A Thing I Made: Fantasy Soccer Media Guide

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Due to my unrelenting need to track and organize data and progress, my latest esoteric Canva creation is a “media guide” for the Copa de Boro, the fantasy Premier League competition my friends and I started a decade ago.

“The Ledger” (named after a notebook two league members used to record their NFL Quarterback Club ’98 matchups back in college) tells our league’s story in the form of year-by-year recaps, charts, and player-by-player breakdowns, with plenty of in-jokes and photos from the league archives[1] woven in.

Now that our league has expanded from just four players in our inaugural season to 20 for our ninth, I joke that the guide is now just a way for me to make my own fun in a contest I probably won’t ever win again.

Really, I think I created the guide for the same reasons some Roman probably started etching gladiator wins into the side of the Coliseum—to give greater context, and perhaps significance, to something I enjoy.

(plus when you lose to the same guy every year it’s nice to be able to say, “well at least I didn’t score below the league average for the third straight year”).

In a way, the guide also inadvertently tells the story of our league members’ twenties. Scrolling through the year-by-year history sees the league start as a group of college students that lived within 90 minutes of one another, then expand to include the new places we have since called call home and the evolving friend circles that go along with.

Cover Rationale

For the cover, I drew inspiration from (ok, pretty much lifted) Sports Illustrated‘s April 2020 issue:

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Although I didn’t have the design know-how and/or tools to recreate the effect of nestling the main header into the seats, I am still happy with how it turned out.

I liked the empty and dissonant feeling of SI‘s powerful cover and thought it translated well to what was also a weird (but obviously infinitesimal by comparison) computer soccer season, too.

And since the guide itself is more about us the league members and less about the, you know, actual soccer players that score points on our behalf, I don’t think it will ever seem fitting to just slap a few stolen EPL action shots from Getty on the front.

As I update the ledger annually and the world (hopefully) returns soon to some sense of normalcy, I imagine this cover will stand out even more as the one from “that” strange year.

Interior Rationale

For interior inspiration, I perused the winners of recent years’ College Sports Information Directors of America’s (CoSIDA) Publications & Digital Design awards. I eventually landed on using the Missouri Valley Conference’s 2019-20 basketball media guide (winner of Best Conference Media Guide—University) as my compass.

Real media guides have heaps more data than our league’s (for now, anyway), so beyond a general framework, the format doesn’t follow too close. However, having a model definitely helped me when it came to deciding how to divvy up pages with a large amount of content on them.

It’s definitely not perfect from a design perspective (due to both my own limitations as well as Canva’s) but I think achieved a good balance of letting some content stand mostly by itself while compacting other data into tables or charts (click any image to open full guide):

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Most importantly, my league got a kick out of it and I have a good foundation to work from for…

Next Season

I already have some fun ideas to help commemorate the Copa’s 10th anniversary, (which should hopefully take much less time to produce now that I have the general layout in place, but one of these years I should probably just buy InDesign already…) and it may just be the excuse I need to finally start dabbling in Python and Visme.

Although, if I actually win this season, who knows what I’ll feel like doing. Perhaps just 25 pages of photos of me bathing with the league trophy, Stanley Cup style.

Check out my fantasy soccer league’s media guide here (PDF).

[1] Ok, just our Facebook group

Available Now!—How to Survive Thailand With a Peanut Allergy (Full Survival Guide)

“Write down what foods did and didn’t give you allergic reactions in Thailand,” I said. “It’ll be a fun and easy project,” I said.

Amost three years to the date after first setting foot in Thailand, that little side project turned chief creative albatross is finally finished: How to Survive Thailand With a Peanut Allergy, a PDF guide helping travelers with peanut and tree nut allergies safely navigate the country’s culinary landscape, is now officially available for purchase on Gumroad.

I won’t rehash everything that’s on the book’s landing page (Thailandwithapeanutallergy.com), but the guide contains lists of safe and unsafe dishes, useful dining expressions for ordering food, a pronunciation guide so you can actually say those expressions properly, a printable allergy card to hand to Thai waitstaff, and many other tips, tricks, and resources gathered from my five-month nut-dodging adventure in Thailand.

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At times the project felt like a burden to finish—this was in part because I chose to use Canva and not a design program for grown-ups. Even still, I’m incredibly happy with how the final product came out and am confident in saying this is far and away the most comprehensive resource out there for the very, very specific life situation of having a nut allergy and wanting to travel to Thailand.

Although I had pitched the concept to a dozen or so publishers in hopes of turning it into a ‘real’ guidebook, I almost think it’s better that it remains entirely digital. As a PDF you keep on your phone (except for the printable allergy card), it’s much more wieldy for even the most rugged of backpackers than a traditional travel guide.

Spring 2020 will probably go down as one of the worst times in history to release a travel book. But quarantine life also makes for the best time to dream about that next big trip (also, have you seen plane ticket prices even for nine months to year from now?). For peanutphiles on the fence about going to Thailand, it’s also the perfect time to do your research and decide if a Thai trip is appropriate given your specific allergy’s severity.

Whether you find this post and my little book in preparation for a trip in 2020 or 2030 (though maybe the allergy will be eliminated by then due to standard issuance of peanut patches at birth), I hope this book answers all your questions and gives you the knowledge you need to enjoy everything The Land of Smiles has to offer.

Yours in peanut dodging,
Andrew


Get the Guide

46 Great Bits From The 23 Books I Read in 2019

I’ve been doing this for eight (!) years now. Find previous years’ lists here: 2012, 2013, 2014, 201520162017, 2018.  

Despite moving continents, a long job search, and living briefly not only with my parents but future my in-laws, I didn’t read as much as I thought I would in 2019.

But those factors and a real need for escapism probably explain why I read more fiction than ever before this year. Well, that and the pursuit to complete my new “Ultimate” Reading List, (modified from Joel Patrick’s) before I turn 100.

I also think I abandoned more books than ever before, making one of my 2020 reading goals to ask myself before opening a book, “is this really what I want to read most right now?”

Enjoy my favorite passages and quotes from 2019 below (all excerpts are the respective authors’) and follow my progress in 2020 by connecting with me on Goodreads, Happy reading!

The Stranger by Albert Camus

1) I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.

2) I noticed that he laid stress on my “intelligence.” It puzzled me rather why what would count as a good point in an ordinary person should be used against an accused man as an overwhelming proof of his guilt.

I Wrote This Because I Love You by Tim Kreider

3) What people have chosen to worship in lieu of God is, literally, pretty dispiriting. MarxIII famously called religion the opiate of the masses, but these days opiates are the opiate of the masses. I would also include things like sportfucking, shopaholism, and a constant IV feed of entertainment under the heading of mass self-medication. I sometimes wonder whether the obsession with celebrity, exhibitionism, and exhaustive self-documentation on social media isn’t some sort of hysterical compensation for the absence of that omniscient Eye that used to watch and judge us. Even if your god is some capricious, abusive father—issuing arbitrary commands, demanding grotesque demonstrations of obedience, forever threatening to take off the Belt—it’s still better than being an orphan.

