Clerestory

I'm Bryan Kam. I'm thinking about complexity and selfhood. Please sign up to my newsletter, follow me on Mastodon, or see more here.

Reading Log

This is a log of articles and books I’m reading, podcasts I’m listening to, conversations I’m having, and movies I’ve seen in reverse…

What I'm up to

The Podcast I’ve recently posted some podcasts: Husserliana with Noah Martin Eternity and Time with Kit Tempest-Walters Writing and AI with…

What I'm thinking about

This page was automatically generated from my Zettelkasten. It uses git to show which notes have changed recently. I would love to talk to…

Meaningful Life

This page contains a transcript of the current question I’m asking. Listen here. How do you balance the necessities of life with pursuing…

Send Audio to Me

Short instructions: record in the highest quality you can (more info below). Then upload here. This page gives information for uploading…

Dependent Origination without any Pali

This essay contains a practical guide to using the moment-by-moment interpretation of a central Buddhist doctrine to end disturbances in…

Heidegger on Logos

A guest post by Zarina Mazitova and an extension to my article On the Origin of Logic, as well as the video lecture I gave on Strands I…

Introductions to Hegel

Today I asked Twitter to recommend introductions to Hegel written in English. Here were the responses in order of length: Richard Kroner…

I received a microgrant

I’m thrilled to announce that Ben Yeoh has awarded me a ThenDoBetter grant to support the project I’m working on. You can read Ben’s writing…

What I learned this month

On 1 November, I began writing. I intended to post something every day on this blog, even if I didn’t promote it much. It was a meant to be…

Perfection: A real nuisance

Yesterday I got distracted by Schopenhauer’s account of how logic. And we will have to come back to Logos, the etymological root of logic…

Perfection of Logic

This continues directly on from yesterday’s post on Schopenhauer. Today I’ll finish Schopenhauer’s line of reasoning about the perfection of…

On the Origin of Logic

How the rules of logic were inferred from conversation.

The Aphoristic Form

Where does morality come from? Some might resort immediately to human nature, but this, to me, is tantamount to saying that it has no origin…

Indian Philosophy

Part 15 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

Surendranath Dasgupta

Part 14 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

Sinitic Syncretism

Part 13 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

Breadcrumbs

In my recent writing (e.g. on “the West”) I have promised to return to several points. I’m creating this page to track some of those things…

More Perfection

Continuing the Ethics (1678) where we left off yesterday, Spinoza makes his opposition to teleology even more explicit. For Spinoza, God is…

On Perfection

On the triple mistake in the concept of perfection.

The Accidental Spinozist

On finding Spinoza's Ethics in my bag.

How diverse is Greek philosophy?

Part 12 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

Homogenizing Purges

Part 11 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

The Nature of Light

Part 10 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

Vision and Abstraction

I’m taking a break today from thinking about homogenisation of history and of science. Today I’m thinking about vision, and how it relates…

The Winners Write the Textbooks

The historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), whom I recently introduced, argues that a tell-tale sign of a mature science is the…

Oak and Stone

Part 9 of a series on Whether There Was a West. Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet thought to have been active sometime between 750 and 65…

How the West Was Spun

Part 8 of a series on Whether There Was a West. In this post I begin my response to Myth of the Month 8: “The West” (2019), a special…

The Myth of the West VII

Part 7 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

The Myth of the West VI

Part 6 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

The Myth of the West V

Part 5 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

The Myth of the West IV

Part 4 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

The Myth of the West III

Part 3 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

The Myth of the West II

Part 2 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

The Myth of the West I

Part 1 of a systematic destruction of the concept of the West.

On Whether There Was a West

This series will look at the concept of “the West,” and whether it is coherent or useful. The Myth of the West, Part I The Myth of the West…

Thomas Kuhn

On how I came to write my enormous thread on Thomas Kuhn, as well as related thinking.

On knowing, of and about

To know something, to know about something, and to know of something are not the same.

On tracing things back to their sources

The Ancient Athenians are often closer to the surface than I thought.

Zettelkasten again

On consciously choosing what to remember.

