Mitch's Blog

I’ve seen headstrong winners of close elections high on their own supply before. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, all of this is meant to hit you with so much sensory stimulus that you become overwhelmed. But the images you see wrapped around you in an iMax theater aren’t real. It’s still a movie.

— A Moment of Calm

Marshall also notes a “for the ages” photo of the CEOs of Amazon, Meta, Google and Apple, “at an inaugural church service feting Donald Trump this morning at St. John’s church across the street from the White House.”

Marshall:

You may not have a billion dollars but your dignity is all yours. No one can take it from you. Compared to some you can already be ahead of the game.

One step at a time. They’re not as big as they look.

People “who are best at achieving their goals are the ones who purposefully form habits to automate some of the things that they do,” Benjamin Gardner, a psychologist of habitual behavior at the University of Surrey, told Shayla Love at The Atlantic. Gardner “recently enacted a flossing habit by flossing each day in the same environment (the bathroom), following the same contextual cues (brushing his teeth). ‘There are days when I think, I can’t remember if I flossed yesterday, but I just trust I definitely did, because it’s such a strong part of my routine,’ he said.”

People explain habitual behavior by tying them to their goals and desires, but research shows habits become self-sustaining. One study found that people who said they eat when they get emotional weren’t doing that; they just ate out of habit, regardless of how they felt. Similarly, people said they drank coffee when tired, but fatigue was only weakly correlated to coffee drinking.

Even habits you deliberately create are worth occasionally reevaluating to see if they still make sense, Love writes.

Habits “can persist even if their outcome stops being pleasing,” Love wrote. One study found that people with the habit of eating popcorn at the movies would keep going even when the popcorn was stale. “It’s not so terrible to endure some stale popcorn, but consider the consequences if more complex habitual actions–ones related to, say, work-life balance, relationships, or technology–hang around past their expiration date.”

I had bad health habits 25 years ago — diet, exercise, taking care of my teeth — and built habits to fix those. I think I actually went too far in my eating habits; I want to become more flexible about those.

Priya Krishna writes in the New York Times about her 12 overnight hours at Kellogg’s Diner, a 24-hour diner in Brooklyn that opened in 1928 and recently re-opened under new management after a hiatus of several months. The article is beautifully illustrated with great photos.

You never know who you might meet in the wee, small hours of an all-night diner.

Here’s a Navy man celebrating his last night in New York City with friends before being deployed. Over there is a tipsy rock singer executing a perfect run-through of Michael Jackson’s dance moves to “Thriller.” And in comes a 60-year-old intensive-care-unit nurse and her wife, sitting down to a romantic dinner after a long night of clubbing.

There’s a chaotic cadence to the 24-hour diner — a refuge where patrons of all ages, backgrounds and tastes are welcome to bump elbows over patty melts and pancakes. Unlike the restaurant that keeps traditional business hours, the diner shape-shifts as the night wears on and different kinds of customers pour in. It can be whatever they need it to be — its menu, mood and playlist often changing from hour to hour.

I love diners, though I hardly ever go to them anymore. I have spent many of the best hours of my life between 2 am and 7 am at all-night diners in the New York metropolitan area, in my 20s and 30s. When we moved to San Diego more than 25 years ago, one of the first things I did was look up the location of 24-hour diners and cafes, but even then, I knew that part of my life was in the past.

Dada Drummer Almanach:

My favorite browsing lately is at a charity bookshop in my neighborhood – it only accepts donations of books, no purchases, and gives all proceeds in turn to a college scholarship fund.

Part of what I enjoy about this bookshop is the glimpse it gives inside the libraries and attics and basements (and probably self-storage units) of my neighbors. The median age of donors is clear from the sorts of titles on the shelves - when I first started frequenting the shop, there were many stolid hardcovers from the 1940s and 50s, alongside an occasional deep dive into the earlier decades of the 20th century. But the profile of the stock has steadily changed, and at present it is dominated by trade paperbacks from those formally educated in the 60s (philosophy and lit crit bear this out in particular), coming of age in the 70s (politics, religion, sociology), setting up house in the 80s (cooking), keeping up with culture as defined by art, fiction and music through the 90s (there’s a lot of world music among the CDs), and consistently enticed in this century by retrospective looks at the youth culture of their past (any given book about Bob Dylan is likely to be in stock at any given time).

So it made perfect sense when I spotted a copy of the Last Whole Earth Catalog (1971) on the shop’s backroom table, awaiting shelving in part because no one was sure where to put it. I’d never actually seen a proper copy of this oversized, newsprint mail-order catalog, though I knew it by reputation as a publication that had helped define a generation.

Stewart Brand’s catalog was a bible for hippie independent living close to the land. Paradoxically, it foretold today’s Silicon Valley tech billionaire broligarchy. Brand has always been comfortable with Big Business and big capital.

One of my college roommates had a copy of one of the editions of the catalog, published as a nice trade paperback, and I was fascinated by it and pored over it again and again.