2026-05-27 19:11:58
I have long been of the opinion that we simultaneously have Too Much Stuff and also that some objects are miraculously cheap and lovely, so here are some things that have brought me joy lately. (See my previous Holiday Gift Guide for more).
Cotton bathrobe, ~$40
Maybe this is obvious, maybe everyone else knows already, but: did you know you can still just get a cozy 100% cotton bathrobe, as an adult? And you can wear it around your home, like a prince? And that it's cozier than any form of pajama or sweatpant, etc? I did not, and now I do, and am richer for it. (H/T best friend-of-the-blog T.)
I do like this particular brand of floss (Dr Tung's), which expands between your teeth and catches a satisfying amount of debris. But far more than that, I want to share the joy – after many years of not-enjoying flossing – to discover that there's various different kinds of floss, and you can buy 5 different types and try them all, and then suddenly have a floss you do like.
Hobibear Shoes, ~$45
I really like these shoes, which have wide toe boxes and flat soles and which I believe (though am not certain) are much better for your feet in the long run.
I like the whole category of "barefoot" shoe, but I like that these particular ones can go well with casual and somewhat-smart looks, and that they don't look TOO weird from the outside (although I'm sure people can tell that they're unusual by the toe box).
If you're new to barefoot shoes then I recommend phasing these in, alternating with traditional shoes every day or few, to give your feet and legs time to adjust to a lot of new mechanics.
Double-walled drinking glasses, ~$7 per tumbler
These tumblers are double-walled so they insulate both hot and cold. I like them better than mugs for hot drinks, I like being able to see what I'm drinking and how well the tea has steeped, etc. And I like them for cold drinks, they stop my hands from getting icy. So for me they replace all previous types of glass.
Triangular wooden clock, ~$15
High on my list of "it seems impossible that this product could be manufactured and sold to me at this price", though I fear a lot of suffering is involved along the way. I find this clock delightful, and you can turn the light down low to make it a very reasonable bedroom clock for those who want low light at night.
Egg Timer, ~$11
You put this fake egg in with your real eggs and it tells you when your eggs are boiled. This is in the category of everyday technological miracles that I don't think we appreciate enough, I'm grateful for the kind of world where this is possible.
(H/T Recomendo, I believe? Regardless, I recommend them if you like nice things).
p.s. I made these wide landscape images with gemini, based on the product images of course. My motivation was that I think most product images are a bad size/shape for laptop screens, but that a picture paints a thousand words in terms of figuring out if a product might be relevant for you without having to click the link. Good, bad, otherwise?, feel free to let me know.
2026-05-26 19:11:23
One thing that has bugged me for a while is when a brand goes downhill: there's a multi-year period where they can keep charging a premium based on their old reputation before the quality-lowering catches up with them.
I had an idea for a while to make a website to track such things, after several bad experiences of wasting a lot of time online trying to figure out whether positive reviews for a company were sufficiently recent to still be credible.
Anyway, it turns out someone else has already done this and made a website. I have complicated feelings about this site because I'm pretty sure that much of it is AI generated, and/but simultaneously I thiiiiiiiiiiink it's still correct? O brave new world, that has such people/entities in't. (Well: 'tis new to me).
I don't have anything deep to say about it, so this post just exists to direct you to their website. There's a funny unnameable feeling as a writer/thing-maker, where you plan to do something eventually but it feels like a chore, then you find out someone has already done it, and now you're liberated but also redundant.
Worse on Purpose
Ok, one comment actually: this person, or at least their website, seems more anti-capitalist than I am, whereas I'm closer to a cat theorist. I notice that there's a trend in family-run companies getting bought out and then becoming far less willing or able to catch mice, but I also think the world is more complicated than that – it's possible that the companies get sold because they're no longer able to produce at high quality, or that there's a salience bias in which companies we notice going downhill. Also, I suspect our time is most valuably spent on figuring out how to structure the institutions and incentives so the cats keep mousing (e.g. by siccing a bigger cat on them).
2026-05-25 19:11:24
Ok, hear me out. What if the best way to experience ideas (generally) is through conversation – hashing things out together, being inspired by other people's thoughts, reaching new thoughts that neither of you had alone?
And the entire history of aritcle-writing was a compromise for the era's technologies: we couldn't have country-spanning conversations, so one person wrote an article and then other people wrote Letters to the Editor in response, and we did our best approximation with what we had?