4) The nicest thing Diana ever said to me—one of those things I secretly inscribed in glue and glitter and hung up with yarn in my heart—was, “You seem very whole to me.” She always seemed to think I was a better person than I did. I never knew whether she was deluding herself, and her affection was only for a bowdlerized version of me, or whether she saw me more clearly than I could. She pointed out to me recently that one reason she seemed so happy when we were first dating was because she was with me. How it could make Diana happy to be around me was mysterious to me, since I was always around me and I was never happy. We always forget the Heisenberg effect of our own presence—that we only ever get to see what other people are like when we’re around. I’d been drawn to her hoping I might absorb some of her radiance, not realizing it was, in part, my own reflected light.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

5) As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

6) While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There by Rolf Potts

7) The problem with ecotourism anywhere, however, is that it’s a difficult activity to define, and an even harder activity to regulate. At a simple level, ecotourism is responsible travel that conserves the natural environment and sustains the wellbeing of the local people–but even this basic definition can prove full of contradictions and loopholes. For example, ecotourism seeks “unspoiled” places that have not been categorized or prepared for tourist consumption, yet ecotourism itself is a form of categorization and consumption. Ecotourism promises an escape from the trappings of affluence and information society, yet by attracting affluent tourists to isolated points around the globe, eco-tourism spends the gospel of information society. And while the purpose of ecotourism is to preserve the culture and ecology of far-flung lands, the most efficient way to achieve this is to not travel to those locales in the first place. 

8) Sure, we all try to convince ourselves that we’re “travelers” instead of “tourists,”, but this distinction is merely a self-conscious parlor game within the tourism milieu. Regardless of how far we try to wander off the tourist trail (and no matter how long we try and stay off it) we are still outsiders and dilettantes, itinerant consumers in distant lands. This is often judged to be a bad thing, but in truth that’s just the way things are. Platonic ideals aside, the world remains a fascinating place for anyone with the awareness to appreciate its nuances. Social critics who proclaim that “real travel” is dead are just too lazy to look for complexities within an interconnected planet–and travel writers who seek to diminish their own presence in the tourist matrix are simply not being honest.”Footsteps” might be a nice thematic vessel in which to pour a travel book, but it tends to miss out on the vibrant, often contradictory (and decidedly non-thematic) experience of what it’s like to travel in a post-modern world.

This Naked Mind by Annie Grace

9) Further, at least when it comes to wine, there is actual proof that almost no one can actually tell the difference between good wines and cheap wines. The American Association of Wine Economists did a study of more than six thousand wine drinkers. In these blind taste tests, wine drinkers were unable to distinguish expensive wines from cheap wines. In fact, the majority claimed to prefer the cheap wines.55 You might be amused to know that the same association conducted a study two years later and found that people are also unable to differentiate Pâté from dog food.

10) You may think alcohol helps people get over their initial shyness, encouraging a party atmosphere. Alcohol—by deadening your natural senses, including apprehension—removes the filters between your brain and your mouth. This gives us the illusion that the party is starting to kick off. Everyone is getting chatty, and conversation is starting in earnest. In truth, people take a bit of time to warm up. Even as kids, everyone is unsure of how they fit in. Give it a few minutes, and they are off and running, having a great time. It’s a good thing to be cautious at first. It helps you understand your surroundings and take the time to get to know the people you are with. Our initial shyness not only protects us but also ensures we don’t do or say something we will regret. You might even like being the person breaking the ice, introducing yourself and asking questions. Everyone else feels just as nervous, and all it takes is one person to start the conversation.

Words That Sell by Richard Bayan

11) But the words that motivate the human spirit have remained relatively constant. We’re still obsessed with status, security, comfort, fear, convenience, money, and all the other primal preoccupations of our species throughout the centuries.

12) Don’t lose sight of your primary goal: to sell your product or service. Your writing should be more than a flat presentation of the facts. (Remember that a copywriter must persuade and motivate.) On the other hand, don’t let runaway creativity bury the message.

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

13) I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don’t want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don’t want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren’t sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn’t mean a thing. They all look alike.

14) There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren’t you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal guy like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn’t really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be where you get to the other place.

The Soul of America by John Meacham

15) Many Americans have never liked acknowledging that the public sector has always been integral to making the private sector successful. We often approve of government’s role when we benefit from it and disapprove when others seem to be getting something we aren’t. Given the American Revolution’s origins as a rebellion against taxation and distant authority, such skepticism is understandable, even if it’s not well-founded. We have long proved ourselves quite capable of living with this contradiction, using Hamiltonian means (centralized decision-making) while speaking in Jeffersonian rhetorical terms (that government is best which governs least).

16) In an indirect but unmistakable allusion to the Klan and its “100 percent Americanism” platform, Coolidge told the veterans: “I recognize the full and complete necessity of 100 percent Americanism, but 100 percent Americanism may be made up of many various elements.” Coolidge added: If we are to have…that union of spirit which is the foundation of real national genius and national progress, we must all realize that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language. If we are to create on this continent a free Republic and an enlightened civilization that will be capable of reflecting the true greatness and glory of mankind, it will be necessary to regard these differences as accidental and unessential. We shall have to look beyond the outward manifestations of race and creed. Divine Providence has not bestowed upon any race a monopoly of patriotism and character.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink

17) “We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art,” she said to whoever was listening. “Like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.”

18) They drove in silence for hours, as the scenery shaded greener. It’s hard to tell regions apart by the human structures. A CVS is a CVS, a Starbucks is a Starbucks. Every town is built like everytown, and so all that changes is the nature that’s been allowed to stay. As a traveller heads north, the trees shift from broad leafy canopies to the narrow spurs of confiers, and the suggestion of hills gives wway to great structures of rock with sweeping aprons of untouched snow. Or, on another drive, the hills dot themselves into nothing, until the traveler hasn’t seen elevation in hours, nor many trees, only a lot of grass, and a lot of road. Or the traveler leaves behind a wetter, greener climate and the world fades from grass to kindling, to dirt and rocks, and then, like a sign marking a border, the first great cactus, harbinger of the desert.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

19) “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

20) “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where——” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. “—— so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler

21) Thus, the underlying message of Main Street U.S.A.—for the grownups, anyway—was that a big corporation could make a better Main Street than a bunch of rubes in a real small town. And Walt was right! Through the postwar decades Americans happily allowed their towns to be destroyed. They’d flock to Disneyland at Anaheim, or later to Disney World in Florida, and walk down Main Street, and think, gee, it feels good here.

Then they’d go back home and tear down half the old buildings downtown and pave them over for parking lots, throw a parade to celebrate a new K Mart opening—even when it put ten local merchants out of business—turn Elm Street into a six-lane crosstown expressway, pass zoning laws that forbade corner grocery stores in residential neighborhoods and setback rules that required every new business to locate on a one-acre lot until things became so spread out you had to drive everywhere. They’d build the new central school four miles out of town on a busy highway so that kids couldn’t walk there. They’d do every fool thing possible to destroy good existing relationships between things in their towns, and put their local economies at the mercy of distant corporations whose officers didn’t give a damn whether these towns lived or died. And then, when vacation time rolled around, they’d flock back to Disney World to feel good about America.

