Disappearing Friendships, Self-Conversations, and Better Apples

Happy Benito Juarez Day

Dear Friends,

A friend once described social media as "having a conversation with oneself, but with the dubious expectation that others will join in." That same week I came across the following quote: "Books are the medium through which we commune with the dead." It occurred to me that the blog, as a literary medium to express ideas, sits somewhere in between. Yes, it's mostly a public conversation with oneself, exploring topics that may not interest others. But it is also a way for me to leave a watermark, one that may or may not persist forever in the digital ether.

I grew up reading long-form essays with appreciation and envy. Then the web arrived, inviting us all to become essayists, and contributing to what David Foster Wallace called "Total Noise:”

a rate of consumption that tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that's also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I'm not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization, and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen---at least that's what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different.

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I wrote the words above in 2014 to mark 10 years of blogging.¹ I concluded:

This is the great paradox of writing online. While it helps me learn from others’ ideas, it compels me to add to the Total Noise.

After publishing that post in 2014, I stopped writing online for a few months. But ten years later, here I am, still publishing … my humble contribution to Total Noise.

For this week, here are five articles that recently stood out to me amidst the Total Noise.

The friends who got away by Frank Bruni

I have been re-reading and archiving my online writing from the past twenty years. Every evening, I revisit forgotten memories and lost friends — people I was sure I’d never let go of but have since disappeared. In this piece by Frank Bruni, who turns 60 this year and has been contributing to the New York Times for 25 years, he reflects on his friendships that slowly fizzled and faded.²

My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s by Gwern Branwen

Reading over 20 years of writing, I realized how much the world has changed while my worldview remains mostly the same. Gwern Branwen, who is roughly my age, compiled a prosaic list of how life has improved since the 1990s, for instance:

• Wheeled Luggage: no longer expensive or rare, but cheap & ubiquitous

• Better Apples: the tasteless mealy bitter-skinned so-called “Red Delicious” apples are still dismayingly common, but now one can buy far superior varieties of apples, such as Honeycrisp

• TVs no longer have rabbit ears that require regular adjustment

• Showers: hot water heaters increasingly heat water on demand, and do not run out (while sometimes shocking the bather)

• Movie Theater Seats have become far more comfortable as movie theaters upgraded, now that they are forced to compete with DVDs (and then the Internet & video games)

A Serene Jazz Masterpiece Turns 65 by James Kaplan

My two favorite jazz albums are Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett. Both transport me. I didn’t know the story behind the creation of either album until this past week when I came across Kaplan’s piece in the Atlantic. It made me yearn to give my everything to a creative project with a leader as demanding as Miles Davis. A couple of days after reading that piece, I heard Tim Harford recount the incredible story behind the production of Keith Jarrett’s sublime Köln Concert.

Arguing Ourselves to Death by Jay Caspian Kang

In this first installment of his Fault Lines series for the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang explores how new technologies attracted more surfers … and how more surfers in the water led to poorer behavior among them. In other words, the Internet promised democratization. It worked. And in the process, we became more angry and less kind.³

Linda Mar was always crowded, but it’s become much worse recently, thanks to three separate innovations. The first is the wide-scale production of cheap soft-top surfboards, which are floaty enough to catch pretty much every mushy wave that rolls through. The second is the ubiquity of surf-camera Web sites that live-stream the waves and provide constantly updating, color-coded reports on the conditions. The third is the popularity of short-form surf content on social media, which, like so much of what you find on the Internet, highlights little fights or asks stupid rhetorical questions aimed at inciting as much conflict as possible.

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Today is a holiday in Mexico to commemorate Benito Juárez, Mexico’s first and only indigenous president.⁴

It’s unfortunate that 166 years after his election, Mexico has yet to elect another indigenous president. That could change in June if Xóchitl Gálvez is elected, which seems unlikely. Either way, Mexico will soon have its first female president. And according to the polls, the country will have its first Jewish president. Ilan Stavans, a Jewish Mexican professor, observes in the New York Times how remarkable it is that Claudia Sheinbaum’s ethnic identity has hardly been mentioned .

This is the end of the conversation with myself, my contribution to Total Noise. But if you made it this far, if you read any of the pieces above, if they sparked any realization, I’d love to know.

Happy Benito Juarez Day,

David

1. The excerpt from David Foster Wallace is from 2007, a reminder that we have struggled with information saturation like a flipping, flapping fish out of water for some time now.

2. Bruni is at least twice as old as fellow Substack writer,

Michael Bateman

, who has a less gloomy take on the friends that come and go.

3. Anyone who can tie surfing to Neil Postman is my kind of writer.

4. Juarez grew up an orphan here in Oaxaca, imposed secular liberalism over the violent Catholic church, and then defended against Napoleon III’s French invasion. It’s astonishing to me that the last movie about his life was made in 1939!