9.6, You can feel it all over
Be one of the things that life just won't quit
Hello friends,
After the heatwave that struck the East Coast (and much of the country), it finally feels like we can begin a proper summer. I hope you’re doing well. I truly do.
Summer has a soundtrack.
Not the one blaring from someone else’s speaker at the pool, or echoing through the grocery store, but the quieter one that finds its way into your memories.
A song you played on repeat during a road trip. The bassline that made dinner feel like a dance. The beat that had you losing it on the club floor.
This season, I’m sharing a new little series I’m calling Summer Sounds: a warm-weather mixtape made for slow afternoons, open windows, barefoot breakfasts, and golden-hour cleanup sessions.
Each week will have a theme. Each one is meant to bring a little rhythm to your everyday.
Week 1 is for the ones we live with, and live for.
The Family Jam is a feel-good mix of 1970s funk, soul, and groove. It’s made for kitchen dance parties, backyard meals, and those rituals that turn a house into a home.
It’s joyful, generous music. So put it on. Let it play. And let summer begin.
🎧 Listen here: Summer Sounds – Week 1: The Family Jam
Got a go-to family jam of your own? Reply or leave a comment. It doesn’t have to be old-school or on-theme. Just real. I’d love to include a few listener picks in next week’s mix.
Anyways, on with the links.
The Links:
Economist Steven Levitt’s rule for making tough life decisions:
“If the choice is between action and inaction, and you’re genuinely unsure about what to do, choose action”
and on loss aversion:
“Status quo bias is predicated on our hesitation to make a change unless we’re sure that the benefits outweigh the risks. We’re more scared of what we might lose than we are excited about what we might gain
How to Be Truly Free: Lessons From a Philosopher President
"You’re free when you escape the law of necessity — when you spend the time of your life on what you desire. If your needs multiply, you spend your life covering those needs. Humans can create infinite needs. The market dominates us, and it robs us of our lives...There is only one life and it ends. You have to give meaning to it. Fight for happiness, not just for wealth."
Read: I’m standing on the train (short story)
Why Do We Call Our Planet “Earth" (when all the other planets in our solar system are named after gods and goddesses)?
What I've Been Writing
Book Notes: The Iliad, by Homer (tr. Emily Wilson)
The Iliad does not tell the story most people think it does. There is no Trojan Horse. No fall of Troy. No death of Achilles.
Instead, the poem opens in medias res. It begins in the ninth year of a deadlocked war and ends with a funeral. The great city still stands. The so-called heroes are exhausted, mutinous, starving, and furious with one another. That is where Homer starts.
On the surface, this is a story about warriors. But The Iliad isn’t truly about war. It’s about ego: what happens when individual identity collides with collective systems. It’s about authorship: who gets to write history, who matters when the dust clears, and what it costs to be irreplaceable. It’s about legacy and loss, and the awful math of glory.
The people in The Iliad are brutal, impulsive, magnificent, and deeply flawed. They are leaders who can’t lead, gods who can’t love, heroes who can’t stop themselves. And they are, for all their armor and epic speeches, alarmingly familiar.
This poem is strange. Long passages are repetitive, ritualistic, or technical. Heroes cry often. Gods cheat constantly. No one learns anything in a modern sense. And yet, the Iliad burns with something that refuses to die. It speaks directly to anyone who has ever built something important and then watched others take the credit. Anyone who has tried to lead, or tried to follow, and been betrayed by both. Anyone who has lost a friend and then lost themselves.
You can read the rest of my notes on The Iliad on my website. Let me know what you think.
In Quotes...
We are here to love. There is no other reason for existence.
—Richard Rudd