On the Syntax of Feelings

As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “feeling is first,” after the famous opening of an E. E. Cummings poem from 1926: since feeling is…

An Audio Experiment

I’ve started a podcast, which, like this blog, is called Clerestory. The initial structure is that I speak for 20-30 minutes about topics…

The Muses

In recent weeks it has occurred to me that I know next to nothing about the muses. Their enumeration — nine by most counts (also known as an…

Epicurus and Happiness

Today I’m thinking about Epicurus’ view of happiness. This section comes directly between the two passages on the future (“We must remember…

Epicurus and Death

Epicurus is sometimes seen as anti-Stoic. Certainly Epictetus and other Stoics seem to have reviled him, as I wrote yesterday. Epicurus was…

Epicurus

Epicurus has had a tough time of it since he wrote and taught (~341–270 BCE). It’s a good thing he was level-headed about posterity: We must…

Freedom

A few years ago, at my discussion group, we read Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958): PDF of the Essay Two Concepts of…

Heritability of variability

Yesterday I wrote about Darwin’s foreshadowing of r/K selection theory. Today I’ll argue that The Origin of Species also predicts punctuated…

Darwin and r/K selection

Today I’m thinking about Darwin and r/K selection theory. Wikipedia had led me to believe that this was an idea of Robert MacArthur and E. O…

Five-Day Fast

Last week, from Monday 2 November to Friday 6 November 2020, I did a self-run writing retreat at home, during which I also fasted. For those…

Oxygenic Photosynthesis

In the beginning, there was anoxygenic photosynthesis. OK, not in the beginning beginning, but at least before oxygenic photosynthesis…

Revolutions break bottlenecks

Part of a series on revolutions. On this page we define bottlenecks and think about some revolutions that break them. Definition What is a…

The Fertile Crescent

Part of a series on revolutions. Here I assert that abundance is a condition for step changes in complexity using the example of the Fertile…

Revolutions occur in conditions of abundance

Part of a series on revolutions. What constitutes abundance? More influx than efflux is one way of seeing it. Of what? is a good question…

Characteristics of Revolutions

Part of a series on revolutions. On this page I’ll keep a list of observations I’ve made about revolutions, as defined here. This represents…

Revolutions, Step Changes, Paradigm Shifts

Part of a series on revolutions. You say you want a revolution? Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it’s…

Revolutionary Disclaimer

This is a disclaimer which applies to the series I’m doing on revolutions. First, I’d like to reserve the right to be wrong in the writing…

On Revolutions

Today I want to begin a discussion of the big, exciting events in history writ large — by which I mean nothing less than the sum total of…

The Jakarta Method

I recently finished The Jakarta Method, a new book about the dynamics of the Cold War by Vincent Bevins. Its subtitle, Washington’s…

Cultivation of the Soul

Part of a series on culture. In 45 BC, when Cicero was 61, his daughter Tullia died shortly after she gave birth. “I have lost the one thing…

Paper Disintegrates

Part of a series on culture. Nicholas Ostler, in 2005, wrote the impressively ambitious Empires of the Word, and in it sought to trace…

Does art evolve?

Part of a series on culture. Let’s start with the oldest book on my bookshelf that talks about origins of cultural-type things. Aristotle…

On Culture

Lately I’ve been thinking about culture in the broadest of all possible senses, including human behaviour, language, knowledge, beliefs, art…

Walking the Planck

Planck’s principle is bleak. It says that scientists rarely change their minds. Instead, they die, and younger scientists, brought up with…

Where to Start

As there are now a few hundred posts on this site I thought I’d provide some entry points to my writing. Note-taking: I wrote a post on a…

Cycles of youth

The first book that I think of when I think about youth is not the perhaps most obvious — namely Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (which…

On Juvenescence

Neoteny, or juvenilization, is the delaying or slowing of the development of an animal. It is, at a cellular or physiological level, the act…

Serotonin and Fasting

This is a continuation of the discussion of serotonin and dopamine begun on this page. I want to talk about fasting. I’m fascinated by the…

Serotonin and Learning

I’m still thinking about the creative/editorial cycles involved in writing and in filters more generally. Kristijan Ivancic pointed out that…

Balance in writing

This is just a short post about the balancing act or filter which writers have been advised to employ. Dorothea Brande, in Becoming a Writer…

On Filters

The reason I wrote about the relationship of “critics” or an “engaged audience” to the avant-garde is that I’m interested in how they act as…

Connoisseurship

Yesterday I speculated about the critics of the avant-garde, saying that they are connoisseurs, which literally means “knowers.” The word…

The Avant-garde

In artistic movements, the pattern of ambition is clear enough: the avant-garde literally advances art. Wikipedia notes that the avant-garde…

Ambition

I argued yesterday that what interests us straddles the boundary of what we know and what we don’t. Today I’m thinking about how this area…

Novelty and Safety

We live on a boundary between novelty and safety. This is a balancing act between order and disorder of exactly the same nature in which…

