William Morris is the Marie Kondo We Need

...serable trumpery, from the engineers who have had to make the machines for making them, down to the hapless clerks who sit daylong year after year in the horrible dens wherein the wholesale exchange of them is transacted, and the shopmen who, not daring to call their souls their own, retail them amidst numberless insults which they must not resent, to the idle public which doesn’t want them, but buys them to be bored by them and sick to death of t...

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Join or Die: Why You Should Join a Club

...the work of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, best known for the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. I read this book when it came out and it had a profound influence on me, leading to years of joining clubs and organizations. The documentary is professionally produced and features some high level interviewees including Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg and David Brooks. More importantly, the doc includes pe...

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Age of Apocalypse

...Satellite TV! Shop Ebay at 30,000 feet! I shut the TV off and picked up a book, but I kept getting distracted by the screen I could see in the row in front of me. It was displaying a nonstop parade of gruesome images–mangled corpses, gunshot wounds–what passes for “entertainment” on mainstream television. Which brings me back to the Age of Limits conference. In Kelly’s blog post yesterday, I wanted to interject to say that I noticed a depressive...

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Looking for Chicken Coop Plans

...’m looking for smart, good-looking chicken coops to feature in an upcoming book. If you’re proud of your coop, send pictures to ultimatechickencoopbook@gmail.com. Please indicate whether you would be able to provide building plans. (I have a budget to compensate builders for their plans.) I do *not* need plans to go with all the pictures, so send your pics even without them. Then I’ll be in touch if your coop meets our needs. Please feel free to s...

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My Big Fat Greek Squash

...cy winter squash galette recipe is here on MSNBC along with a video of him making it. I’ll note that the online recipe is different from the one in the book which calls for a longer baking time. My galette was in the oven for over an hour, but I did not cook the squash as long in the frying pan as Bittman does in the video. I’m sure either way will work, and this has to be, seriously, one of the best things I’ve ever cooked. It would make a great...

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