22) Children are certainly the biggest losers—though the suburbs have been touted endlessly as wonderful places for them to grow up. The elderly, at least, have seen something of the world, and know that there is more to it than a housing subdivision. Children are stuck in that one-dimensional world. When they venture beyond it in search of richer experience, they do so at some hazard. More usually, they must be driven about, which impairs their developing sense of personal sovereignty, and turns the parent—usually Mom—into a chauffeur. The one place outside the subdivision where children are compelled to go is school. They take buses there—a public transit system that operates at huge expense, is restricted to children, and runs only twice a day. Even if children happen to live relatively close to school, there is good chance that it would not be safe for them to travel there on foot or by bicycle. This is because the detailing of the streets is so abysmal. By detailing, I mean all the big and little design considerations, including the basic dimensions, that make for good relationships between the things along the street, between the things that streets are supposed to connect, and between people’s different uses, as, say, between motorists and pedestrians.

For example: what are the building setbacks? Can cars legally park alongside the street? Will there be sidewalks, trees, benches where people can rest or simply enjoy the public realm? Will there be lighting, trash baskets, plantings, et cetera? The suburban streets of almost all postwar housing developments were designed so that a car can comfortably maneuver at fifty miles per hour—no matter what the legal speed limit is. The width and curb ratios were set in stone by traffic engineers who wanted to create streets so ultrasafe (for motorists) that any moron could drive them without wrecking his car. This is a good example of the folly of professional overspecialization. The traffic engineer is not concerned about the pedestrians. His mission is to make sure that wheeled vehicles are happy. What he deems to be ultrasafe for drivers can be dangerous for pedestrians who share the street with cars. Anybody knows that a child of eight walking home from school at three o’clock in the afternoon uses a street differently than a forty-six-year-old carpet cleaner in a panel truck.

The Visual Dictionary of American Domestic Architecture by Rachel Carley

23) Housing terms I didn’t know (among many others): dormer, clapboard, gable, inglenook, swag

24) In 1934 the architect Rudolph Schindler designed a modern weekend house for a client, Gisela Bennati, in Lake Arrowhead, California. A planned community, Lake Arrowhead required all new houses to be designed in the Norman Revival Style. Schindler responded rather sarcastically with a design dominated by a “Norman” roof that fell from the ridge all the way to the ground. Challenged by a dubious jury, the architect countered with photographs of steep-roofed houses, and as none of the panelists had ever been to France, he handily won the argument. 

Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett

25) A wide stance squat is also good for people who have too much range of motion. I’m referring specifically to hypermobile athletes who are so flexible they have a hard time stabilizing and creating tension in their joints. Adopting a wide stance and positioning your feet straight creates tension in the system. This helps people who have too much slack in their joints find stability and avoid potentially harmful movement errors. 

26) People often make the mistake of trying to correct their spinal position while seated. The moment you sit down, the large muscles of your butt go to sleep. This not only places additional stress on your spine, but also makes it difficult to stabilize your pelvis in a natural position. So if you fail to address the bracing sequence before you sit down, you don’t keep your belly tight, or you round or overextend your spine once seated, fixing your position from your chair is difficult. For example, say you’re sitting in front of your computer working and after a few minutes you start to slouch. After answering a few emails, you become aware of how bad your posture is (or you just become uncomfortable), so you try to fix it by flattening your back. Although it may seem as if you’re rectifying the problem, all you’re doing is going from a flexed position to an overextended one. Again, in order to correct your position, it’s best to stand up, go through the bracing sequence, and then sit down with your spine locked in a neutral position.

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

27) More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.

28) Food exists only in an abstract sense for anybody dying of hunger; there isn’t any such thing as the taste of Kobe beef or Hiroshima oysters. But once one’s belly is full, then one begins to discern differences in taste and textures. Sexual desire was the same. First came desire in general, and only after that did particular sexual tastes evolve.

Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser

29) “All I ask of society is to let me paddle my own canoe.”

30) Memory keeps turning into imagination. The world—the fact—the actual—keeps slipping away. Memory is impossible.

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

31) And what was the point of calling the cops when your measure of good fortune consisted of having them not know you exist.

32) The paper the old man had slipped her bore an address in another city but it seemed there was no need to verse this one to get to that one: it was simply a matter of riding busses and crossing streets and passing malls and after lots of the first and even more of the second and several of the third, she’d arrive.

Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler

33) With surprising regularity, when people are asked: “Is it possible that there’s a way to accomplish both?” they acknowledge that there very well may be.

34) When you have a tough message to share, or when you are so convinced of your own rightness that you may push too hard, remember to STATE your path:  

  • Share your facts. Start with the least controversial, most persuasive elements from your Path to Action.  
  • Tell your story. Explain what you’re beginning to conclude.  
  • Ask for others’ paths. Encourage others to share both their facts and their stories.  
  • Talk tentatively. State your story as a story—don’t disguise it as a fact.  
  • Encourage testing. Make it safe for others to express differing or even opposing views.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

35) Other kids were looking at him, pointing him out to each other. He was becoming a presence, rather than an absence, and that made him uncomfortable.

36) Bod hurried through the rain through the Old Town, always heading up the hill toward the graveyard. The grey day had become an early night while he was inside the storeroom, and it came as no surprise to him when a familiar shadow swirled beneath the street lamps. Bod hesitated, and a flutter of night-black velvet resolved itself into a man-shape.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel

37) With few exceptions, I sell before the end of each calendar year any stocks on which I have a loss. The reason for this timing is that losses are deductible (up to certain amounts) for tax purposes, or can offset gains you may already have taken. Thus, making losses can lower your tax bill.

38) The efficient market theory does not, as some critics have proclaimed, state that stock prices move aimlessly and erratically and are insensitive to changes in fundamental information. On the contrary, the reason prices move randomly is just the opposite. The market is so efficient–prices move so quickly when information arises–that no one can buy or sell fast enough to benefit. And real news develops randomly, that is, unpredictably. It cannot be predicted by studying either past technical or fundamental information.

Investing in your 20s and 30s for Dummies by Eric Tyson

39) You can make penalty-free withdrawals of up to $10,000 from IRAs for a first-time home purchase or higher educational expenses for you, your spouse, or your children (and even grandchildren).

40) When your child is young (preschool age), consider investing up to 80% of your investment money in stocks (diversified worldwide) with the remainder in bonds. Doing so can maximize the country’s growth potential without taking extraordinary risk. As your child makes his way through the later years of elementary school, you need to begin to make the mix more conservative. Scale back the stock percentage to 50 or 60% Finally, in the years just before the child enters college, reduce the stock portion to no more than 20% or so.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

41) It’s the time you lost for your rose that makes your rose so important. 