(I've been reading old magazines from the 30s-80s recently, and the letters pages are full of long ongoing conversations, implemented slowly. Or think about the Republic of Letters, or the Federalist Papers: long conversations carried out in essay form).
It's fun to hate on social media but: what if it has taken over because it's a closer approximation to conversation, and therefore a better way to develop ideas together?
Maybe the issue with social media is just the way it devolves into, well, strangers shouting at each other, and not having a shared trust base, and the ease with which one person (of any agenda) can hijack the whole conversation. But maybe if you build ways around that, it's actually a great way to think?
I've said before that my favourite social media is 5 person whatsapp groups, and I suspect that if I actually tracked such things a lot of my new thoughts in the last few years come out of those simmering soups.
I obviously don't mean this as absolutely as it's written – there's a different kind of deep thought that only happens when one person focuses on one thing for a long time, and then synthesises it all in one place. But still, maybe we've been letting that ideal get in the way of enabling the magic in written conversation as well.
2026-05-22 19:11:00
Some beloved friends of the blog were conversing about old units that had meaningful but flexible definitions, e.g. a 'pose' was the amount of land a farmer could plow before needing a rest. Here are my suggestions for units of time that ought to exist.
respuence:
abeguence:
saeculum:
saeculaminor:
2026-05-21 19:11:26
this is a remix[^1] of a post I wrote previously.
Most of the plot-lines of my life never resolved. At age 22 there were a few Big Stories in my life, they each felt momentous, and the thing I feared was that they might resolve "against" me. But what actually happened is that they never resolved at all.
Some of the most important people in my life just dissolved from it entirely – whether gradually, or suddenly – and mostly I've never heard from them or about them ever again. The stories we were co-writing stopped in the middle. Often we reached the disaster, but not the transformation, nor the atonement, nor the return.
In the end, the people and organizations I had the most trouble with neither got their comeuppance nor crushed me under their boot, but just.... stopped being part of my life, and I don't know what happened to them, and that's about it.
I wonder how much my original expectations were just a fiction created by fictions. Many of my ideas about life were forged by books and movies – most of the lives I got real knowledge of as a kid were fabrications – and maybe that's why I imagined that the stories of my life would have resolutions, whether good or bad or ugly.
Speculating about The Young is a good sign that you're getting spiritually Old, but I do wonder if the Youth of Today will not find an unresolved life as strange as I do. If you grow up in an age of scrolls and reels, snacking on endless morsels of standalone media from one eternal feed, does that change your expectation of narrative connection between events? Does it free you from the tyranny of a Life Story?
Maybe instead you learn to see life as a garden, filled with interesting and sometimes interrelated things to see and do, but without the expectation that stories should have a happy ending, or any ending at all.
[^1]: I don't think I've seen people write (explicit) remixes before, I thought I'd give it a go. They have three attractions for me:
One is that I get new readers over time, and mostly they've never seen my old posts, and that seems kind of arbitrary – these posts are no more or less timely than they were when I first sent them, so shouldn't I keep trying with the ones that seemed meaningful?
Two is that I think an idea is more likely to affect someone if it goes through spaced repetition. Some of my favourite newsletter writers do this by picking a few lenses on the world and applying them to endless different situations, thereby spaced-repeating the lens. I'm not sure I can do that effectively, so remixes seemed like an intriguing alternative.
Third is just that I want to see if I'm any better as a writer than I was two years ago. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for.
2026-05-20 19:11:25
A few times in my life, I've made decisions that had a feeling of extreme preordaindness: I met a person and felt I already know you, or had a choice to make and felt like I didn't really have a choice to make, the die had already been cast long ago.
There are many reasonable explanations for this phenomenon, but I want to proffer a somewhat unreasonable one.
People always say that, when you die, your life flashes before your eyes: you experience it all again, at least the highlights, at least briefly. Sometimes I like to believe (or symbolically believe) that the life I'm living now is actually just a playback of a life already lived.
In much the way that our dreams are not quite as 3D as our actual lives,[^1] I suspect that the implication here is that the beings whose lives we are replaying are higher dimensional than we are, having richer and denser experiences of which this life is just a projection. Much of the detail comes as a surprise, still, but some of the core facts of your life are so overwhelming that you recognize them as they approach you. Oh, you think: this is her. This is it. This is it.
[^1]: I don't think my dreams are 2D, exactly? But they're somehow... flatter than my real life? At least how I remember them, though I'm never sure how much the waking-me is accurately remembering the dream-me's experiences.