Morning Pages

The Atavist, Barcelona apartment, Cal Newport on John McPhee, Jean-François Millet

Morning Pages
Photo by Patrick Tomasso / Unsplash

Morning.

It's been a week or so since I posted anything here. And I think that's because, like everyone else (and notwithstanding all the fine advice I gave in the Rabbit Holes post), I have been staring open-mouthed and anxious at the world.

During that time, a lot of new links have been accumulating in Raindrop, so it's time to fire some of them out into the world.

Long reads have been a thing for me recently, a means to escape for an extended period of time. The Atavist magazine is a great source of these. Mostly you need a subscription (at $25 per year, it's very reasonable, and as I understand it, they split the proceeds with their freelance writers), but you should be able to check out their latest story "The Voyagers" for free.

Other Atavist pieces that caught my eye recently (without a subscription, you can read three pieces for free, so choose wisely!):

The Shadow and The Ghost - How a religious sect in Brooklyn stole my grandmother’s childhood.

The Gilded Age - Gold mined in the jungles of Peru brought riches to three friends in Miami—but it also carried ruin.

The Girl in the Picture - A sketch artist and a grieving mother set out to solve a cold case. The more they dug, the more terrifying the truth became.

The Butcher of Havana - How a drifter from Milwaukee became the chief executioner of the Cuban revolution and a test case for U.S. civil rights.

The Snitch - In Scott Kimball, the FBI thought it had found a high-value informant who could help solve big cases. What it got instead was lies, betrayal, and murder.

Cat and Mouse - With dozens of felines turning up dead around London, a pair of pet detectives set out to prove it was the work of a serial killer.

The Lives of Others - Two women gave birth on the same day in a place called Come By Chance. They didn’t know each other, and never would. Half a century later, their children made a shocking discovery.

Searching for Mr. X - For eight years, a man without a memory lived among strangers at a hospital in Mississippi. But was recovering his identity the happy ending he was looking for?


Another useful list of long reads pinged my radar this morning: Becoming Human Again: A Reading List for the Extremely Offline

If you have a spare 1.5 million Euros, then this Modernist Barcelona apartment could be yours.

I was encouraged by Cal Newport's short post on John McPhee this morning.

And lastly, this video is really interesting. Hold out for when Salvador Dali enters the picture, that's when it really kicks off.

That's it for today. Have a good one and try to look away once in a while.