This is the only time we have
Why I bounced off social media, how I read, and why I write
"Argument Two: Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.
Argument Three: Social media is making you into an asshole."
- Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier (Indiebound)
It's been roughly a month since I left Facebook. I made rather a big deal of it because, like other people, I used Facebook as a social/events calendar at least as much as I used it to keep up with people I know. It's been about ten days or so since I decided to take a break from Twitter.
Unsurprisingly, I'm more conflicted about doing this. Twitter does two things for me: it keeps me in tune with what people I know and like are talking about (not to mention the breaking news aspect, in which Twitter can genuinely be invaluable). It also helps lessen my sense of isolation. Outside of work, I spend a ton of my time living a solitary life. I'm not great about reaching out to friends to spend time with them socially, because I feel I'm burdening them; this isn't rational, but it's a fact. Spending time on Twitter let me feel less alone, in some ways.
But that's like satiating your hunger by hosing down a bag of Doritos. Yeah, it'll fill you up, but it's ultimately unhealthy. You can't really substitute chips and crackers for fruits and vegetables. That's what I was finding with Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms — especially after reading Lanier’s brief pamphlet (that’s what it really is).
I've worked really hard over the last decade-and-a-half to be a kinder, more compassionate, loving person. My politics essentially boil down to love and kindness. Twitter - especially a lot of the Twitter leftism I see - encourages and is captive to the belief that it's OK to be cruel and vicious in service of advancing left politics. That's in direct contradiction to what I'm trying to do, and how I'm trying to be in this sick, sad, broken world. So I chose to leave Twitter, for the time being.
Before you respond: I get it. The world as it is is full of outrages. It is, I think, impossible to not be outraged at seeing caged children; at seeing forests burn and made desolate desert; at seeing venal, gross corruption made glossy; at seeing our laws shredded, our Constitution desecrated for the greater glorification of the worst of us; at seeing ourselves and our friends die and suffer and struggle in all this.
I get that. I am outraged. I am seized with a righteous fury.
In the end, though, solidarity comes down to kindness and compassion and love for others. I am fighting for people I don't know, and will never know, because I have a deep and boundless love for humanity. Cruelty is incompatible with that, even if we excuse it by wielding it against our enemies. We cannot build solidarity - and thus make a better world possible - by being cruel. We only become that which we hate.
Now that you've read all that: hi, there! I'm Raf, and you're reading The Miscellanies - a biweekly digest of things I care about that you might find interesting. Things like politics and tech and sports and style and, what the hell, what it's like to be a man in the 21st century. Thank you for reading! If you're here because someone shared this with you, you can sign up below; if you're already signed up, thank you! If you want to share it with someone, and spread the word, you can do that below as well.
How I read
I got asked this week how I keep track of what books I read, which books I have, and which books I want to read. Let me break it down by first saying: this is what works for me. I tried a bunch of different things, and finally settled on this. I read both print books and eBooks; I'm not a big audiobook person, for lots of reasons; if you like them, great!
I use a fifth-generation iPad as my eBook reader. I tried using various Android tablets, including the Kindle Fire 8, but went back to the iPad for two simple reasons: the apps and the screen size (9.7 inches). I really like eBooks because the only space they take up is virtual, so to speak. I have over 2,700 of them, and if they were print books, that would make for a massive physical library collection. Instead, they only take up a few gigabytes of space on my hard drive (which, itself, is a wondrous thing, but that's a conversation for another time).
I use Calibre to manage my eBook collection. This is a cross-platform app; it's essentially iTunes for eBooks. It's not a pretty, polished app at all; in fact, it's straight-up ugly. But what it lacks in polish it more than makes up in power and extensibility. You can do all kinds of file manipulation with it, and it manages most every kind of eBook file you can think of.
Speaking of which: there's basically two types of eBook files: .mobi and .epub. Think of it as Amazon and Apple -- Amazon Kindle book files are .azw, which is .mobi with digital rights management (DRM), and Apple Books are .epubs with DRM. The third option is Google Play Books, but they, too, use. epub. On my iPad, I have all three apps - the Kindle app, the Books app, and the Play Books app. For everything else, I use the Documents app by Readdle -- this is how I read PDFs, because it lets me mark them up. You can use Documents for tons of other files - it lets you view Word and Excel files, you can read eBooks with it, open ZIP files, and even listen to MP3s and watch movies with it.
So that's how I handle eBooks. What about print books?
Most of my print books, sadly, are in storage. That's the price I pay for sharing a place in New York City. I do have a small library at my place, though, because I like having print books around. Being able to read actual written words on actual paper lets my mind focus on what's in front of me, and allows me to shut out the outside world, much like when I was a child. I highly recommend it. I probably read eBooks faster, all told, but I'm pretty sure I absorb more information from print books; they're certainly what I read when I want to really learn something in depth.
