These are all the best things I read and watched in April 2024. If you open this in a browser, you can click the link to take you straight to that part of the article.
“What to say when your child asks for a smartphone” by Emily Harrison
“What If We Placed Friendship at the Center of Our World?” by Katherine Goldstein
“I am become infinite monkeys, author of Hamlet” by James Taylor Foreman
Cosmographia by
I think anyone who honestly confronts the overuse of their phones at some point has a thought that goes like, “maybe I don’t stop using my phone? Maybe instead I find something better to scroll through—like timeless art or wisdom or good advice.” I have tried this many times and found the solution doesn’t work for me.
But if this is an impasse you’re currently at, I couldn’t suggest a better account to follow and subscribe to than M. E. Rothwell’s Substack Cosmographia, particularly for the Atlas’s Notebook series. As he says on the most recent post:
The following is part of our Atlas’ Notebook series, featuring art, poetry, literature, cartography, and photography, all centred on a particular place.
It is a beautiful collection of all kinds of art and original writing. It’s like scrolling through a museum. I recommend the whole thing, but to get a flavor for what a post looks like, check out the most recent issue on Asuncion, Paraguay.
On reaching the age of the TV anti-hero by
I’m thirty-six years old. When people my age are represented as characters in popular media or as avatars in current events, they rarely capture the reality of my life and the problems I’m dealing with. Erik writes this essay about feelings in a similar vein upon his becoming the same age as Don Draper and Tony Soprano.
On how these characters don’t seem to grow from being parents, he writes:
If I were another sort of person, and this were another kind of essay, I’d talk about how I don’t feel like an adult, and how I’m shocked to find myself the age of these characters, what with all their adulting. But actually these people now feel like children to me. I don’t understand how they managed to have kids and not mature into at least marginally better, kinder, people. It’s almost like they missed an obvious stage of life, failing to pupate.
On why characters ‘our age’ don’t always feel representative, he writes:
Despite being the perfect age for the fictional anti-hero, in actuality, your late 30s for most people is not so glamorous, or dramatic. In fact, it is usually the time of life when glamor is lower than ever (poopy diapers, or a stable home routine after work, etc). It is when life becomes poorly fitted for a TV show. The screen-filling neediness of fictional characters of that age, from Carrie Bradshaw to Don Draper, is because the rest of normal people in their thirties are retreating from being viable subjects for fiction. They are squirreling away, become steadfastly boring, too focused on either career or family or both to be voyeuristically tracked. They are playing a different game entirely, one based on minimizing chaos and entropy, not increasing it.
These are two ways that I find media not representing my experience also. Parenthood rapidly changed my viewpoint on so many things, and I also find it bizarre how much time the constructions in media that are supposed to represent people my age seem to have for drama. Read the whole thing: On reaching the age of the TV anti-hero.
Daily Palantir by
There are too many things that I want to stay informed about. For example, I want to know about the technology industry as a business, the technology industry as an innovation sector, artificial intelligence, geopolitics particularly as it relates to defense and cybersecurity, civil liberties as it relates to cyber intelligence, and many others. But it’s tough to find something good to read about all of these topics—and even if I could, it would be tough to stay on top of them all.
Daily Palantir is exactly what it sounds like: a column that covers daily news around the company Palantir. If you’re unfamiliar, Palantir is a company (named after a magical orb from Lord of the Rings) that specializes in advanced big data analytics. Meaning it is trying to make sense of companies data. People with strong opinions about it regard it as either a savior or a boogeyman depending on their inclinations about privacy, the tech sector, the defense sector, etc.
I discovered The Daily Palantir by accident, but I like reading it so far. I find Palantir a very interesting company on its own, but the itch this newsletter scratches for me is it gives me one tiny window into all of the topics in the first paragraph. Each article updates me on what’s happening at Palantir but is also a great window into some other complex phenomenon.
For example, last week in We all need to keep an eye on Palantir & Germany, I learned a lot about European and German ideas of liberty, policing, technology. Check out the full blog here.
What to say when your child asks for a smartphone by
My daughter is now able to ask for TV shows by name and has started to doodle on an app on my phone. My wife and I talk a lot about screens and how we will handle it when our daughter wants to use a tablet or computer more often. I enjoyed this post from BeScreenstrong because it was practical but didn’t make it seem too easy. It was also prinipled but not hyperbolic. This was the takeaway:
We will keep being the parents and letting our kids be the kids. We will make decisions that our sons don’t always like. It’s part of the parenting job description. Instead of bragging about being the last in the class to get our kids smartphones, let’s be the first to give our kids the freedom and joy of a smartphone-free childhood.