42) “Of course,” said the fox. You are but a little boy to me, like a hundred thousand little boys. And I do not need you. And you do not need me either. I am only a fox to you like a hundred thousand foxes. But if you tame me, we will need one another. You will be unique in the world for me. I will be for you unique in the world.

Wedding Speech Killer by Aaron Goodhoofd

43) The million dollar tip for writing a joke: Don’t look for something funny. Instead, look for something and make it funny.

44) Here are the four main parts in order: 1. You 2. The person you are giving the speech for (bride or groom) 3. The person they are marrying 4. The bride and groom

A Decent Life by Todd May

45) But if everyone deserves to live a meaningful life, then it would seem that I deserve to do so as well. And to ask that I sacrifice things that make my life meaningful in order to assist others in their quest for a meaningful life is actually treating my life as less worthy than theirs. That is to say, even if we accept that we have an important duty to assist others in desperate straits, that duty is limited to activities that will not undermine aspects of my life that make it worth living for me.

46) A fourteen-year-old girl is thinking of having a child. She’s advised that this would be a bad idea. After all, wouldn’t a child be better off if she waited until she was older and could offer it a better life? If she has a child when she’s in middle school, she will more than likely drop out of school, never get a good job, and severely limit her access to a partner that could help raise the child. It would just seem unfair to bring a child into the world under those circumstances when waiting would provide a much healthier environment. However, against all advice, the girl goes ahead and gets pregnant. And indeed, just as expected, the child has a difficult life. However, if you asked the child as he grew older whether he would rather not have been born, his answer would be no. For sure, his life is difficult, but nevertheless it is a life worth living. He would not have ceded it to another person.

And here’s the rub. If the girl had waited to get pregnant, the child she eventually gave birth to would undoubtedly have had a better life—but it would not have been this child. It would have been a different one. And this child, since his life, however difficult, is worth his living, would prefer the decision that was actually made. Moreover, the child that would have been born had the girl waited is not there to complain. In fact, there is no such thing as the child that would have been born—that child does not exist anywhere. So the only person affected by the girl’s decision is the child who was actually born. (Well, the other person who is affected is the girl, now mother. But it’s hard to imagine a mother looking at her child and regretting that he was born.) And if that’s true, then why was the decision to get pregnant the wrong one? In this case we seem to find ourselves in an awkward, in fact ironic, moral position. It’s as though the girl turned a morally inadvisable act (getting pregnant at a young age) into a morally good act simply by going ahead with it. On the one hand, it would have been better for the girl to wait. On the other hand, having not waited, it would seem, looking back on it, that it was better not to wait. After all, everyone who was affected by the girl’s decision—the mother and the child—preferred that she acted in the way she did. So why should she have waited?

 

54 Great Bits From The 27 Books I Read In 2018

This idea was originally inspired by Julien Smith, a much more prolific reader than I. Here are my lists from years past: 2012, 2013, 2014, 20152016 and 2017.  

Turns out I still like books, and other than getting to read more on public transit (thanks Japan life!) my reading habits didn’t change much in 2018.

I read slightly more fiction than usual in part due to two friends publishing their first novels (congrats Kyle and Sean!) and from feeling re-inspired to catch up on classics I missed out on in high school: instead of trying to read Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of All-Time, my new goal is to tackle a modified version of Joel Patrick’s Ultimate Reading List and read the 156 books that appear on at least two of eight different read-before-you-die lists. Check out my modified list (and my slow progress) here or connect with me on Goodreads.

But before diving back into that moonshot mission, I like to use the end of the year as an excuse to revisit my Kindle highlights, pick out some favorite passages, and remind myself how little of what I read I actually remember.

WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us by Tim O’Reilly

1) That is the essence of the Maker movement. Making for the joy of exploration. Making to learn. There’s no joy in our current education system. It is full of canned solutions to be memorized when it needs to be a vast collection of problems to be solved. When you start with what you want to accomplish, knowledge becomes a tool. You seek it out, and when you get it, it is truly yours.

2) I’m fascinated by a comment that Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, made to me over dinner one night: “If you want to understand the future, just look at what rich people do today.”

Dining out was once the province of the wealthy. Now far more people do it. In our most vibrant cities, a privileged class experiences a taste of a future that could be the future for everyone. Restaurants compete on the basis of creativity and service, “everyone’s private driver” whisks people around in comfort from experience to experience, and one-of-a-kind boutiques provide unique consumer goods. Rich people once took the European grand tour; now soccer hooligans do it. Cell phones, designer fashion, and entertainment have all been democratized. Mozart had the Holy Roman Emperor as his patron; Kickstarter, GoFundMe, and Patreon extend that opportunity to millions of ordinary people.

Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon

3) You have to remember that your work is something you do, not who you are. This is especially hard for artists to accept, as so much of what they do is personal.

4) Today it is the amateur—the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love (in French, the word means “lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career—who often has the advantage over the professional. Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. They take chances, experiment, and follow their whims. Sometimes, in the process of doing things in an unprofessional way, they make new discoveries. “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” said Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.”

Dune by Frank Herbert

5) “Do you see a way to go?” Jessica asked, mistaking his hesitation. “No,” he said, “But we’ll go anyway.”

6) “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan and Edward Boches

7) Here’s the formula I see work effectively over and over again: Do > Invite > Document > Share. Do something interesting, but on strategy, of course. Conceive the idea so that it allows people to participate, and find a way to invite them to join in. Document the event so it lives beyond the event and becomes content. Make it shareable across every relevant channel.

8) Now that you know you need to write like that particular brand, I also have to encourage you to write like people talk; in the copy you write for ads, in e-mails to clients, and letters to the editor, write like regular people talk. For some reason, when handed a pen and asked to write something that will be seen by others, 9 out of 10 people decide an authoritarian tone is somehow more persuasive than clear English.

There’s a cost to this, which the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto made clear in their famous 95 Theses: “In just a few more years, the current homogenized ‘voice’ of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.…[C]ompanies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.”

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

9)  The Pew Economic Mobility Project studied how Americans evaluated their chances at economic betterment, and what they found was shocking. There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites. Well over half of blacks, Latinos, and college-educated whites expect that their children will fare better economically than they have. Among working-class whites, only 44 percent share that expectation. Even more surprising, 42 percent of working-class whites—by far the highest number in the survey—report that their lives are less economically successful than those of their parents’. 

10) The family-based hiring practices of the major industrial firms had their desired effect, and the results were predictable. All over the industrial Midwest, new communities of Appalachian transplants and their families sprang up, virtually out of nowhere. As one study noted, “Migration did not so much destroy neighborhoods and families as transport them.” In 1950s Middletown [Ohio], my grandparents found themselves in a situation both new and familiar. New because they were, for the first time, cut off from the extended Appalachian support network to which they were accustomed; familiar because they were still surrounded by hillbillies.

Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

11) The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

12) Fifty years ago, I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called “unemployment neurosis.” And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries and the like—in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity—their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.

Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

13) What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad goodby, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.

14) A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I’m going apply myself when I go back to school next September. It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question.

