Tips for surviving the now and seeing the big picture:

An article about “one of the oldest political frontiers in the world,” the foothills of the Zagros mountains.  For five thousand years the border separating present-day Iraq and present-day Iran has been here.  There’s even a new “discovery” of a wall there—the Gawri Chen wall—though presumably for the people living there, it was no discovery at all.  But ironically, the article notes, “This hard delineation is the exact opposite of the cultural situation of the region in this period.”  In other words, the border is real, and also a delusion.  The article is behind its own kind of border too—an academic publisher paywall.  I hope you can find some way to read it. 

Everyone should buy books from bookshops.  This article has a list of ways to do just that.

And a list of good movies to watch!  

Is this not still the best essay ever written on a baseball game, or on baseball?  If you know of a better one, let me know.  “Gods do not answer letters.”  John Updike on Ted Williams’s last game.

Tips from polar explorers about surviving months in isolation.  

In praise of a normal, boring country:

…ac sic felicioribus rebus humanis omnia regna parva essent concordi vicinitate laetantia et ita essent in mundo regna plurima gentium, ut sunt in urbe domus plurimae civium.

…and human affairs would thus be happier, were all kingdoms small, and rejoicing in neighborly concord, and therefore there would be in the world many realms of people, as there are many houses in a city.  (Augustine, civ.Dei 4.15)

You can almost hear Augustine say: Coulda, woulda, shoulda.  (Also, the idea of “boring” being good is one I remember from Adam Michnik’s farewell to politics speech in ’90 or ’91, when he became a publisher.)  (Also the "normal, boring country" line was actually a crack by the departing president, Lennart Meri, against the incoming president, and he said it in 2001, not 1997, as the article says.)

A small excerpt of a story of James Madison’s black family.  After the Jefferson-Hemings story was confirmed, reality seems to get harder and harder to deny for those of us who want to imagine that, if there was not equality, at least an unbreachable barrier went two-ways in race relations.  But the barrier has always only served the white.  What we are learning about our country is painful or embarassing or shocking for some of us, utterly unsurprising for others of us, and it will finally lead I think to a possibly much more sane future.

Stay safe everyone.  Today feels a little better than yesterday.  And yesterday felt better than the day before.  Let's keep that momentum going.