Quite a comeback by the Timberwolves. Denver just went cold in the third quarter and never recovered.
Things you didn’t know you needed until you heard them: a funk cover of Sandra McCracken’s We Will Feast In The House of Zion.
Pentecost: the day you realize that the only red shirt that you own is a Nebraska Cornhuskers jersey. My wardrobe still hasn’t fully adapted to being a member of a liturgical church.
⚓️
2024 Reads: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse 📚
Simple, interesting, beautiful expression of Buddhism.
Bullet Points for a Friday
- Between now and July there are only 2 weeks where I’m in the office for 5 full days. This week I was in DC Monday through Wednesday.
- I’m gonna be back in the saddle, er, on the bench as a church musician the next couple weeks. Looking forward to it.
- Pretty dang excited for the concert tickets I bought this week. More on that later.
- Next week I’m out of office for 3 days for Anwyn’s high school graduation.
- This means that by next week at this time we’ll have 2 of our 3 kids out of high school. When did we get old?
- I’ve been helping pick out the hymns for our church services for the past several months, which has been a good way to learn the Episcopal hymnal and also to pick out songs I enjoy singing. Is that self-serving?
- Obviously I mean that I got old but my beautiful wife is as young and lovely as ever.
Happy Friday, everybody.
One more flight to get home. In theory if I had a rental car here from ORD I could be home sooner than this flight will get me home. But that would mean driving four hours… out of Chicago… during rush hour… Instead I will sit here and eat dinner on the company dime.
2024 Reads: The Future by Naomi Alderman 📚
Not subtle, but imaginative and entertaining. Worth a read. Four stars.
Spent an hour with Apple tech support trying to figure out why my MacBook just refuses to show me the Hilton Honors captive portal screen so I can login. Got escalated to second tier support. Next step: try reinstalling the OS. Sure, I’m game. Go to recovery mode. Turns out reinstalling the OS… requires you to have an internet connection. 😩 Guess my iPad will do for tonight.
Haven’t run much in the last several years after injuring my knee running a half marathon. Having lost a bunch of weight this spring, it’s time to try it out again. Boy am I out of cardio shape. Time to be back at it.
Oh man, this bit in Naomi Alderman’s latest novel, the thoughts of a woman who left a religious cult. I know these feelings. #exvangelical
Current status: monitoring the video game room at the post-prom party. Watching the level of play, pretty sure I could beat most of these kids at Mario Kart. 😂
2024 Reads: NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman 📚
A moving and empathetic history of modern grappling with neurodiversity.
Headed into a busy weekend… high school tennis tonight for K15, prom tomorrow night for A18. I volunteered to be a post-prom party door monitor from 11:15pm to 2:00am… I suspect I will not be making it to church on Sunday.
Because I need more piano music...
Because I’m a sucker for trying out new piano music that I’ll probably never be good enough to play (or at least to play well), I just ordered this one:
A Russian composer writing jazz-styled preludes? Too much awesome.
Here’s a video of the composer playing one of them:
A radicalizing NYPD-Columbia Education
Sam Thielman goes hard in his most recent piece at Forever Wars titled “What Could Be More Radicalizing Than An NYPD-Columbia Education?”
Eric Adams, the ex-NYPD mayor of New York City —who, in keeping with the grand traditions of his old job, probably doesn’t even live in New York—cares deeply about our children. We know this because he told us so. “These are our children,” he told Katty Kay on MSNBC, “and we can’t allow them to be radicalized like children are being radicalized across the globe.”
It is important to Eric Adams that children learn the right lesson at the right time. And so, on the campus of Columbia University, where the Pulitzer Prizes will be awarded today, he deployed platoons of his former colleagues to administer the kind of education New York City’s ruling class prefers.
Worth reading the whole thing. (As is true any time Sam is writing.)
It is amazing to me the level of over-reaction from School Administration and the NYPD, who clearly wanted an excuse to display their power. Fascim, folks. It’s real. It’s not coming; it’s here already.
May your garden always thrive: A beautiful little essay from Wil Wheaton.
I may have become the stereotypical liberal exvangelical.
On a beautiful Sunday morning, I slept in (until 8).
Kicked off the coffeemaker to brew my locally-roasted beans.
Played Wordle. (Got it in 4.)
Read through my email newsletters for the morning. Realized I was long overdue to support A.R. Moxon. Clicked the link and started a monthly donation. By my count, the 5th recovering homeschooled or super-conservative Christian-schooled evangelical-kid-turned-writer I’m supporting. It’s a whole genre.
Made breakfast. Drank coffee. Started reading a book on social science.
I’m now a member of a church where you don’t have to show up at the crack of dawn and stay all morning to prove your devotion to the cause. My wife and kids aren’t going this morning. (My kids don’t usually. My wife has other plans today.) I’ll show up this morning for the 10:15 service and do my part by getting up to read the OT and Psalm. I’ll be home by 11:30. (The Episcopal Church: Where You Can Love Jesus and Your Trans Kid. ™)
After church I’ll probably hit the neighborhood farmer’s market. (First market of the year today!)
Still evangelical enough that there’s a verse in my head to summarize my morning thoughts:
“When the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
2024 Reads: The Light Within Darkness by David Jeffrey 📚
Blew through this one in a day to finish up the trilogy. Really enjoyed this one.
2024 Reads: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar 📚
A stunning little novella. Spare, keen, and gripping.