You Gotta Have Wa by Robert Whiting

15) Foreign players in Japan have long spoken of barriers, both visible and invisible, that effectively keep them from winnings titles, breaking records, or otherwise gaining recognition. The most frequent targets of their complaints have been from the umpires. As Leron Lee once said, “It’s almost a natural law for a gaijin that the higher your batting average goes, the wider your strike zone becomes. The umpires will see to it because you’re not supposed to outshine the Japanese.”

16) Although Imperial Army soldiers were heard to scream “To hell with Babe Ruth” in the jungles of the South Pacific, Ruth was still deemed to have a high enough standing with the Japanese that he was almost called upon to act as a peace negotiator in the fading months of the war. A U.S. government plan called for the Babe to be flown to Guam to make a series of radio broadcasts to the people of Japan. As Ruth put it, he was to appeal to their sporting instincts to give up, and to tell them what the U.S. had in store for them if they did not surrender. In the end however, the plan was scrapped as the U.S. high command opted for a more forceful approach: the A-Bomb.

Souvenir by Rolf Potts

17) After tipping some local servants to gain access to the Bard’s tomb and birthplace, the two American statesmen did something that to the modern imagination smacks of adolescent-grade vandalism: taking turns with a pocket knife, Jefferson and Adams each carved chunks from an antique chair alleged to have belonged to Shakespeare, and took the wood shavings home as souvenirs.

18) In an era before the availability of inexpensive snapshot cameras, postcards became a powerful medium for evoking what various corners of the world looked like, and how one might interact with them. Postcard entrepreneurs popularized notions of what sights were worth seeing in a given location, and postcard artists and photographers presented idealized visions of how it should be seen. Even as point-and-shoot snapshots gradually replaced postcards over the course of the twentieth century, tourist photographs tended to mimic the visual clichés of postcard images (a trend that has persisted into the age of digital photos and social media).

Draft No. 4 by John McPhee

19) “Penn’s daughter Margaret fished in the Delaware, and wrote home to a brother asking him to “buy for me a four joynted strong fishing Rod and Real with strong good Lines.…”

The problem was not with the rod or the real but with William Penn’s offspring. Should there be commas around Margaret or no commas around Margaret? The presence or absence of commas would, in effect, say whether Penn had one daughter or more than one. The commas—there or missing there—were not just commas; they were facts.

20) Shawn also recognized that no two writers are the same, like snowflakes and fingerprints. No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

21) “After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.”

22) Now the sea would suck down, making cascades and waterfalls of retreating water, would sink past the rocks and plaster down the seaweed like shining hair: then, pausing, gather and rise with a roar, irresistibly swelling over point and outcrop, climbing the little cliff, sending at last an arm of surf up a gully to end a yard or so from him in fingers of spray.

American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen

23)  If you have forty gallons of sap, you must boil off thirty-nine gallons of water to yield one gallon of maple syrup. That’s why maple syrup is so expensive and why the syrup market is dominated by artificial products containing not a drop of real maple. What you are paying for in the genuine artifact is a terrific amount of fuel, along with somebody’s long nights in the sugarhouse tending the sap as it boils.

24) We are some of the first people in history not to have built-in connections to the land we inhabit, not to be able to take comfort and pleasure in its verities. Paying attention to terroir is one of the best and most enjoyable ways to reestablish the relationship. It can teach us much about who we are, why we like what we like, and how we go about living on this earth. It can allow us to rediscover a romance that is exhilarating, fortifying, and real.

1776 by David McCullough

25) It was also a matter of record that Washington had been retired from military life for fifteen years, during which he had not even drilled a militia company. His only prior experience had been in backwoods warfare—a very different kind of warfare—and most notably in the Braddock campaign of 1755, which had been a disaster. He was by no means an experienced commander. He had never led an army in battle, never before commanded anything larger than a regiment. And never had he directed a siege.

26) Far more, however, would be said later and repeated endlessly of Hessians who supposedly, on the morning of the attack, were still reeling drunk or in a stupor from having celebrated Christmas in the Germanic tradition. But there is no evidence that any of them were drunk. John Greenwood, who was in the thick of the fight, later wrote, “I am willing to go upon oath that I did not see even a solitary drunken soldier belonging to the enemy.” Major James Wilkinson, the young officer who had been present at the capture of General Lee and who also fought at Trenton and later wrote an account of the battle, made no mention of anyone being drunk.

The One Thing by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan

27) “What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”

28) The inequality of effort for results is everywhere in your life if you will simply look for it. And if you apply this principle, it will unlock the success you seek in anything that matters to you. There will always be just a few things that matter more than the rest, and out of those, one will matter most. Internalizing this concept is like being handed a magic compass. Whenever you feel lost or lacking direction, you can pull it out to remind yourself to discover what matters most.

How To Write About Music by Marc Woodworth and Ally-Jane Grossan

29) In 30 years, unless you’re a genius (and probably not even then), no one is going to care about the quality of your work, and no one will accurately remember anything you published about some arcane album that nobody listened to … except you. You will care, and you will remember. So if you can’t satisfy yourself, you ultimately can’t satisfy anyone else. That said, nobody believes their own writing is brilliant; only crazy people think like that. So if you’re insecure about your work and you lack confidence in your ability, it might just mean you’re reasonable.

30) Swifties see the characteristic at hand for what it is: writing. Her songs are her point of view, making it her job to blow up the most minor event into something that more accurately represents the way she experienced it. As Tay quoted Neruda in her Red liner notes, “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” This is basic Nabokov shit, right? Everything hits harder in memory. Everything changes color. Her first album will tell you she is a natural crusher, daydreamer, hopeless romantic. Obsessing over the briefest of encounters is what we do. She was just born to translate it for millions of people.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (RIP)

31) Brunch menus are an open invitation to the cost-conscious chef, a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business. You see a fish that would be much better served by quick grilling with a slice of lemon, suddenly all dressed up with vinaigrette? For ‘en vinaigrette’ on the menu, read ‘preserved’ or ‘disguised’.

32) Given these perils. . why? Why would anyone want to do it? Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you’ve got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who’s working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, anyone of whom could then crash Daddy’s Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there’s the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, anyone of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it’s a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen’s Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he’s taking back the delivery; you didn’t order enough napkins for the weekend-and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

33) His glass eye shone brightly up at me and was by far the most lifelike thing about him.

34) What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.

everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too by Jomny Sun

35) i love art. to experience sombodys art is to be invited into a silent conversation they are having with themself.

36) wat happens after we die

nobody knows. thats why it is scarey.

maybe the reason why we dont know is becuase it is so wonderful that nobody ever thought to turn back around to tell us.

Thoughts of An Eaten Sun by Kyle Tolle

37) How could she hold on to the memory of someone without also holding on to the grief of losing them? The grief and the memories were intertwined.

38) “I’ll accept my fate and meet the frigid end as soon as it’ll have me. Then I can join my family in rest. They lie many miles away, but my blood will seep into the world just as theirs does. When Iomesel is buried in ice, when the core of the planet is the only heat to know, our blood will mingle deep underground and the world might know family and its love doesn’t die with our bodies.”

