Boxing books for donation to either a charity or my favorite used bookstore. Clearing out old files. Sending off some business proposals. Clearing desks. Billing.
And some reading, of course.
But also: Coffee. Conversation. Gratitude. Work on a new Substack column.
[The most recent one is here.]
Every day should have gratitude.
[Photo by Nick Fewings at Unsplash]
"Between January 2023 and May 2024, more than 300 fire hydrants were stolen from LA County streets, according to data from the Golden State Water Company, which manages the fire hydrants."
and
"Ten years ago, California voters approved spending $7.5 billion to build water storage and improve state water facilities - but by 2023 not one dam had been finished, per the Los Angeles Times."
Read all of the Nellie Bowles column in The Free Press.
Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev loved radiation the way other men loved their wives. Tall and good-looking, twenty-six years old, with close-cropped dark hair and ice-blue eyes, Logachev had joined the Soviet army when he was still a boy. They had trained him well. The instructors from the military academy outside Moscow taught him with lethal poisons and unshielded radiation. He traveled to the testing grounds of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, and to the desolate East Urals Trace, where the fallout from a clandestine accident still poisoned the landscape; eventually, Logachev's training took him even to the remote and forbidden islands of Novaya Zemlya, high in the Arctic Circle and ground zero for the detonation of the terrible Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear device in history.
- From Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham
Back in front of the class.
A huge array of topics.
It's like Europe in One Day.
I'm armed with espresso.
Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury. We were living in a blend of their novels and then along came The Great Clarification.
Check out my latest Substack essay here.
Plato. Aristotle. Homer. Solzhenitsyn. Epictetus. Seneca. Madison. Tacitus. Shakespeare. Cervantes. Taleb. Swift. Locke. Jefferson. Mill. Ellington. Melville. Gibbon. Ellison. Franklin. Tocqueville. Dickens. Lincoln. Berry. Aron. Grant. Thatcher. Douglass. Trollope. Johnson (Samuel and Paul). Twain. Kurzweil. Tolstoy. Moynihan. Tennyson. Proust. Chesterton. Unamuno. Lewis. Conrad. Orwell. Bellow. Scalia. Sowell. Murray. Vargas Ilosa. Yeats.
Was teaching a workshop on Equal Employment Opportunity today. Bright audience. Great questions.
Have another session later this week in another city. Also working on some Substack essays.
Bear with me.