To track these books, I use an iOS and macOS app called Book Track. At $1.99 apiece for each version, this app is a veritable steal. I keep track my library of print books here, as well as a wish list of books I'm interested in. There's two things I like about this app: it's simply but beautifully designed, and it lets me export my data easily, as a comma-separated values file (CSV).
There's one last thing I'll mention, and that's that my library is actually an anti-library. I readily admit that I won't read most of the books I have, whether they're virtual or physical. That's OK! My library is there to serve as a tool of research. Here, I'll let Nassim Nicholas Taleb explain. Taleb writes in The Black Swan:
"The writer Umberro Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non-dull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means...allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an anti-library."
Taleb adds:
"We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head."
I am, it's fair to say, obsessed with what I don't know. I am deeply, painfully insecure about having failed out of college; about not graduating with glittering degrees, and being thought dumb and ill-educated about the world. I hunger to know what I don't know, and learn what I haven't been taught. It is my experience that what we think we know is what leads us astray. As Lincoln Steffens put it:
“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning."
This is now, more than ever, a moment for curiosity; a moment when the world begins anew again. This is what my anti-library does for me. I hope it can do the same for you, should you choose to do this.
Oh, I nearly forgot! Here's the eBooks I'm reading now:
The Gatekeepers, Chris Whipple. If there’s one thing I’m a nerd about, it’s White House administration. Specifically, how a White House works, or doesn’t. I am fascinated by how Presidencies succeed or fail. Next to the President, the person most responsible for how their Presidency turns out is the White House Chief of Staff. Whipple’s book is a history of that position, and it is surprisingly readable.
Almost President, Scott Farris. We’ve got a solid literature on the people who win the Presidency. We’ve got less material on those who’ve run for President, but lost — and the impact their candidacies had on the country. Farris was moved to write this book after he lost his own race for Congress, in Dick Cheney’s old Wyoming seat. A breezy book, this isn’t a scholarly work, but it is interesting.
The Friendly Orange Glow, Brian Dear. This is a fascinating look at a computer revolution that could’ve been - one based on terminals connected to mainframes, as opposed to personal computers operating independently. Dear explores the PLATO system, pioneered at the University of Illinois. PLATO pioneered instant messaging, chat rooms, message boards, interactive fiction, multiplayer games, and even screensavers. I just finished this, along with Farris’ book; highly recommend picking this up, if you haven’t heard of it yet.
Calcio: A History of Italian Football, John Foot. I’ve mostly written about baseball here in the Miscellanies; it was, and is, my first sporting love. I’ll never forget the ‘86 World Series, for instance. But my deepest love is for soccer. Growing up, soccer on television simply didn’t exist. That absence made the sport exotic, mysterious, and therefore alluring. Everyone knew about baseball and football; but only the true sophisticate knew about soccer. Adding to that glamour was the fact that the world’s best league at the time (the time being the late ‘80s and early ‘90s) was Italy’s Serie A. If you’re the kind of person whose knowledge of European soccer runs no deeper than England, you’re in for a treat. Italian soccer is full of drama, tragedy, heroism, and farce. Foot’s book is marvelous, and I recommend it unreservedly. Note that the link is to Winning At All Costs; I believe that’s a different edition of the same book, but if it’s not, let me know.
All links to Apple Books, because Amazon has a stranglehold and we should break it. That said, if you have a Kindle, all these books are available on Kindle, and I am not shaming you for either having a Kindle or buying books for your Kindle. You should get them and read them, if you like.
I'll close today's newsletter by answering a different question. Namely, why? As in, Why are you writing this newsletter?
There's lots of reasons why. I've always felt a need, a craving to write. I got tired of posting up stuff on Facebook, I got tired of making tweet threads; I wanted to get back to writing from the heart and gut. I missed blogging, and I craved discipline, or at least, the discipline of writing to a deadline, which I miss so much from journalism. Writing to biweekly deadlines - the Miscellanies lands in your inbox at 9:34 on Mondays and Fridays - means that I have a structure, a hard stop I need to stick to.
There's one other reason why, but I won't address it now. Suffice it to say that this is the only time we have, and I write accordingly. Death, after all, is the only promise; I write because for me, to write is to live, to breathe, to love. I love writing, I love playing with words, and seeing their power made manifest. I write because I have to, and because I want to, and the two are so intertwined that they are the same. I write this newsletter because it makes me feel less lonely to know that I'm writing to people who care about the things I say and think and do, and that fills me with such wonder.
In that vein: I love you. You're each one of you amazing, and I believe so much in the things you're going to do this week, and the weekend that follows, and the weeks and days and months that are to come. We are what we have, and what we have is each other. I love you for who you are, and who you're trying to become, and the wonder of it all is that we make each other so much better than we deserve to be.