Vacations are beautiful things. I know a lot of people who highly anticipate them, roil in their presence, then mourn going. For me they roll in with an amazing amount of anxiety around the disruption of my regular rhythm, then settle in to a calm comfort of disconnection, and finally fade away with the glow of a sunset and a book of memories. This year Liz and I sent our kids to sleep away camp for the first time ever, and stacked two weeks with a succession of experiences. We sprinted off to Europe for a week, came back stateside to spend a week on our own, brought the kids back in for a solo parenting stretch, then reunited everyone to kick off our annual summer month in rural Virginia.
Having these four phases -- family time, couple's retreat, individual adventure, solo parenting, then back to full family time -- gave me a great way to experience each piece of who I am in my personal life in immediate succession. It was an enlightening way to step back and see the whole puzzle in each of its pieces. Each week was a way to reflect on how I come together, and to reimagine the parts of my life that I can blend together.
Here's what else I spent the vacation:
Reading - Bill Gates released his summer reading recommendations and of the five books mentioned I picked up How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future by Vaclav Smil. The book is a narrative walk through a numerical argument around how deep our carbon addiction really is. Smil makes compelling arguments that simply focusing on EVs and solar power for our homes isn't enough to significantly dent, much less erase our environmental impact. He shows how almost every part of modern life, from food production and worldwide distribution, to modern building and civilization development are more deeply rooted in carbon consumption that most people imagine. If you've read and enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari's books, especially Sapiens, you may dig Smil as well.
(I also nabbed Why We're Polarized by journalist Ezra Klein on Audible -- it's fascinating if you're curious about our the roots and reasons for our current political divide.)
Listening to - One of my favorite podcasts just years came to an end. Kara Swisher's Sway had an incredible two year run of asking tough questions to powerful people. Since exiting the booth in June Sway has been re-airing some of Swisher's favorite episodes including a 2020 interview with Elon Musk. They discuss Tesla and SpaceX of course, but I found the snippet of conversation around Neuralink especially interesting. It's one of Musk's lessor known ventures that's aimed at understanding brain science and creating an integration between technology and human hardware. The initial goals of tackling challenges such as seizures and paralysis are interesting, but the ideas Musk floats around AI's progress and humanity's limitation around speed of communication are especially fascinating. It's worth the listen.
Admiring - This week NASA released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Launched at Christmas 2021, the JWST is powerful enough to see the earliest moments of the universe's existence. The photos shared this week show clusters of galaxies four billion light years away. The images are simply breathtaking.
Weekly gig - I've been listened to a lot of David Bowie the last few weeks. He was a musical genius who was able to reinvent, express himself, and remain relevant over five decades. It's not a greatest hit's show, but here's a show from Montreaux in July of 2002. It's a stellar setlist and it's crazy to think that this happened twenty years ago this week.
Have a clear eyed, forward thinking, awe inspiring week.
