The cover image at another site I run is an image of Ada bakery door. There's a promise of bread baked daily. I wish I did. This today from Lisa Donovan at The New York Times—

It brought me back to wondering why bakers are the way they are. There is a quietness, and a kindness, to their lives that veers into almost monastic behavior. Perhaps it is simply the ancientness of being a fire maker — tending a hearth really brings something out in a person. I’ve been working in restaurants since I was 15, and one thing I keep learning over and over is that some of the smartest, deepest and most earnest people in our world are bakers.

It raises other questions for me: What does baking require of us? It requires patience, thoughtfulness, an eye to your surroundings, otherwise known as simply paying attention and responding accordingly. Maybe most important, it calls to light a common refusal to let the world shift your perspective, to hold true to a thing you believe to be true in all the small movements and steps and to return to them again and again.

There is a saying that goes something like: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” I think of that a lot when I dig into what I find so remarkable about bakers. To dedicate your life to such an ancient practice, one that is grown from such ritual and devotion, well, it feels like a kind of spiritual calling to me. And every time I take a bite of Ruan’s brioche, I find myself steeped in belief.

And little by little I began to wake up to the fact that I am, like everyone else in the academic humanities, really just scraping by in a ghost-career, a vestige of an older order that no one has yet worked up the courage to put out of its misery, but that really cannot continue to fulfill its purported function of shaping well-rounded citizens, when it is so fully subordinated to the primary function of the 21st-century university, which is, namely, fundraising.

Justin Smith-Ruiu via Alan Jacobs

At his newsletter Frank Bruni passes on a pretty good metaphor for the feeling of dread generated by the approaching election.

In The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel wrote: “As we lurch closer to Election Day, it’s easy to feel as if we’ve all entered the Great Clenching — a national moment of assuming the crash-landing position and bracing for impact.” (Gwen Toole, Pensacola Fla.)

Michael Chabon:

I find the continuing mission of Voyager 1 so moving, for the way its name alone evokes a time of promise, for the thought of that tiny contraption way out there in the vastness at the edge of the heliosphere  —  perhaps the farthest any human-made thing may ever travel  —  a bit battered, swiftly aging, still doing the work it was purposed to do. 

I feel exactly the same way, but also claim a self-description: I too am "a bit battered, swiftly aging, still doing the work [I] was purposed to do." 

Jacqueline Gerber's movie quiz on WCLV this morning focused on War and Peace. introductory remarks cited an Associated Press article noting that many students are no longer asked to read full-length novels:

In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world. 

The National Council of Teachers of English acknowledged the shift in a 2022 statement on media education, saying: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”