Something I thought about:

  • I finished reading The Ministry for the Future which I really liked, and it was funny because there are so many things about it that I normally don’t like, and yet Robinson pulls all of it off so well that I admire it even more. It’s like sometimes you lose an argument, and it’s a pleasure to be so thoroughly disproven. I was also very surprised by the book’s Swissness. By Chapter 4, I knew Robinson had lived here — not just visited but lived — and I looked it up, and sure enough, he was in Zurich for about two years. I kept experiencing little jolts of recognition, and those were also delightful. Tough topic. Brilliantly executed.

Something I did:

  • Writing that was difficult — the kind that requires repeated reworking to get at something complex without flattening or trivializing it
  • Taught
  • Made a major life decision
  • Writing for me — it’s been too long

Something I read:

In the Bengal delta, land exists where water allows it.
To a degree, I sympathize with some of the skepticism regarding long COVID, because the condition challenges our typical sense of what counts as solid evidence. Blood tests, electronic medical records, and disability claims all feel like rigorous lines of objective data. Their limitations become obvious only when you consider what the average long-hauler goes through—and those details are often cast aside because they are “anecdotal” and, by implication, unreliable. This attitude is backwards: The patients’ stories are the ground truth against which all other data must be understood. Gaps between the data and the stories don’t immediately invalidate the latter; they just as likely show the holes in the former.