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…

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…