The Artful Edit by Susan Bell

39) It’s interesting that the word editor—in the American sense—does not exist in other languages. For example, the policy in Latin America with magazines is that you pretty much sink or swim according to what you wrote. They correct spelling mistakes and obvious things like that, but they pretty much publish it the way you wrote it. The result is that any given magazine has a much greater diversity of voices than American magazines have. There’s a greater diversity of quality, too, but there’s a greater diversity of voices, unlike American magazines that all end up sounding as though they were written by the same person because the editor keeps rewriting the piece. Because they have a house style. Everything gets poured into the mold. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. Everything has to be in that beautifully polished prose. The editors sort of throw it into the Cuisinart and it all comes out sounding the same.

40) Also, to read pages horizontally is quite different from reading them in a stack, where you see only one page at a time. You can see proportions better when you read across, page to page to page, glancing back and forth, and stepping back to take in a view of the whole typographic design of a chapter. You will more easily see whether you’ve used too many tiny or lengthy paragraphs in one area. If you have a specific concern, use a highlighter or the bold key on your computer to make it stand out, then hang the pages up and observe where the color or bold type is either dense or absent—this may tell you if there is too little of one person, for instance, too much of one verb, too little dialogue, or too much of a leitmotiv. On hearing of the laundry-line method, Laura Kipnis, author of Against Love, said, “O no, I could never do that. I have to lay it all out on the floor.” She walks or crawls around on top of her pages, reading and moving them as pieces of a puzzle. Jim Lewis tapes his pages to the wall. He will print his manuscript out in a tiny, unreadable font size, so he can hang the entire book up. He will look at it like a painting or a map, searching for topographical imbalances. Whichever way you choose—cord and clips, wall and tape, or floor—it can be valuable when you edit to look at your manuscript’s topography.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

41) Spider said, “How’d he die?” “Heart failure.” “That doesn’t mean anything. That just means he died.” “Well, yes. He did.”

42) It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it’s true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It’s not even coincidence. It’s just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.

5/3/1: The Simplest and Most Effective Training System to Increase Raw Strength by Jim Wendler

43) When you’re choosing your assistance exercises, do yourself a favor and justify why you’re doing them. Don’t bullshit yourself. You must have a very strong reason for doing an exercise. If you don’t, scrap it and move on. Sometimes, instead of what you do in the weight room, it’s what you don’t do that will lead to success.

44) Starting too light allows for more time for you to progress forward. It’s easy for anyone – beginner or advanced – to want to get ahead of themselves. Your lifts will go up for a few months, but then they’ll stall – and stall, and stall some more. Lifters get frustrated and don’t understand that the way around this is to prolong the time it takes to get to the goal. You have to keep inching forward. This is a very hard pill to swallow for most lifters. They want to start heavy, and they want to start now. This is nothing more than ego, and nothing will destroy a lifter faster, or for longer, than ego.

Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

45) The driver looked as if he was half asleep but he passed the fast boys in the convertible sedans as though they were being towed. They turned on all the green lights for him.

46) It got darker. The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling. I sat up on the bed and put my feet on the floor and rubbed the back of my neck. I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson

47) “If I am spared,” he always said to Constance, “I will write the book myself. If not, see that my notes are entrusted to some worthy cynic who will not be too concerned with the truth.”

48) I had to put down the shopping bag to open the lock on the gate; it was a simple padlock and any child could have broken it, but on the gate was a sign saying PRIVATE NO TRESPASSING and no one could go past that.

Football Scouting Methods by Steve Belichick

49) Too often the opposing team is given too much credit for being able to do many things offensively that it has not shown. Probably a better approach to game planning would be to play the opponent for what has been shown, but respect that opponent for what it might do. If an opponent gives you something definite to key and play, it seems logical to play the key with some caution, and not gamble that the key is completely foolproof. Play it until the key is proved wrong, or until something more has been added to neutralize the key. But to simply assert that another team could do one thing or another does not give that team the ability nor the techniques for such accomplishments. It must be remembered that the opponent’s practice time is limited also.

50) A quarterback uses several methods to go back to pass, he will usually have a reason for it. On some types of passes, he will go back one way, and on passes to a certain area he may use a different technique. As proficient as most professional quarterbacks are, there are several in the National Football League that generally tip-off the area to which they are going to pass, or the area where their primary receiver is. When they “back pedal,” they are usually going to throw the ball to the left, and when they run back side ways, they generally throw the ball over the middle or to the right. Since two of these passers are high in the list of those passers with the most interceptions, it seems that some of their opponents are aware of this.

The Judgement: Transmutation by Alexander Dennison

51) “Your incompetence created me.” She said bluntly. She stood to one side and the fragile glass that governed Ford’s sanity exploded, showering him once again with the tendrils of lunacy.

52) He realised afterwards that he was probably breaking so many laws at the same time when he revved the engine; theft, unsafe apparel and likely the most humiliating one – public indecency as his hospital gown swayed erratically in the wind.

Waking Up by Sam Harris

53) It is usually easy to detect social and psychological problems in any community of spiritual seekers. This seems to be yet another liability inherent to the project of self-transcendence. Many people renounce the world because they can’t find a satisfactory place in it, and almost any spiritual teaching can be used to justify a pathological lack of ambition. For someone who has not yet succeeded at anything and who probably fears failure, a doctrine that criticizes the search for worldly success can be very appealing. And devotion to a guru—a combination of love, gratitude, awe, and obedience—can facilitate an unhealthy return to childhood. In fact, the very structure of this relationship can condemn a student to a kind of intellectual and emotional slavery.

54) Imagine that several of your friends have already traveled to Mars this way and seem none the worse for it.

They describe the experience as being one of instantaneous relocation: You push the green button and find yourself standing on Mars—where your most recent memory is of pushing the green button on Earth and wondering if anything would happen. So you decide to travel to Mars yourself.

However, in the process of arranging your trip, you learn a troubling fact about the mechanics of teleportation: It turns out that the technicians wait for a person’s replica to be built on Mars before obliterating his original body on Earth. This has the benefit of leaving nothing to chance; if something goes wrong in the replication process, no harm has been done. However, it raises the following concern: While your double is beginning his day on Mars with all your memories, goals, and prejudices intact, you will be standing in the teleportation chamber on Earth, just staring at the green button. Imagine a voice coming over the intercom to congratulate you for arriving safely at your destination; in a few moments, you are told, your Earth body will be smashed to atoms.

How would this be any different from simply being killed?

To most readers, this thought experiment will suggest that psychological continuity—the mere maintenance of one’s memories, beliefs, habits, and other mental traits—is an insufficient basis for personal identity. It’s not enough for someone on Mars to be just like you; he must actually be you. The man on Mars will share all your memories and will behave exactly as you would have. But he is not you—as your continued existence in the teleportation chamber on Earth attests. To the Earth-you awaiting obliteration, teleportation as a means of travel will appear a horrifying sham: You never left Earth and are about to die. Your friends, you now realize, have been repeatedly copied and killed. And yet, the problem with teleportation is somehow not obvious if a person is disassembled before his replica is built. In that case, it is tempting to say that teleportation works and that “he” is really stepping onto the surface of Mars.

