Hello!
Ah, September—what a pleasure! Though it’s been a while since the academic year shaped my life, I’m still keenly aware of it—the rhythm of thirds has a better feel than quarters, and the change from the beginning to the end of each set of four months is real, tangible, appreciable. This week is delivering a classic September heat spell, but with luck we’ll soon be snuggled in sweaters.
- I’m a fan of “vibes” posts (call them what you will, but they’re round-ups of what someone did / read / saw / thought / etc over the last week / month / arbitrary period of time). Two I read recently: Susan Jean Robertson and Tom MacWright.
- Props to Doug Keefe for doing what TBS doesn’t by making GC rate of pay data publicly available in an open data format (plus an API!). (And hat-tip to Chris Allison and Sean Boots for their prior art in this space.)
- This week, I picked up Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others from Perfect Books. Essays on reading and writing are a favourite genre of mine, and I really enjoyed Lahiri’s In altre parole (In Other Words)—reading and writing takes a whole other feel when moving between languages.
- T and I also picked up Gardening Naturally, a delightful book by Laurie Perron and Sarah Quesnel-Langlois of Jungle Fleur—next year, we’re looking forward to slowly growing (haha) into gardening, and this book has a “just enough info and encouragement” approach that really resonates with us (similar to How to Sew Clothes, which we also love).
Posts the next few weeks will be brief, or… not at all!? This newsletter is now six years running (!!), a fact I largely missed last week. The fifth anniversary issue remains a good signpost to the archive, and the accompanying data analysis is a bunch of fun. (Solid Lucas sentence there.) While I don’t feel quite ready to shut it down entirely, issues this summer have been a bit slower to materialize—I’m reading and doing differently these days, in ways that don’t quite lend themselves to what I write here. Which is fine! But that, coupled with a very busy few weeks ahead, has me pondering a pause. We’ll see.
All the best for the week (weeks?) ahead!
Lucas