What Is of Interest

Everything interesting exists at a phase transition between order and disorder. I mean that literally. If you say that something is…

Entropy

Entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, uncertainty, or even surprise. If you have shied away from entropy in the past, you’re…

Order and disorder

Matter must approach a phase transition in one direction or the other. Either ice is melting into water, or water is freezing into ice. The…

Phase Transitions

A phase transition describes a transition between different states of matter. You may remember this from high school chemistry. As…

The Axial Age

Carl Sagan, in Cosmos (1983), introduced me to the notion of the Axial Age, a period of “pivoting” in human history: The sixth century B.C…

Gaia House Retreat

November 10, 2020: You may wish to read about my more recent retreat. Last week I did a five-day home meditation retreat in the Sŏn (Korean…

Space & Originality

So lacking am I in originality that I set out to write against it today, and in the process found out that I had already done so, and…

Trillions dead for one to live

I was reading about Welwitschia this week, a strange plant found in Namibia and Angola. Its strap-like leaves grow slowly but continuously…

You can't know in advance

In Foreknowledge I proposed that you can’t know in advance what you’ll learn before you set out. If you could, you wouldn’t need to learn it…

Writing as Cooking

Today I’ve been thinking about writing as cooking. If we don’t quite control the output, then at least we control the initial conditions…

Output

If we cannot control much of what we take in, then at least, surely, we can control what we put out? We control what we say and write, don’t…

Foreknowledge

There is a further problem, though, with inputs, and that is that you do not and really cannot control inputs either. You set out to read a…

Inputs

If method matters more than we commonly think with respect to output, then what of input? If how you do a thing matters as much as what you…

Infinite Knowledge

On process vs. outcome, and on whether there is any end to the accumulation of knowledge.

News

I’ve started a newsletter, so please sign up to get news about the novel I’m writing and the thinking going on behind the scenes. Much has…

Dry November: Day 30

Final evening, having finished the re-read of the novel, which was painful in places, in good and bad ways. There is a staggering amount of…

Dry November: Day 29

And death shall have no dominion. A productive day, 320 pages read out of 413, and everything else more-or-less done. A friend’s raucous…

Dry November: Day 28

An exceptional day, in several ways, at the Royal Geographical Society. I haven’t the time to say all I need to say, so I’ll leave you a…

Dry November: Day 27

Nearly finished with my month of not drinking, but like last year not much looking forward to diminution by drink. The only upside I can see…

Dry November: Day 26

In an unexpected turn of events I’m going to How to Change the World on Thursday. Will post about that on Friday. Today I began, after a…

Dry November: Day 25

Learned a lot about power laws and criticality today. Most interesting was this idea that for communication to occur requires both…

Dry November: Day 24

I failed yesterday, or rather through rationalisation and deliberation decided to have some drinks at a pub, at a party. It was good to see…

Dry November: Day 23

Today a discussion of pleasure ex negativo, of whether pleasure can be thought of as absence of pain. Seems plausible, though…

Dry November: Day 22

Today thinking about Shakespeare’s Sonnet XCIV, which somehow reminds me of the chimp/bonobo divide. I’ve also been discussing Sonnet CXXIX…

Dry November: Day 21

Another great day. Tonight I’m thinking about whether connectionism might be more true of “System 1” and computationalism might be more true…

Dry November: Day 20

Another day, another lime and soda in the pub, discussing the admin aspects of publishing, and other things literary. Otherwise I’ve been…

Dry November: Day 19

And now the days are flying by. Good night, discussing Williams’ Stand out of Our Light with a larger group than usual. He’s made me curious…

Dry November: Day 18

The paperback edition of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind came out a few months ago. For a little while now I’ve been lugging around…

Dry November: Day 17

An extremely busy weekend. Lots of reading and writing. Dinner at Barrafina, houseparty last night, café, cocktail bar, and dinner today…

Dry November: Day 16

Today I’ve been thinking through podcasts I’ve heard recently, Douglas Rushkoff and others, and catching up on comms. And sending out…

Dry November: Day 15

Yesterday there was a fire in my building, which I forgot to mention. There were, apparently, six fire engines downstairs, and I could smell…

Dry November: Day 14

I spent some of today reading Stand out of our Light, a book about digital distractions which is available here for free here, which is for…

Dry November: Day 13

Lovely dinner tonight with a friend, discussing many of the topics that have been on my mind lately: enactivism, learning, writing, note…

Dry November: Day 12

Another night in a pub on the lime and soda, seeing a few friends I’ve not seen in some time. Everyone is coming and going, leaving London…

Dry November: Day 11

Dry in the pub tonight at Darkly as we discussed the ideas of Andy Clark — a really interesting discussion. It began with where to draw the…

Dry November: Day 10

Officially, I only made it nine days in. Yesterday I toasted a friend’s birthday with sherry, and had another drink later on. But I avoided…

Dry November: Day 9

On the whole it’s been a good week. Yesterday I finished Barney Norris’ Turning for Home which I thought was excellent. It’s quite moving…

Zettelkasten!

