7 for Sunday

A half-glitchy, half-haunted text-based space city still online after decades — MicroMUSE, where the transporter attendant still greets newcomers and warns that clear communication is very important — sits alongside Stoicism’s eudaimonia, Katy Bowman on the feedback loop between pain and immobility, and the surprisingly sublime experience of springing out of bed at 5:30 to smash the big, low-priority items that have been quietly weighing on the mind.

The smartphone is a less capable phone, a less capable camera, a less capable everything — and the point about proximity is the one that finally makes it click: it’s not the individual apps, it’s that they’re all right next to each other. That argument for calm technology shares the issue with a simple diagram — Rest, Reflect, Recalibrate — that quietly dismantles the fantasy of any creative project running as a steady-state forever.

Oliver Burkeman’s counterintuitive reassurance — that doing your thing kindles a fire that keeps the rest of us warm — opens an issue that keeps testing the limits of ruthless prioritization against a life with no particular interest in doing what’s “best.” Richard Hamilton makes the case that a story told aloud, in person, carries a power that electronic media simply can’t replicate. And somewhere in the margins, an 18th-century typographer gets magnificently punked about the very thing he cared most about.

A tree that exists both as fossil and as living specimen — the dawn redwood, spanning geologic time — shares the issue with a meditation on a podcast where Craig reads one quote aloud, raw and unedited, and occasionally gets chills on playback. In between: Djuna Barnes on silence making experience go further, and the realization that nine years of ruthlessly clearing the calendar somehow produced exactly the opposite problem from the one Gavin Leech is trying to solve.