Hi all,
I promise - this actually will be the last 'July' proper admin.
Podcast news
Speaking of Rapinoe, I liked her interview with Roger Bennett of the Men In Blazers.
In other pod news, I finally started listening to Deep Dive, a show put together by the English language Japan Times online newspaper. This episode about the bizarre but captivating reality TV show Terrace House is highly recommended.
I learned that longtime TOA favorite Michael Lombardi left The Ringer and started a new show called The GM Shuffle. Again, highly recommended, at least for helmet football fans.
Call Your Girlfriend had another good episode – this one featured Nora McInerny of Terrible, Thanks For Asking, and she spoke with Aminatou Sow about loss, grief, and the ways we might redefine moving on.
Finally, I learned that my all-time favorite show, The Football Ramble, intends to start daily podcasts in August. This sounds like good news on the surface but I’m actually worried that they are strangling the golden goose.
That’s fresh, coming from the guy who does daily TOA posts.
No comment.
Reading update
I haven’t chimed in with my current reading in a while so let’s have a quick glance at my straining bookshelf.
First, I mentioned in the July newsletter that I was eating a little differently. The catalyst was Intuitive Eating, a book I read because of a recommendation. This work has forced me to think very seriously about my approach to eating. The short version is that although I’ve developed many good habits, I could do a lot better in certain respects. One such area is listening to my satiety signals. My biggest underlying issue is a serious aversion to wasting food and this has led to a pattern of overeating at certain meals followed by a fasting period to balance out my indulgence. I was encouraged while dining out over the past few weeks when I saved food to take home instead of plowing the plate clean as I had done in the past. I’ve also done better to respond to hunger signals and I'm trying to follow a specific guideline from the book by going no more than five hours without eating. I am, for now, retaining one weekly fast period of 16-24 hours, but I may reconsider this as well if I sense a different approach would work better.
I’m also working through In The Shadow of Statues, a fascinating look into how one city’s mayor thought about its Confederate statues, and looking forward to Hannah Arendt’s Thinking Without a Banister. The most interesting book in terms of my reading process at the moment is The Moral Saying of Publius Syrus. This is essentially a list of sayings, around one thousand in all, and I’ve discovered that it is an ideal book to read for a minute or two every two weeks while I wait for the end of my biweekly laundry cycle.
Finally, I’m looking forward to reading Digital Minimalism, a book that came my way via multiple (OK, so two) trusted sources. Apparently Cal Newport works his way up to an ‘extreme’ application of the title concept – not having a smart phone. I haven’t seen a royalty check yet!
Anything else?
I realized one day while riding a bicycle that although the mathematics of human uniqueness are somewhat puzzling – with seven billion people eating and talking and farting about on our little blue planet, surely there is one other person around like me? – the reality of my experience is that the more I’ve gotten to know someone I initially perceived as similar to me, the more obvious our differences turned out to be in hindsight. What I’m wondering about today is whether this actually speaks to a fact about uniqueness or if it is simply another example of willing self-deception in the eternal, doomed struggle we endure in the lifelong search for kinship, understanding, and belonging.
Thanks for hanging in there during this admin-heavy month. I’ll be back in August, hopefully, with a little less to say.