It’s been a month since I wrote about the adoption of a strange and intense note-taking system, so I thought I’d give an update about how it…

Dry November: Day 8

This week I listened to a podcast that James Clear and Cal Newport did together, on concentration and habit formation. Much of it was about…

Dry November: Day 7

After a week without alcohol, I feel healthier and more content, more intellectually engaged. But as I said the other day I feel less social…

Dry November: Day 6

Today I’m thinking about a friend’s article on resourcefulness, which is great and I recommend reading it. In it, he argues that there are…

Dry November: Day 5

I’m considering whether my life and mind have contracted from stretches of solitude. All I do is read and write these days, fast and…

Dry November: Day 4

The fog may finally be lifting on my mind. A good day, mostly spent reading, with a bit of writing as well. Tonight heard Richard Beswick of…

Dry November: Day 3

Last night, the Arts Club, discussing Kaliningrad, the evacuation of East Prussia, the history of horror films, and more divisive topics. A…

Dry November: Day 2

This morning, though I’ve awoken late, I’m writing this post, then I’ll do some handwriting, then I’ll go to a writing critique group in…

Dry November: Day 1

This year I am (if not fresh) than at least not hanging. It’s rainy and grey. Last night I was reading Antifragile, about which I have mixed…

Fiction ratio

Part 6 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview. Or, how much fiction does a…

Fiction and trauma

Part 5 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview. The next claim, by Chad…

Fiction and morality

Part 4 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview. Wiblin says: I think people…

Does fiction improve understanding?

Part 3 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview. The World Implicit too in…

What is fiction?

Part 2 in a series on fiction. See this post for an introduction to the podcast I’m discussing and an overview. Scope of discussion The…

In Defence of Fiction

Yesterday I listened to an episode of the Mission Daily Podcast from May 2019. In it, Chad Grills interviews Rob Wiblin of 80,000 Hours. The…

Posting Daily

I’ve let my daily posting lapse, in part due to adopting the new note-taking system. It might sound strange, but the system has been mind…

Originality

Why is originality so highly valued? What does it mean to be original? If you’ve had a great idea, wouldn’t you want it to be related to a…

Zettelkästen?

Not a great word, is it? Neither is its most typical English translation: “slip-box.” In German, a “Zettelkasten” (plural Zettelkästen) is a…

Systems

Like many nerds I’ve used many productivity systems, and naturally it all started with Getting Things Done. David Allen promised to provide…

Fame

Last night, in a fit of insomnia, I found myself reading the 80,000 Hours Guide, which is an excellent resource for thinking about what to…

Feelings

Lately I have been thinking through Derek Sivers’ idea (well worth reading) that you ought to write things down because it’s hard to…

Relaxed Beliefs under Psychedelics

Robin Carhart-Harris, whom you might know from Michael Pollan’s book, may have done it again. In 2014 he wrote the insanely insightful…

Observation

I have a theory that it is in the act of observation that philosophy, science, and literature converge. They all require prolonged, repeated…

Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence

I recently learned about the distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence. The former sounds something like induction, thinking…

They Shall Not Grow Old

On the plane home I watched They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s documentary about World War I. Though the title was vaguely familiar…

Home

I’m ready for home, however humble. My siblings and I sang a song from childhood this weekend, a song itself about what is lost in childhood…

Walking

In New York we’ve walked a lot: 7.34 miles, 8.03 miles, 10.12 miles, 11.43 miles. Not as much as we did on the Camino of course, and less…

Visions

I dream more under certain conditions. When I travel, when I sleep in, when it’s warm, my dreams seem to become more monumental. This…

Density

We’re still trying to work out what it is that separates the feeling of New York from cities like London, Paris, Chicago, Berlin. The…

New York

New York has all the energy I remember, but it’s hard to express exactly what this is, or how it’s perceived. There’s a hum throughout the…