And it reminded me of a similar conclusion I reached the end of my recent post Becoming an adult, one toddler tantrum at a time:
To be the man and father I want to be, this is how I should show up in all the places in my life: do the right thing and create the environment for more of the right things to happen. I am blessed because I had parents who thought this way as well.
I am inclined to say the dialogue between the child and parent in the story felt contrived, but that is also how I sound when I talk to my daughter. I am trying to spend less time on screens myself, so I value other people’s insight on this, especially when it’s this practical. Read What to say when your child asks for a smartphone here.
Glendale - Queens by
I frequently daydream about New York City: what it would be like to move there now or what it was like at different times throughout history. One of my favorite novels, Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, is a historical fiction magical realism set in NYC. One of my favorite documentary series is New York: A Documentary Film which is a seven part history of NYC. I also love accounts on YouTube where people just walk down the street there to give you a flavor of daily life.
The Neighborhoods is a blog that is like a written cross all three of those. It has the street level info you’d get from the YouTube channels covering daily life walking around. It has the history you’d get from a documentary. And it has the sweep and idiosyncrasy you’d get from historical fiction.
The most recent issue (which is also the one year issue) is about the neighborhood of Glendale in Queens. I loved it and immediately subscribed and went back to read more. Read Glendale - Queens here on The Neighborhoods.
“What If We Placed Friendship at the Center of Our World?” by
As I’ve grown older, my family has become increasingly important to me. More and more, I think that organizing society around strong families will be required for a future where the world is more just, more prosperous, and more interesting. However, I understand that there are a lot of great reasons why people cannot rely on or organize their lives around their nuclear or extended family.
It’s therefore worth asking questions like what is family? How do we define family in such a way that takes into acount the myriad ways people can live together and love one another? How do we draw a clear enough circle around who is our family so that people living as families can get the benefits families have now, but people will not just abuse this and spoil the benefits for everyone?
Katherine Goldstein writes The Double Shift, which asks readers to “Subscribe for groundbreaking ideas and solutions journalism about how we care for our families, our communities, and how to transform our society to center care.” In this article she has a conversation with author Rhaina Cohen about her book on the titual question about organizing our world around friendship, particularly long-term friendships where people care for one another, much like families. They don’t pose the same questions I do, but their discussion and answers are very generative for getting to the answers I’m looking for. Here are some of my favorite passages:
On how we might organize friendships to have a more structured scaffolding, similar to the way a romantic relationship might, Cohen says:
I would want people to have a book of questions that they could manage and somebody standing in the wings who could counsel them if they were dealing with complicated decisions or conflict because right now it's just like everybody for themselves. Right now, the default is just to not ask, to let things go unsaid, and to expect that the friendship is not going to be a relationship that you can put that kind of work into.
On unusual decisions, Cohen says:
People over-weigh all the negatives of making an unusual decision, and they overlook the negatives of a conventional decision.
On why to consider platonic partnerships (the name Cohen gives to these long-term care-oriented friendships), she says:
I just think that there are unrecognized risks of asking so much of so few adults for so many responsibilities. It's not working for a lot of people. It seems like it might be time to experiment with something different and to see what the pluses and minuses of that arrangement are.
Read What If We Placed Friendship at the Center of Our World? here.
Summer Lightning by
A lot of the essays I write at Castles in the Sky are a particular genre. It could be defined as, “literary-feeling narrative essay where I start with an episode in my life, trigger memories I explore, and then circle around these two events and maybe others while commenting on a larger more universal theme.” Sachin also writes in the genre and he does it masterfully.
I think Summer Memories is my favorite recent find on Substack. The arcs and lessons of the essays are great, but he is a master at turning little phrases. Here are excerpts from two of my recent favorites that show what I mean.
Pasteurized Memories is about how we remember things and what is important. It is beautiful and touching, but it also has this absolute banger of a quote that made me cackle waiting in line to board my most recent flight:
In America, you know something is spiritually vanquished when there's a football team named after it.
Fish Stories is about, well, stories about fish—what the fish mean and why they’re meaningful to us. It’s a great essay in spite of his gross mischaracterization of Houston (my hometown and one of the best cities in America), but it opens with this amazing line:
It is common knowledge that people who do their jobs hunched over a laptop love fantasizing about a simpler life.
I’d start with those two essays and if you like them, then check out Summer Lightning here.
“I am become infinite monkeys, author of Hamlet” by
A lot of Substackers wrote great essays about books in April: people’s book-reading habits, the book industry, what makes books great, and the future of books. I started reviewing them all here but it was too long so I am working on a longer post linking those posts together. This essay will be included there, but it was too good not to mention here, too.