50 Great Bits From The 25 Books I Read In 2017

This idea was originally inspired by Julien Smith, a much more prolific reader than I. Here are my similar lists from years past: 2012, 2013, 2014, 20152016.

Given the amount of long planes ride I had in 2017, I expected to read many more books than usual throughout the year. While I capped out at 25 again, this was probably the most diverse reading year genre-wise I’ve ever had, mainly because I made a point to finally read more fiction. Although it took a while to get used to reading not for the sake of learning something of benefit to my career, personal life, or bar trivia, I enjoyed the rhythm of reading non-fiction in the morning to get my problem-solving brain going and then fiction at night to bore me, er, get me thinking about something more abstract before falling asleep.

Despite how others might remember 2017, it was a great book year for me and several I read will likely remain among my all-time favorites for years to come. Here are 50 of my favorite passages, quotes, and bits from all 25 of those reads (words are the respective author’s unless otherwise noted).

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

1) The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.

2) ‘You put so much stock in winning wars,’ the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. ‘The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we’ve done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn’t a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.’

The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

3) According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it—the paradox of our times.

4) In addition to the normal workplace wardrobe, employees had to create a “workplace casual” wardrobe. It couldn’t really be the sweats and T-shirts you wore around the house on the weekend. It had to be a selection of clothing that sustained a certain image—relaxed, but also meticulous and serious. All of a sudden, the range of wardrobe possibilities was expanded, and a decision-making problem emerged. It was no longer a question of the blue suit or the brown one, the red tie or the yellow one. The question now was: What is casual? A New Yorker piece about this phenomenon identified at least six different kinds of casual: active casual, rugged casual, sporty casual, dressy casual, smart casual, and business casual. As writer John Seabrook put it, “This may be the most depressing thing about the casual movement: no clothing is casual anymore.” So we got the freedom to make an individual choice about how to dress on a given day, but for many, that choice entailed more complications than it was worth.

Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson

5) One of the small marvels of my first trip of Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different ways of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying movie tickets. It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike — that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding — and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.

6) Liechtenstein’s last military engagement was in 1866, when it sent eighty men to fight against the Italians. Nobody was killed. In fact – you’re going to like this – they came back with eighty-one men, because they made a friend on the way. Two years later, realizing that the Liechtensteiners could beat no one, the Crown Prince disbanded the army.

How To Write Short by Roy Peter Clark

7) Joseph M. Williams’ Five Principles of Concision:

  1. Delete words that mean little or nothing (kind of, really, actually)
  2. Delete words that repeat the meaning of other words (various and sundry)
  3. Delete words implied by other words (terrible tragedy)
  4. Replace a phrase with a word (‘in the event of’ becomes ‘if’)
  5. Change negatives to affirmatives (‘not include’ becomes ‘omit’)

8) Some of the best advice on how to write to and with visual images comes from TV writers and producers. In his book Television News, Ivor Yorke writes, “In most cases, to repeat exactly what is happening on the screen is to waste a great opportunity to tell the viewer something worthwhile. The writer’s skill lies in being able to convey what is not clear from the pictures.” In Aim for the Heart, my Poytner colleague Al Tompkins argues that in good television, “pictures and words should not match,” but they should, according to Jill Geisler, ‘hold hands’.

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

9) Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.

10) No one I knew would admit to liking Craigslist, but I always found it weirdly cheering. The unashamed display of need, the sheer range and specificity of things that people wanted was far more reassuring and democratic than the preening, exacting profiles that appeared on the more sanitised dating sites. If the internet was a city, Craigslist was its Times Square, a site of cross-class, cross-racial contact, temporarily levelled by sexual desire.

Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz

11) In 1768, when Cook embarked on the first, roughly a third of the world’s map remained blank, or filled with fantasies: sea monsters, Patagonian giants, imaginary continents. Cook sailed into this void in a small wooden ship and returned, three years later, with charts so accurate that some of them stayed in use until the 1990s.12) The death scene was all the more shocking for its many ironies. Cook, who had often excoriated his men for violent intemperance toward natives, succumbed to precisely that, marching ashore with a menacing but inadequate force and opening fire at the most charged moment possible. A Quaker-influenced child of the Enlightenment, Cook died with a gun in his hand, having just killed a man. The dagger that felled him was forged from one of the iron spikes that Cook himself had ordered for his ships before leaving England, “to exchange for refreshments” and “to be distributed to [natives] in presents towards obtaining their friendship.” The final irony was that Cook died, not in warlike New Zealand or Niue, but on an island where he’d been greeted as a god, and where he’d felt so secure that until the final day he had ordered his men to go ashore unarmed.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

13) Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.

14) I thought of our respect for the dead. I thought of the white sanatorium where the light of a man’s life goes quietly out in the presence of those who love him and who garner as if it were an inestimable treasure his last words, his ultimate smile. How right they are! Seeing that this same whole is never again to take shape in the world. Never again will be heard exactly that note of laughter, that intonation of voice, that quality of repartee. Each individual is a miracle. No wonder we go on speaking of the dead for twenty years. Here, in Spain, a man is simply stood up against a wall and he gives up his entrails to the stones of the courtyard. You have been captured. You are shot. Reason: your ideas were not our ideas.

Maphead by Ken Jennings

15) There’s a reason why we call the travel bug “wanderlust,” not “wanderwhim” or “wanderhobby.” It’s an urgent, passionate thing.

16) Tests on gender and navigation have found that women tend to navigate via landmarks (“I turn left when I get to the gas station”) whereas men use dead reckoning (“I still need to be north and maybe a little west of here”), which ties in nicely with the evolutionary perspective: early men went out on hunting expeditions in all directions and always needed to be good at finding their way back to the cave, developing their “kinesic memory,” while women foraged for edibles closer to home, developing “object location memory.” Simply put, men got better at finding places, while women got better at finding things.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

17) ‘Did you ever feel,’ he asked slowly, ‘as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it the chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you could be using if you knew how?’

‘You mean all the emotions one might be feeling if things were different?’ Helmholtz shook his head.

‘Not quite. I’m thinking of a strange feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it – only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power. If there was some different way of writing… Or else something different to write about. I’m pretty good at inventing phrases that seem new and exciting even if they’re about something completely obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough. It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.’

18) The Savage shook his head. ‘It all seems to me quite horrible.’ ‘Of course it does. Happiness is never as exciting as unhappiness or the struggles of great passions. Happiness is never grand.’

Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy

19) If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.

20) Highways with billboards have three times as many accidents as highways without billboards. President Eisenhower said, ‘I am against those billboards that mar our scenery, but I don’t know what I can do about it.’ In California, Governor Pat Brown said, ‘When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded.’

Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer 

21) Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear.