Priorities

As I write this I’m on a flight to New York to see family, in particular my brother on his birthday. On the flight I listened to several…

Too Articulate

Not that I “talk too wise”, but that I write too much, and in too many places. I’ve just finished writing about Walter Kempowski’s All for…

Inarticulate

I’m uncharacteristically inarticulate today, and not my usual inexhaustible self. I’m writing about Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing, and…

Silence

The other day I wrote about noise. But in addition to the roar of the ever-louder city, the sound of silence has been growing stronger for…

Sedated

Does social vitality have a limit? Does vivacity strengthen, like a muscle, or is energy for socialising a finite resource? I’ve never liked…

Blood

As I said yesterday, I often wear earplugs or other hearing protection as I go about my daily business. I often leave them in during…

Clamour, Cacophony

Silence is hard to come by in Central London. When I’m reading or writing, I need at a minimum earplugs, if not the kind of over-the-ear…

A Meditation on Absence

Lately, as I’ve experimented more with meditation, I’ve begun doing a meditation on self-absence. This is not quite self-enquiry, which…

Chess and Stress

Apparently chess grandmasters are known to lose weight while playing chess. The sheer mental effort can burn 6,000 calories per day. I’ve…

Productivity

Today I’ve been thinking about an article my friend Vincent wrote a few years ago, called Productivity is Dangerous. I largely agree with…

Missed

I missed a day. Or rather, I wrote a post but it got too long, and I decided I needed to spend more time thinking it through. Tonight at…

Signals

Recently I have been thinking about whether or not it is helpful to think of brains in terms of signal processing. In short, the question is…

Inexhaustible

Lately I’ve been thinking about what the upper limit might be for writing, in terms of words written per day. A fast typist can type 10…

Types of Meditation

After I learned to concentrate, for several months I only did concentration meditation. It’s blissful and gives blessed relief from the…

Frequency

Last year I posted here daily for a month. It was a good experience. Seth Godin advises everyone to blog every day. Since I’m on a break…

On Feedback

Submission, or The Silence In the past few months, I’ve written my first fiction. In the past few weeks, I’ve let people read it for the…

I Grant You Ample Leave

I’m ahead of schedule on the novel, but today I did not hit my wordcount in the six hours I wrote. Here’s my progress so far. Since I have…

The Rewrite

New beginnings This week I’ve begun rewriting my manuscript. Although I’m six months into writing this novel, and though I wrote a zero…

It Rains on Our Love

This week I watched Bergman’s It Rains on Our Love (1946). It’s a twisting tale of a lowly, desperate pair who meet in a train station and…

Everything Static

If you're reading this, you're on my new blog...

GatsbyJS

Today I thought I’d try to learn GatsbyJS and see if I could turn this blog into a static site. I got Gatsby working in Docker, then tried…

Interstice

Today I’m thinking about the need for novelty and the need for security, which seem in humans in constant tension. I saw a literary agent…

On Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is an admirable attempt to define the good life. It is empirical and insightful, and seeks to answer…

Keeping Everything Moving, Everything Static

As a brief update I’m back from the Balkans, where I saw unseasonably touristy Croatia, snowy Montenegro, and beautiful Bosnia and…

A Passing Feeling

Let this be a placeholder for future thoughts on the topic of events and their contents, their planning, execution, and aftermath. What I…

A thoughtless week

I failed either to edit or to write as much as I would have liked this week, though I watched several films, read Vikram Seth’s The Golden…

Arizona

I’m writing from a hotel in Desert Ridge, Phoenix, AZ. I flew here on Friday to surprise my parents; I’m flying back to London today. I have…

A fond farewell to freedom

Nothing to say in particular this week. I’m dreading editing, even though every time I succeed in starting, I enter the flow state readily…

On Marriage

Today I “gave notice” of marriage, which in the UK requires a period of publicity, during which the public can raise legal objections. The…

On Fear

I am not a fearful person. Last year, I was ill enough that I thought I would die; I made my peace with it. This experience was useful. It…

36 Questions

Tonight a friend arranged a conversation dinner in which people were paired up (with friends of friends) to try the 36 Questions that Lead…

Goals for 2019

In a bit of holiday downtime, I’m planning what I’d like to do in 2019. Beeminder is having a New Year’s Resolution Survivor competition…

On choice

Lately I’ve been thinking about free will. This is in part thanks to Sam Harris, who has been examining the topic in his new Waking Up app…

On Getting Good

This weekend I finished Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Much of it rings true for me. Although it’s intended to motivate and to…