It is about the future of books and human creation in the age of generative AI. My favorite part, which I think distills his idea:
Well, infinite monkeys might slap out Hamlet, but they could not, then, produce another intentional word of Shakespeare – a man limited by time, body, and space, looking out to the light of the morning, just like me, grasping at the infinite within. We marvel not because he got words in the right order, but because he, from his little vista, transposed the waveform of the infinite soul.
I clock Foreman as a book person. As I wrote in A Pilgrimage for Book People:
What separates book people from others is that they regard a book as more than the sum of its parts. Once the words are down and the book is printed, something special happens, and the book ascends to a new dimension of meaning.
I originally took it for granted that it was a human being with their inimitable humanity that was behind getting the words down, but his essay is thinking maybe I’ll need to update that some day.
Read I am become infinite monkeys, author of Hamlet on The Metaphor.
Show Your Work by
I’ve been reading Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. I picked up this, his second book, but realized I could read them side by side whenever convenient as they’re more like collections of advice and anecdotes than single narratives that need to follow each other in sequence. As it turns out, this one was more compelling so I finished it first.
It was great: an easy read but chock full of brilliant advice. A lot of it is stuff you might surmise or see elsewhere but he does a great job of packing a ton of value in and saying things in a punchy way that is not obnoxious. (When I say it’s not obnoxious, I mean I’m really glad this came out in 2014 because if it had come out after Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and the wave of ‘fuck’ title books that inspired, I fear his editor or publisher would have tried to get him to call it “SHOW YOUR FUCKIN WORK” or something like that.)
Kleon includes a ton of quotes from other people but his own words are very quotable themselves. These are three of my favorite passages:
On how and why to share your process, he writes:
Now, let’s face it: We’re not all artists or astronauts. A lot of us go about our work and feel like we have nothing to show for it at the end of the day. But whatever the nature of your work, there is an art to what you do, and there are people who would be interested in that art, if only you presented it to them in the right way. In fact, sharing your process might actually be most valuable if the products of your work aren’t easily shared, if you’re still in the apprentice stage of your work, if you can’t just slap up a portfolio and call it a day, or if your process doesn’t necessarily lead to tangible finished products.
On why to talk about your process in addition to sharing your work, he writes:
Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work affects how they value it.
On how to be a generous contributor and citizen as an artist, rather than a consumer and vulture, he writes:
I call these people human spam. They’re everywhere, and they exist in every profession. They don’t want to pay their dues, they want their piece right here, right now. They don’t want to listen to your ideas; they want to tell you theirs. They don’t want to go to shows, but they thrust flyers at you on the sidewalk and scream at you to come to theirs. You should feel pity for these people and their delusions. At some point, they didn’t get the memo that the world owes none of us anything . . . If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community. If you’re only pointing to your own stuff online, you’re doing it wrong. You have to be a connector. The writer Blake Butler calls this being an open node. If you want to get, you have to give. If you want to be noticed, you have to notice. Shut up and listen once in a while. Be thoughtful. Be considerate. Don’t turn into human spam. Be an open node.
Not wanting to be human spam and wanting to show my process is what inspired this post! Check out Show Your Work on Goodreads or also take a look at his Substack here.
Baby Reindeer on Netflix
Baby Reindeer is a seven episode limited series on Netflix. (If you get squeamish about drugs or abuse of any kind, you should probably check for trigger warnings or content warnings before you watch it.)
This is the logline: “Dealing with a female stalker, a man is forced to face a dark, buried trauma.” It’s hard to describe what the show is about or like to watch. There’s very funny parts and very dark parts. It is definitely not a feel good show. But it is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen—certainly one of the ones that hooked me the most and I finished the fastest.
I predict that viewers will have reactions that come largely in two flavors depending on their own past and the people who’ve been in their lives. One group of people will be like, “I do not understand why these people keep doing the things they do and making the choices that they are.”
The other group of viewers will be immediately sucked in, thinking of all the times that they or someone they knew started and kept engaging puzzling behaviors that were self-destructive or harmful toward others, despite the obvious reasons to stop and their own expressed desire to stop. If you read Relatable Flaws | Review of Ask the Dust by John Fante, you might remember this quote:
The protagonist is a deeply flawed, almost perverse daydreamer, but it is his flaws that make him relatable in a way I’ve encountered in very few other places.
I am firmly in the second group, and I feel the same way about Baby Reindeer that I did aobut Ask the Dust. The main character is flawed, but it is his flaws that make him relatable. If anyone else has seen it, I would love to know what you think. (No link here—just check it out on Netflix.)
What was the best thing you read or watched in April 2024?
Finishing reading Show Your Work by Austin Kleon is what inspired this new feature, as I’m already reading these things and keeping notes on them. I hope to do it again next month. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on any of the things mentioned here.
Thanks Charlie!
Ah what lovely words, thanks Charlie! So glad you enjoyed it