On the March: March 10-16, 2025

Mostly short pieces this week, as I spent a good chunk of it on a quick family Spring Break trip to Boston. Wild, I know. Most of my time was spent reading Atkinson's book on the American Revolution in advance of the trip and then while trapped in the hotel room while my kids were asleep I turned my attention to Woodard's attempt to explain American history and the modern mess we find ourselves in. These books have turned out to be a perfect pairing, and they've taken up a lot of my mental space.

Perhaps that's why the rest of my intake was so randomly jumbled?

Books
American Nations, Colin Woodard (continued): Utterly fascinating and completely dispiriting at times. It's beyond depressing how much of the current moment is shaped by historical forces that largely centered around the propagation of both slavery and corporate interests.

The British Are Coming, Rick Atkinson (continued): This week, I walked around Boston in khakis and running shoes telling my son about the burning of Charlestown and how Paul Revere didn't make it all the way to Concord on his famous ride. (He wasn't really all that interested in either item.) I'm just leaning into middle-agedness at this point, and it felt pretty good. I did have some concerns that my sneakers weren't giving me the proper support though...

I have really enjoyed this book, though, and I was particularly into the deprivations involved in the attempted capture of Quebec and the slowly building story of what a shit Benedict Arnold was. While Atkinson does a really nice job of rounding out the character of each major participant in the war, I especially love how he has slowly made it clear that Arnold was brave but also that people didn't like him and that he left a trail of complaints and bitterness in his wake.

"[Arnold] would forever be an enigma, beset with both a gnawing sense of grievance and the nattering enmity of lesser fellows."

In cool moment of synergy for me this week, the ragtag nature of the Continental Army troops in and around Boston and the disdain with which many, including to a good degree George Washington, held them are nicely foregrounded by Woodard's insights into why the Yankees fought and how they viewed their duty to their fellow neighbors. I need to see more of Washington in this book to see how his presumably Tidewater-aristocratic leanings will come into play, but I look forward to using the opportunity as a bit of a litmus test for Woodard's argument.

Music
Abbey Road, The Beatles: My son's music education continued this week with Abbey Road, which was such a hit he drew a picture of The Beatles performing on stage and then requested a Beatles poster for his bedroom. It will be the first non-Pokemon/non-soccer-related item to graces those walls, and I feel like it's a big moment for him. (Or for me? Is this really just about me? No, he genuinely likes it. I think.)

Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys: Spinning the story of the album-driven "rivalry" between The Beatles and The Beach Boys, I pushed my luck and tried introducing this classic to far less success.

Phish Mix: In my personal listening this week, I've been playing a playlist that my buddy Andy made for our bookclub. We continue to explore Phish and my other buddy Christian is just dipping a toe, and Andy created an illustrative high point live track from each year of Phish's existence. It's clear how much work and care went into the playlist and the insight it offers is pretty incredible. It actually overshadows the music for me at times, but a lot of the tracks have been exciting to explore. He should label it and market it as Phish Studies 201. I'd have bought it.

Articles and Episodes
Would I Lie To You - S18:E09: Bob Mortimer's appearances on this show are one of my favorite running gags. He's a tough comic to describe accurately or well, but his stories on this show are really the perfect example of the heights this format can reach. Bizarre, bewildering, and impossible to predict, Mortimer's stories and their slow destruction of opposing team captain's David Mitchell's sanity are what I hope to see every time there's a new episode. (This one doesn't quite live up to that hype, though, I must confess.)

"The Rush Is On For Oregon Truffles," Pete Wells (New York Times):

"As soon as you find a truffle, it owns you."

"The New Yorker Embraces (Some) Modern Language," Callie Holtermann (New York Times):

“For every person who hates the dieresis and feels like it’s precious and pretentious and ridiculous, there’s another person who finds it charming."

The CIA Bookclub by Charlie English Reviewed by John Simpson (The Guardian): Great little review by someone unwittingly enmeshed in the CIA's scheme at one point. English's book is going straight into my To Read list.

"Toxic Preconditions," Oliver Burkeman (The Imperfectionist): I've always liked Burkeman's work, which largely what my wife calls being "Type A-minus," and I particularly liked learning about "toxic preconditions" in this piece.

"Toxic preconditions lie in wait everywhere. Consider the ubiquitous modern-day search for the ideal morning routine, featuring the “optimal morning sunlight protocol” and so forth. (Step one: Don’t live in northern England during winter.) It starts off innocently enough, with a list of three or four things you might beneficially do each morning, in order to feel happier and get more done. But then it morphs – shockingly easily and quickly, in my experience – into a list of three or four, or seven or eight or nine, things you absolutely must do each morning, if you’re to stand any chance of being happy or productive."

"Undergraduate Upends A 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture," Steve Nadis (Quanta Magazine, by way of Wired):

"He turned to a common approach for storing data known as a hash table. But in the midst of his tinkering, Krapivin realized that he had invented a new kind of hash table, one that worked faster than expected—taking less time and fewer steps to find specific elements."

Silicon Valley did it first? (NSFW)