Reprise: Michael Pollan on Quitting Caffeine for Three Months

 

Viability

If the necessary resources, talent, and time are not available, then what might be a viable plan under different circumstances is not viable.

Repeat as needed during analysis.

[Photo by Zoe Holling at Unsplash]

 

Small But Large

The tasks that are known to be important and sizable will be done. It's hard to ignore them. They're on all of the charts.

The tasks that are important and small, however, may not be done because they are harder to spot. Since they are easier to do, the assumption is that they will be done as a matter of routine.

The result of that oversight, of course, may be enormous.

[Photo by Jamie Street at Unsplash]

Nitwittery Update

Los Angeles Times column: White supremacy comes in all colors.

[HT: Joel Engel]

Late Night Reading

 

The "Disinformation" Game

Commentary magazine: Christine Rosen on "How Disinformation Journalists Practice Disinformation."

There Was a Job To Be Done

 

A Good Time to Study the First World War

I have always understood the fascination with the Second World War. The main leaders were very interesting, the campaigns were more complicated, and the technology far more advanced than in its predecessor.

And yet, the period that deserves more attention is the First World War. Dynasties fell, ideologies rose, massive amounts of talents were slaughtered on an unprecedented scale, and the entire event was followed by a pandemic. 

There was a logic to the Second World War that was missing in the First.

That alone is why it deserves scrutiny.

First Paragraph

That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age.

- From Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford Love Story by Max Beerbohm

Find Something Beautiful Today

[Photo by Theng at Unsplash]