7 for Sunday

The hard part of the practice is never the work itself — it’s the way you think about the work before you ever begin. Around that insight: a backyard ultra where runners circle a 4.1-mile loop in Tennessee until only one person is left, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful definition of true self-set challenge. And every morning, a few minutes with journal entries from 1, 3, 6, and 9 years ago — the most fascinating author Craig knows.

Five and a half transcendental hours with toes in the sand, perfectly managing hydration and kidney function — foiled only by beach mates dragging him into the ocean. The issue asks, with characteristic precision, whether having one of something might actually mean having none, and whether the whole attention problem is really about cleaving the desire to seem clever from the moments when being clever actually helps someone.

Three high school students realize the exam is hackable, keep it secret, and race to answer as many questions as possible at 60% correct — which turns out to be a personal origin story for a lifetime of thinking like a hacker. Around it: Vannevar Bush’s eighty-year-old observation that the mountain of knowledge and the feeling of being buried under it are both, somehow, still exactly the same. And a nagging question about the list: where do I have structure I didn’t actually intend?

Charles Simic recommends testing every grand theory in the kitchen first — ideally with sausages, potatoes, and a philosopher on hand. Elizabeth Gilbert wants to live slowly enough to hear herself living. And the fading affect bias explains why the worst adventures are the ones you’re most glad you had: the badness fades faster than the goodness, and sometimes the memory that begins as “ugh, that sucked” quietly becomes the one you treasure most.

A year in, fifty-two issues deep, and the question that surfaces is surprisingly personal: not what do I do, but what am I? Murakami stares into his own nature and finds clouds have nothing useful to say. Borges insists that everything — humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes — is raw material, clay for sharpening the art. Jorge Luis Borges and Isaac Asimov sharing an issue with a deliberately weak joke and a meditation on protocols versus platforms feels, somehow, exactly right.