 1, 2020
“Almost every child likes to make drawings, and some children are less discouraged by adults than others.” — Stanley Donwood, There Will Be No Quiet, P.25...
Issue 16 - Reboot
June 21, 2020
It’s been a while, for which I apologize. The last issue of this newsletter went out on April 20th, relatively early in the unfolding of what has become a...
Issue 15 - Bread
April 20, 2020
I love this spontaneous quarantine baking trend! I love being a part of it. I love what it says about us as a people—the comfort inherent in fresh bread, the...
Issue 14 - Guest Cowboy
April 7, 2020
I am terrible at self-promotion, for a variety of reasons, including a general British suspicion of such things, healthy doses of impostor syndrome, and an...
Issue 13 - Tiger
March 31, 2020
We settled into it this week — did you notice? This whole crazy, weird, scary situation is the new normal now. We don’t know how it’s going to end, and...
Issue 12 - Inflection?
March 24, 2020
For a long time, it was evident that we (at least, the collective “we” of the Western world) had become pretty freaking bad at operating as a functioning...
Issue 11 - Socially Distanced
March 15, 2020
So then, this is the New Normal. As I sit down to write this, the governor of Illinois just closed all bars and restaurants in the state, the cruise industry...
Issue 10 - Late
March 10, 2020
A truncated issue this week, because I started getting sick on Sunday and spent yesterday in bed. I still struggle mightily with just not doing anything,...
Issue 9 - Simulation
March 1, 2020
I've been thinking quite a bit, off and on, about the simulation hypothesis this week. It touches so many fascinating little areas of life. A couple of...
Issue 8 - Flight
February 23, 2020
Thanks to the internet, we all live in our own private mediaspheres now, in a way which we didn't just a few decades ago. The precise collection of...
Issue 7 - 'Wich
February 16, 2020
Let me take you inside my brain for a minute. I promise, it’ll hurt me more than it hurts you. Amy and I have been practicing intermittent fasting recently;...
Issue 6 - Art
February 12, 2020
“What’s the point?” “A five-year-old could do that.” “Why not do something more productive?” We immerse ourselves in art, perhaps more now than at any time...
Issue 5 - Vulnerable
February 2, 2020
I made my first small mistake with this newsletter last week. The easiest way to create a new issue using the list-manager I’m on, ButtonDown, is to “reuse”...
Issue 4 - Bass
January 26, 2020
I have no big overarching theme to explore this week. It was… a long series of days where too much happened but not a lot of consequential progress occurred....
Issue 3 - Beauty
January 20, 2020
We spent much of the weekend tidying the house for visitors, and it intersected with a lot of other parts of my week to make me think deeply about the things...
Issue 2 - Cadence
January 12, 2020
Producing anything on a regular schedule is a unique experience. I'm already feeling the overlaps between planning this newsletter and the old processes I...
Issue 1 - Beginnings
January 5, 2020
The early stages of anything are only a certainty in hindsight. We have a tendency to look at some concrete thing in the world -- airplanes, Facebook, Disney...