Currently Reading

• Trying to decide between three books to start next:
  • Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
  • How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur
  • Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya

Currently Watching

• Slow Horses, Season 1

Currently In Queue

• The First Omen
• Skinamarink
• Godzilla Minus One

Currently Listening

• Continuing the trend of all my favorites releasing albums way too close to each other: new Avett Brothers'!

Currently Planning

• July: Kentucky to visit family and drop off kids for two weeks
• August: West Coast: Portland, Bay Area, Los Angeles, Disneyland (and maybe Yosemite!)
• October: Eastern Shore
• November: Palm Springs for Eric’s wedding (maybe Vegas on the front end?)
• December: post-Christmas trip to Kentucky

Concurrently

• May was a bit of a weird month–we were insanely busy, but it was just a bunch of one-off events. I journaled about a lot of it, but didn’t blog much. I like that I have my journal where I feel comfortable capturing what I feel like, but I want to blog more. I need to adjust the line between public and private.
• At our school auction we bid on and won a week at a house on the Eastern Shore. Since the school is always out for five days around Indigenous Peoples/Columbus Day (apparently our holiest of holidays), it’s always a good time to get out of the city. Looking forward to it!

Finished in May:

The White Lotus, Season 2: so great at unpacking so many ideas:

• the transactional nature of how we live our lives and how it’s always a choice
• how the stories we tell ourselves are truer than the facts
• power is desirable and serves a function, but holding onto it for its own sake is self defeating

Finished reading: Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick 📚 great overview of how AI can be currently used most effectively: as a partner in completing tasks rather than as an entity that completes the tasks itself. I appreciated that Mollick was enthusiastic about AI while remaining skeptical.

3 Body Problem, Season 1: I liked this more than I thought I would– it’s made really well and did just enough thematically to remain interesting. I wish this had been a smidge more subtle and spent a tiny bit more time on its critique of religion.

Finished reading: Extremely Hardcore by Zoë Schiffer 📚 This is ostensibly an account of the downfall of Twitter, but I fear this same story is about to be retold over and over. Schiffer does a great job of anchoring the story in non-Elon characters. So while it’s long, it goes fast and smooth.

Civil War: I mostly liked this, but it felt just a bit off. It works way better as a plea for the necessity of journalism and documentation than as some kind of reflection of current times.

The full-on Tarantino-style ending–while satisfying– undercut the stillness of the rest of the movie

Previously, in Current Things…

May 2024
April 2024
March 2024
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
May 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022