Up From Facebook

Most days I go on walks of 4-6 miles in the nearby woods. I bring my camera. I tell people that it gives me something to do with my hands. But it’s more than that. I learned the basics of photography in high school. I used many of those skills as a postdoc and well into my career as a scientist. Digital photography freed me from the darkroom.  Through all those decades, my life was dominated by the future and how to control it. Photography was a means to an end. Revisiting photography after retirement has not just taught me new skills, it’s taught me to live in the moment at a time in my life when the amount of “future” I have left is shrinking. As the professional wildlife photographer Simon d’Entremont says: “Photography doesn’t just change the pictures you make, it changes the person who makes them. Photography is a way of participating in the world instead of consuming it.” In the video link at the end, d’Entrement enumerates six ways that photography is transformative in the w...

The fact of college graduation matters far more, if you’re worried about jobs, than *which* college you attended. For most employers and most jobs, the fact that you graduated college shows that you’re a finisher. Over a four-year period, you took courses in a variety of fields and, within a narrow timetable (quarter or semester) completed all the tasks at an acceptable proficiency year over year.   “ In high school I used to OBSESS over the US News and World report college rankings, naively thinking school prestige = long-term career success.| Fast forward a decade later, I think these ranking lists are less of an indicator of the quality of education you’ll receive, and more so of the network you’ll have access to (both of your peers and alumni). So my biggest tip for soon-to-be and current college students: No matter where you go to school, surround yourself with people who give a f*ck about their future. Because the clearest indicator of long-term success is how much you and th...

I'm currently auditing an online lecture series by historian Timothy Snyder on Hitler and Stalin. The most recent lecture was on Communism. Snyder recommends that his students read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. It's mercifully short and the Kindle version cost 99 cents, so I read it.  As I say, it's short and cheap, so although I found it a complete waste of time and money, the damage was modest. I realize it's a manifesto, not a work of scholarship, but the polemical reliance on assertions and the poverty of evidence for them is certainly an affront to my intellect. I guess I'm not the intended audience, Then there's the fact that it didn't age well. The claim that Germany was particularly ripe for a communist revolution is risible in light of the fact that millions of German workers supported the Kaiser and later Hitler. And, there's the enormities that were the starvation, suffering and death of tens of millions in the "communist...

“ Former first lady Jill Biden  said she noticed a troubling bedtime tendency that may have foreshadowed  former President Joe Biden's  aggressive prostate cancer diagnosis: he would use the bathroom as many as seven times at night.   “Jill Biden shared the details during an interview Wednesday, Aug. 5, on SiriusXM’s “ Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa, ” saying she had previously raised concerns about her husband’s frequent nighttime trips to White House physicians.” In the waning months of 2017, I had to pee two or three times a night. My wife made an appointment for me with my PCP, who misdiagnosed the problem. Long story short, I found myself in the urology clinic with a Foley catheter that drained 1.2 liters from my bladder. Again, long story short, the diagnosis was benign prostate hyperplasia and I had green light laser prostate reduction surgery. Nearly nine years later, it’s all good. Guys, pay attention to your bladder (and your wife). https://www.usato...

“Ever the hype man, Musk suggested thinking of SpaceX’s satellites as robots, given that “they’re autonomous and don’t need servicing.” In the not-so-distant future, Musk mused, robots will be used to scale manufacturing on the moon. From there, moon-based robots will enable SpaceX to build a mass accelerator with solar production. Even Musk admitted it all sounded “totally nuts” but claimed that it could lead the company to scale to 1,000x the economy of Earth. From there, factories will be built, and robots “will be helpful with that,” Musk added. “It sounds super sci-fi right now, but it’s going to happen,” he said.” Don’t bogart that joint, Elon https://fortune.com/2026/08/04/elon-musk-spacex-earnings-trillion-revenue-target-capex-stock-reaction/

It seems extremely unlikely that the Trump administration will be chastened by its failure in Iran. Shamelessness has been central to Trump’s business and political success, and his reaction to setbacks is to deny objective facts and construct fantasies of achievement. The rigors of war do not seem to have persuaded him of the need for a more coherent process of policy formulation and assessment; he continues to blurt out his every whim, and a cabinet of sycophants and amplifiers is unlikely to impose discipline on an undisciplined principal. Nor can the two parts of the government that have apparently provided solid strategic judgments—the CIA and the military—salvage the process. They are advisory bodies, not policy actors, and Trump repudiates or ignores their counsel whenever it conflicts with his claims or preferences.   ~Kori Schake