Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk.

Justice.

Robert Adams in his foreword to Why We Photograph:

Though these essays were written for a variety of occasions, they have a recurring subject—the effort we all make, photographers and nonphotographers, to affirm life without lying about it. And then to behave in accord with our vision.

Emphasis mine. I don’t think I’ve found a more succinct mission statement for my life and my life’s purpose than that. To affirm life without lying about it. Beautiful.

The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects. The important words—the life-changing ones—should echo a little. But they didn’t. They sounded like everything else.

— From Tiamat’s Wrath

I started The Expanse series of books almost a year ago, when I started Leviathan Wakes on April 27th. A month before, I went down to Missoula and applied for a library card at the public library, and one of the perks was its association with Libby, an app I could use to check out ebooks for free. My library had access to all the The Expanse books, and because I was a fan of the TV show and because I wanted to be distracted from the pain and sadness at the time, I thought, why not? Let’s dive in.

Today I finished the 8th book in the series, and my adrenaline was coursing through my body as I read through the final chapters. I haven’t read too many sci-fi series in my life—the biggest one I’ve read is the Dune series—but I absolutely loved this one. The space opera nature of it was not something I’ve experienced before, and boy, I feel like I’ve been missing out on so much fun. The 9th and final book doesn’t come out until November, and that date cannot come soon enough. I have a long list of books I would like to read before then, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m itching to do some research on what other great sci-fi series are out there. I own some John Scalzi books—maybe The Interdependency series?

Either way, my life is richer for having read through this series. It was just a lot of fun with compelling and likable characters, an amazing premise, a down-to-earth take on science and interstellar politics, and a whole lot of space battles. What else would one want?

Joan Acocella, in a review of Richard Greene’s (no relation) The Unquiet Englishman, describing Graham Greene’s writing routine:

Graham Greene was an almost eerily disciplined writer. He could write in the middle of wars, the Mau Mau uprising, you name it. And he wrote, quite strictly, five hundred words per day, in a little notebook he kept in his chest pocket. He counted the words, and at five hundred he stopped, even, his biographer says, in the middle of a sentence. Then he started again the next morning.

I like this. It’s simple and can be done anywhere.

I find these reasons by Jesse Squires really compelling, enough to re-activate my Facebook and Instagram accounts sometime soon:

Regardless of whether or not I choose to continue using these platforms in the future, I prefer to retain the accounts for historical reasons and leave them vacant — at least for now… This preserves (at least the shell of) my online “identity” and prevents someone else from taking the usernames that I used for so many years. I would rather someone find my old, vacant accounts with a message to contact me by other means, instead of finding some Internet rando and wondering what happened — or worse, mistaking that other person for me.

[…]

On Instagram, after deleting everything years ago, I now keep a small handful of posts — 9 to be exact. When I post something new, I delete the oldest one. If ever decide to leave the account vacant, it will be quick and easy to do. This is how I use these accounts in ways that keep me in control.

At the end of last year, I downloaded all my data from Facebook and Instagram, so deleting all my content and keeping my accounts open there (though unused) seems like a good middle ground. I deleted Twitter years and years ago, so someone else has already taken up my old username there (which is okay, but still kinda sad—a feeling I can’t quite wrap my heard around yet).

On a side note, over the past week I’ve been getting emails from Facebook with a security code to login. I think someone out there is trying to get into my Facebook account and possibly claim my username as their own. I think this act alone is shaping my thinking on this.

Charlie Warzel in the New York Times:

In 2016, Mr. Caulfield met Mr. Wineburg, who suggested modeling the process after the way professional fact checkers assess information. Mr. Caulfield refined the practice into four simple principles:

1. Stop.
2. Investigate the source.
3. Find better coverage.
4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.

Otherwise known as SIFT.

I had an argument/discussion with a really good friend yesterday about whether or not flu cases went down during the last year. I told her they went down because of our collective COVID precautions—wearing masks, social distancing, washing our hands—but she said it’s not true because they weren’t testing for influenza, so there’s no way of knowing for sure. She’s been against all the COVID precautions since the beginning, so I could understand where she was coming from. I still didn’t believe she was right, so I went online, found around ten sources for my claim that flu cases actually went down, and she said,

We don’t “believe” the same articles. We can both find ones that show what we agree with 🤣

I’m not sure if this SIFT method would’ve worked with her, but I find it useful for myself anyway. I also don’t know how to converse with my friends who don’t share the same definition of “truth” as me. Am I wrong? Is she wrong? Is there a balance? I have no idea.

But we’re still friends, and I’m fiercely loyal to my friends, even when we disagree.

Molly Wood in the latest episode of Make Me Smart with Kai and Molly:

Facebook is cigarettes… It’s Big Tobacco… They know its product causes harm and they keep minimizing the harm to keep selling product. #FacebookisCigarettes

Agree 100%. And over 2 billion people are addicted.

Philip Roth, in his introduction to Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog:

The character of Moses Herzog, that labyrinth of contradiction and self-division—the wild man and the earnest person with a “Biblical sense of personal experience” and an innocence as phenomenal as his sophistication, intense yet passive, reflective yet impulsive, sane yet insane, emotional, complicated, an expert on pain vibrant with feeling and yet disarmingly simple, a clown in his vengeance and rage, a fool in whom hatred breeds comedy, a sage and knowing scholar in a treacherous world, yet still adrift in the great pool of childhood love, trust, and excitement in things (and hopelessly attached to this condition), an aging lover of enormous vanity and narcissism with a lovingly harsh attitude toward himself, whirling in the wash cycle of a rather generous self-awareness while at the same time aesthetically attracted to anyone vivid, overpoweringly drawn to bullies and bosses, to theatrical know-it-alls, lured by their seeming certainty and by the raw authority of their unambiguity, feeding on their intensity until he’s all but crushed by it—this Herzog is Bellow’s grandest creation, American literature’s Leopold Bloom, except with a difference: in Ulysses, the encyclopedic mind of the author is transmuted into the linguistic flesh of the novel, and Joyce never cedes to Bloom his own great erudition, intellect, and breadth of rhetoric, whereas in Herzog Bellow endows his hero with all of that, not only with a state of mind and a cast of mind but with a mind that is a mind.

Try saying all 244 words five times fast.

Craig Mod in his introduction to his new newsletter huh:

As I was conjuring up the shape of huh it struck me as slightly insane that more photographers don’t do this — mail out a single photo once a week. Ideally we’d subscribe to a cadre of our favorites. Maybe they’d all arrive on Wednesday and Wednesday would be this visual inbox party. No comments, no likes, no stream of other images to compete against, no Reels to be sucked into, no algorithmic curveballs. Just a few beautiful images, from the four or five photographers whose work we adore. Things to be enjoyed as units unto themselves in ways that are difficult to do in the din of social streams. And best of all — if we want to say something nice, we just have to hit reply. No public-space posturing.

Photography Wednesdays sounds amazing.

Viet Thanh Nguyen on page 267 of The Sympathizer:

You know how to tell if someone’s really dead? Press your finger on his eyeball. If he’s alive, he’ll move. If he’s dead, he won’t.

When I was an EMT, a paramedic told me of another way to tell if someone’s playing dead: rub the knuckles of your first two fingers hard against their chest. No one can pretend after that.