Alan Jacobs

here

Austin Kleon:

Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs for our old house. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.

The Bills That Destroyed Urban America — The New Atlantis:

Americans are now three generations into a set of policies that, on the one hand, provide open-ended subsidies for sprawl and, on the other, do little to ameliorate the problems of the urban core — and maybe even aggravate them. Over time, this has come to seem like an unalterable fact of life and the work of the invisible hand of the market. But in this case, the hand is being nudged by Uncle Sam. 

The sequel is here. 

Francis Young:

As we enter Holy Week and Lent draws to a close, I feel a certain relief; not just because I have given something up for Lent that I rather miss (in my case, beer), but because I find that Lent can quite easily become spiritually toxic – at least for me. It can turn into a purely human striving for perfection, of the kind that once became quite dangerous for me; it was, in fact, the scourge of performative spiritual perfection that was probably the single most dangerous thing I was exposed to at university. It was the one thing that nearly took me off the rails and risked turning me into something less than human, and I am thankful every day that I ultimately escaped it. Performative perfection is the besetting sin of people who define themselves, collectively or individually, as self-consciously devout; because once you make it part of your identity, you are socially locked into maintaining devout behaviour – or at least the appearance of devout behaviour, and that’s where the danger starts.