That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

22) Remembering numbers proved to be one of the real world applications of the memory palace that I relied on almost every day. I used a technique known as the “Major System,” invented around 1648 by Johann Winkelmann, which is nothing more than a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds. Those sounds can then be turned into words, which can in turn become images for a memory palace.

The code works like this: The number 32, for example, would translate into MN, 33 would be MM, and 34 would be MR. To make those consonants meaningful, you’re allowed to freely intersperse vowels. So the number 32 might turn into an image of a man, 33 could be your mom, and 34 might be the Russian space station Mir. Similarly, the number 86 might be a fish, 40 a rose, and 92 a pen. You might visualize 3,219 as a man (32) playing a tuba (19), or maybe a person from Manitoba (3,219). Likewise, 7,879 would translate to KFKP, which might turn into a single image of a coffee cup, or two images of a calf and a cub. The advantage of the Major System is that it’s straightforward, and you can begin using it right out of the box. (When I first learned it, I immediately memorized my credit card and bank account numbers.)

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

23) This is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job—not a calling.24) “Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?” she asked.

“Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?”

“Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

25) The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online.26) The idea motivating this strategy is that the use of a distracting service does not, by itself, reduce your brain’s ability to focus. It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty. This constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the mental muscles responsible for organizing the many sources vying for your attention. By segregating Internet use (and therefore segregating distrnactions) you’re minimizing the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention-selecting muscles strengthen.

The 50 Best* College Football Teams of All-Time by Bill Connelly

27) [Walter] Camp hated the idea of the forward pass. This was not his vision. He and others made sure that passing was still an immense gamble. You wanted to throw? Fine, but a pass had to cross the line of scrimmage at least five yards beyond where the passer received the ball from the center. Violating this rule meant a turnover. A pass could not cross the goal line. Violating this rule meant a turnover. The pass couldn’t even hit the ground without resulting in a turnover.

28) 1990 would go down as one of the craziest seasons in the history of the sport, with six different teams holding the No. 1 ranking and eight holding No. 2. Two teams split the national title – one began the season unranked and didn’t reach the top 10 until November; the other lost a game, tied a game, and benefited from two of the most famous, controversial calls ever.

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters

29) What the slave wants but can never have is not only freedom from the chains but also from their memory.

30) Sometimes it’s possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger’s sentence, a green, impossible vision—the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.

How To Change The World by John-Paul Flintoff

31) The Victorian artist and writer John Ruskin once asked why we gave medals to people who, in a moment and without much thought, save somebody’s life, but we give no medal to people who devote years to bringing up a child.

32) Going first does not necessarily mean taking charge of everything that follows.

Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday

33) “You’ve heard it in a million meetings. And clients are so flip about it: “We want to go viral. Make people share this online.” Everyone wants it. As though massive viral sharing is as simple as asking for it. All I know is that I cringe each time I hear a client make that assumption. The growth hacker has a response: Well, why should customers do that? Have you actually made it easy for them to spread your product? Is the product even worth talking about?”

34) At the core, marketing is lead generation. Ads drive awareness . . . to drive sales. PR and publicity drive attention . . . to drive sales. Social media drives communication . . . to drive sales. Marketing, too many people forget, is not an end unto itself. It is simply getting customers. And by the transitive property, anything that gets customers is marketing.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

35) It was propped against the collar box and I lay listening to it. Hearing it, that is. I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.

36) Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes.

Study Hall by Bill Connelly

37) When you grow up in an area obsessed with this sport, and when you take in the collegiate game day experience enough, it becomes a large portion of your identity, more than perhaps any other sport in this country. You cannot fathom another way to spend autumn Saturdays. You get nervous when friends announce they’re getting married in September. Cracking open a beer at 8:00 a.m. is, on Saturdays, completely defensible. Driving 12 hours round trip for a big conference game? Not only logical, but necessary. NFL fans who say things like “Well, I don’t really follow college football…” make you question both their integrity and their morals. You perhaps cannot justify some of college sports’ shadier dealings, but you believe there is enough good to outweigh the bad, and it is difficult to imagine what might change that.

38) For now, just know that if your average starting field position was in the low 20s, you probably lost. If it was in the high 30s, you probably won. While the way you capitalize on your opportunities matters, the simple fact is, creating more opportunities through field position typically results in more points.

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber

39) If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic! “And, besides, that’s not the purpose of going into business. “The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people. “The purpose of going into business is to expand beyond your existing horizons. So you can invent something that satisfies a need in the marketplace that has never been satisfied before. So you can live an expanded, stimulating new life.”

40) Your business and your life are two totally separate things. At its best, your business is something apart from you, rather than a part of you, with its own rules and its own purposes. An organism, you might say, that will live or die according to how well it performs its sole function: to find and keep customers.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

41) He walked till morning. The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow.

42) Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shopping centers he’d known as a teenager, low-density places where the small hours brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy, a tension that left you watching insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops. Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from the all-night click and shudder of the hot core. There was that same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition soon to wake again.

The Art of Smart Football by Chris B. Brown

43) In addition to extensive drill work, [Mike] McCarthy often gives his quarterbacks lengthy written tests, once even asking his non-Montana quarterbacks in Kansas City to write an essay describing the Chiefs’ version of the West Coast offense “from a philosophical perspective.”

44) A quarterback translates his knowledge of defenses and passing plays to the field through his reads, of which there are two basic types: progression and coverage. “A progression read is a pass play where three or more receivers are looked to in a one, two, three progression. ‘Is he open? Is he open? Is he open?’” said [David] Cutcliffe. With a coverage read, it’s “the coverage played by the defense” that determines which receivers the quarterback looks for.

Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

45) If the best in the world are stretching their asses off in order to get strong, why aren’t you? (Christopher Sommer)

46) I wish I would have known that there was no need to wait. I went to college. I went to law school. I worked in law and banking, though not for terribly long. But not until I started PayPal did I fully realize that you don’t have to wait to start something. So if you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months? Sometimes, you have to actually go through the complex, 10-year trajectory. But it’s at least worth asking whether that’s the story you’re telling yourself, or whether that’s the reality. (Peter Thiel)

The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey M. Schwartz

47) The brain of a child is almost miraculously resilient, or plastic: surgeons can remove the entire left hemisphere, and thus (supposedly) all of the brain’s language regions, and the child still learns to talk, read, and write as long as the surgery is performed before age four or five.

48) The seven-month-old Japanese babies whom [Patricia] Kuhl tested had no trouble discriminating r from l. But ten month-olds were as deaf to the difference as adults. When Kuhl did a similar test of Canadian babies raised in English-speaking homes, she got the same results: six-month-olds could distinguish Hindi speech sounds even though those sounds were not part of their auditory world; by 12 months they could not. Between six and twelve months, Kuhl concludes, babies’ brains begin the ‘use it or lose’ process of pruning unused synapses. The auditory cortex loses its sensitivity to phonemes that it does not hear every day. This may be why children who do not learn a second language before puberty rarely speak it like natives.

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

49) “From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert.… I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace. This kind of thinking infused the second half of my life with a conflicted mentality: Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old…”

50) There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.