French Dorrigo food is enjoying a renaissance in Sydney, re-emerging with a fresh sense of adventure.
Note 📝 Uncle David Tyson and Julie …
The tyranny of having a hobby
People fell upon them with desperation during lockdown. Now they’re presented as forms of self-care with the potential to overhaul your life
I have a friend who birdwatches. She doesn’t call it birdwatching — she calls it “looking at birds and then ticking them off in my bird book” — but that is what it is, and she’s been doing it for 20 years. A family friend gave her the book for her 10th birthday with a note saying that she seemed like a person who really loved the natural world and had a great appreciation for the living creatures around her, particularly the birds. The note, she says, was crucial. By being anointed as the type of kid who loves birds, she immediately became one, feeling sure that the friend had identified an innate quality she hadn’t yet figured out for herself. She has a good time with it. She looks at birds and thinks about them and, if you ask her why she likes doing this, will say things like “Well, birds are God’s most magical creatures.” I have another friend who knits. She started doing it while studying for her finals, needing an activity distinct from reading all day, and now she is a person who can knit. Her family buys her nice wool for her birthday, correctly anticipating that she will make something for them with it, and she is currently at the level of being able to knit gloves. She likes it, she says, because it occupies her hands, it’s satisfying, and it has an astonishingly impressive impact on the sorts of people for whom being able to knit gloves is as out of reach as being able to walk through walls…
It’s been swinging this way for a while. There have been memoirs about lives changed by houseplants and allotments, cold-water swimming as a cure for heartbreak, crafting as a cure for insanity, crafting as a lifesaver, chainsaw mindfulness, birdwatching as therapy, birdwatching as cure for heartbreak and knitting as tool of power. Call it an overcorrection.
The Peril Of Being Surrounded By Admirers
Admirers agree with you “even if you say something totally crazy.” And that’s bad: “You need people who can tell you what you don’t want to hear." Being admired for our accomplishments is pleasant, but it can also inflame our vanity and distort reality in ways that leave us worse off...
Why Do Writers Write?
There is often something compulsive about the act of writing, as if to cast out invasive thoughts. - The Paris Review
A New Study Says Literary Snobs Are Right
In short, reading literary fiction seems to give readers a more complex worldview. - LitHub
The Most Unlikely Literary Rediscovery Ever? “Don Quixote” In Sanskrit
The 1937 translation was commissioned two years previously by wealthy American accounting executive Carl Tilden Keller, who already had versions of Cervantes's novel in Icelandic, Japanese, and Mongolian. The translators were two Kashmiri pandits who knew no Spanish and worked from an 18th-century English version. - The Guardian
Why We Need To Cultivate Toleration
Toleration involves putting up with something that you would rather not be the case. This doesn’t have to involve moral disapproval: perhaps you just can’t stand your colleague’s taste in music. But toleration is likely to be especially hard when what you experience is moral disapproval. - Psyche
July 7, 2022