7 for Sunday

Fiction has been systematically optimized out — and that was a mistake. Inviting old and new friends back into the antilibrary leads straight to Vernor Vinge, whose 1981 novella quietly founded cyberpunk while predicting most of what came after. Meanwhile, Pressfield’s reminder about self-evaluation and self-validation cuts through the shouting-for-attention impulse cleanly, and The Police…

The fastest path to mindfulness, it turns out, is to think: this may be the last time I get to experience this — the last boulder I scramble on, the last time I wrench my back shoveling snow, the last time I laugh until I lose control of my bladder. From there, an issue that…

Tim Berners-Lee opens an essay with “Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web” — and that’s an “I” statement with a little punch. Around it: the difference between goals and aspirations, vertigo at the edge of consciousness, and the admission that do-now as a default mindset is excellent right up until…

A book borrowed, returned unread, revisited twice more, finally bought and begun from page one — and the literal first paragraph stops everything cold with 850 pages of “woa, that’s interesting” still ahead. Around it: the laptop display pinched between two fingers, thin as a pinch of salt, with an entire real world visible just…

Ted Nelson’s hummingbird mind — unable to keep track of anything, desperate to write and film, needing a way to follow all the branching associations his brain produced — gave the world the word “hypertext” long before the Web existed. That origin story shares the issue with a man who feels like a speck in…

The ancient Athenians had to invent information technology from scratch just to keep democracy flowing — tracking bodies, votes, decrees, and endless speechifying with whatever materials were at hand. That sits alongside a 1992 essay on how being spatially located creatures shapes everything about how we think, and the counterintuitive comfort that the ever-growing distance…

High-quality listening can make a speaker’s attitudes less extreme, less prejudiced, more complex — which means simply listening well is already doing something. Around that: the observation that being buried in email is just as much a distraction as scrolling Instagram, questions worth holding in your mind without immediately asking them, and the incomprehensibly-advanced supercomputer…

Seated in seiza on the concrete, barefoot, 53 degrees, mug of steaming broth, watching rain turn the backyard uniformly green — and then Nick Cave arrives with Leonard Cohen’s crack where the light came in. The issue holds that alongside Pressfield’s Resistance, which wakes up every morning and never relents, and a hard-won razor: would…

Any day at the crag — dappled sunlight, cool breeze in the shade, food tasting better, sleep less troubled — has a higher density of “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is” moments than almost anywhere else. The issue pairs that with a deceptively simple troubleshooting question for failed attempts at personal change:…

The decision, at its root, involves cutting something off — and the post-decision stress is never anything like the pre-decision stress, which means the stress was self-created all along. Paul Yamazaki on the joy of running an independent bookstore lands alongside a long-standing fantasy: walking into a bookstore, clearing the rest of the day, and…