On Improvement

I recently read Derek Sivers’ Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur. I can’t remember how I came across it, but the…

On Whether to Write

Last night we had our second meeting of the new discussions I’m holding, called Through a Glass Darkly. It went exceedingly well; I wrote at…

Dry November: Day 30

My final hours of sobriety; our revels now are starting. Tonight I’ve got a friend’s birthday followed by a Christmas party, and I fully…

Dry November: Day 29

On my penultimate dry day, I’m writing in an empty pub on Tottenham Court Road, where the staff knows me, as I used to work nearby. I’m in a…

Dry November: Day 28

Let me explain. This morning I attended a session on starting a business, kindly provided by St. Luke’s Community Centre. These sessions…

Dry November: Day 27

Tonight was my monthly book club. The discussion was on Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, which I enjoyed. The book takes a number of unexpected…

Dry November: Day 26

It’s late so I’ll not say much tonight. It was the first meeting of the Monday evening face-to-face intellectual conversations to which I’ve…

Dry November: Day 25

Yesterday evening, during an invigorating and exhilarating exploration of Kew Gardens with a dozen of London’s best and brightest, after…

Dry November: Day 24

A major realisation I’ve had this month, mentioned in passing in previous posts, is that even without beer, I adore pubs. This should not…

Dry November: Day 23

A week left of November and it’s been going well. I’ve done some interviews this week, with the cycles of anxiety, relief, and regret that…

Dry November: Day 22

I’m whelmed. Both over- and under-, the former by a slew of nascent endeavours, the latter by their fruit and lack thereof, by the talk…

Dry November: Day 21

On Tuesday I saw Jonathan Haidt speak at intelligence². Emily Maitlis moderated the discussion with Kehinde Andrews, Eleanor Penny, and…

Dry November: Day 20

Two-thirds of the way through the month. I spent the past three hours in a pub, conveniently one of the closest to my house, for an…

Dry November: Day 19

Tonight I saw Jonathan Haidt speak at intelligence². Although I quite liked the book he wrote with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the…

Dry November: Day 18

Our spiritual rapport pervaded the party, to support the commencement of a third, our host of honour. His citizenship was the culmination of…

Dry November: Day 17

I’m in the BFI bar, surrounded by booze. A family near me, or rather families, a gaggle, had gotten four pints for the price of two due to…

Dry November: Day 16

I’ve also begun Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word, which I’ve been meaning to read for years. It begins with an account of the dramatic…

Dry November: Day 15

Halfway there. It’s been a good few weeks and productive, though what to do next with my life is not yet clear. But one day at a time. Today…

Dry November: Day 14

After fourteen days dry, I’m feeling suspiciously fantastic. It would be churlish not to give credit to my sobriety, though my diet and…

Dry November: Day 13

Last night, after a day at the British Library, a doctor’s appointment, and a catch-up meal with a friend, I took two buses home. I could…

Dry November: Day 12

On Thursday night I went to a contemporary dance performance called MK Ultra at the Southbank Centre. Since then I’ve learned that this is…

Dry November: Day 11

After brunch we discussed the crisis of meaning in work, one recently mentioned in the Harvard Business Review, whose survey found that 9…

Dry November: Day 10

Yesterday, I went to a screening of a pretty remarkable documentary called General Magic. It premiered at Tribeca in July, and has not yet…

Dry November: Day 9

Another is that reflection involves the act of recollection, and memory itself seems to have an elegiac effect on my writing. It is not that…

Dry November: Day 8

I awoke today with a song from a decade-old album stuck in my head. A noteworthy album, for me at least, by Of Montreal, and memorably…

Dry November: Day 7

I dreamt I had a drink. I don’t mean that I dreamt of drinking; in the dream, it had been inadvertent, had already happened. In my fitful…

Dry November: Day 6

Last night I saw a dear friend from my teenage years, and her mother whom I had not seen since then. They had finished a ten day cruise…

Dry November: Day 5

Somewhere it is said that man cannot exist without sleep for more than a stated number of hours. Quite wrong! I had been convinced that…

Dry November: Day 4

After waking late yesterday, I met the friend with whom I am undertaking Dry November. Because we’d not seen each other for ages, the…

Dry November: Day 3

Yesterday I took the easy way out. I don’t mean that I drank, for I’ve done several things to ensure that this way would be hard, telling…

Dry November: Day 2

Yesterday was the first real challenge, in a way. It came down to the social question, maybe one more unavoidable in London than in other…

Dry November: Day 1

A first stab at conversion