Neil . Pasricha

October 24, 2025

Neil Pasricha's Monthly Book Club - October 2025

Neil . Pasricha

October 24, 2025

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Hey everyone,

The Blue Jays are in the World Series!

I'm in Cape Cod and have a talk here in a couple hours before racing home to catch Game 2. When I'm traveling I listen to the games on the free stream from Toronto AM radio The Fan 590 w/ Ben and Chris which I recommend. I love baseball on the radio.

I was 13 when the Blue Jays last made the World Series and I’m 46 today … so it’s been a while.

Baseball fever up here right now!

Let's get to the books...

Neil

1. The Kid’s World Almanac of Baseball by Thomas G. Aylesworth (1927—1995). Introduction by Orel Hershiser (b.1958). “Hey Orel,” Tommy Aylesworth said to the longtime Los Angeles Dodgers ace over a beer one night. “What say you write the Intro and then we throw you and Straw on the cover pasted over the Babe?” Now, I'm not saying that happened, but I pictured something like that sitting in the passenger seat of our Chevrolet Cavalier on the way home from Coles Bookstore in the Five Points Mall in Oshawa, Ontario in 1990. Shoutout to mall bookstores! (QT is a big fan, too!)

I spent so many nights paging through its endless pages of stats, trivia, quotes, lore, and stories. And I loved Orel Hershiser’s Introduction! He was absolutely one of the biggest players in the game at the time after going 22-9 in 1988 with a still-existing record-setting 59 consecutive scoreless innings which came via (get this!) six ... complete game ... shutouts ... in a row ... in August and September. Wild. Those games thrust the Tommy Lasorda-led team to the World Series where with two outs in the bottom of the ninth of Game 1 you may remember the former Linebacker with two very wobbly knees Kirk Gibson steps up to the plate and after a dramatic at-bat worked up into a 3-2 count he launches a game-winning pinch-hit 2-run homer to win the game off the Dennis Eckersley and the heavily favored A's. It's seriously worth clicking the long, blue link in the last sentence and just watching the moment. Now, we still, I think, call that the third most famous World Series homer of all time after Joe Carter in 1993 and Bill Mazeroski in 1960—both World Series winning walk-offs. Anyway, I could keep going. You could keep going. We could keep going. That's baseball. One of those sports where the longer you look the more you see. This is the book that helped me see it. It's an Almanac! In the old sense of almanac—one person's voice, personality, and idiosyncrasies, all rolled up into their own grand compendium of everything. It's a wonderful book. And it opens right away by challenging us! Who invented baseball? Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, right? No! 5000 years ago Egyptians were using swinging bats to promote crop fertility and balls were added as a way to worship the sun. Crop fertility and sun worship!? No wonder many of us feel baseball in our core. Then those conquering Moors in eighth century A.D. brought the evolving game to Europe and in the 1700s the Brits—the Brits!—turned it into “rounders.” In fact the first time “Base ball” was ever in print was 1744 in the world’s first picture book by British publisher John Newbery (of Newbery Medal fame!) who described it like this:

How cool would it be if they still played in tights and tails like that? Now, of course, some stuff is out of date. Page 29 says “Most Home Runs in a Single Season” is held by Roger Maris (61, which is now #8) and “Most Career Stolen Bases” is held by Lou Brock (938, which is now #2). But many stats stand the test of time like Cy Young’s 511 wins or (indeed) Orel’s 59 straight scoreless innings. I love the arcane stuff like “Best Relief Appearance” which tells the story of Ernie Shore relieving Babe Ruth in the first inning of a 1917 Red Sox game after the Babe let up a hit to one guy. Then that guy was caught stealing and Shore retired the next 26 in a row! Or how about “The Language of Baseball” section which tells us how the word “bullpen” came from the famous Bull Durham tobacco ads painted on outfield walls, how “farm teams” are called that because minor league teams were always be in small farming communities, and how “southpaw” for lefty pitchers comes from the fact that ballparks were built with home plate on the west so hitters didn’t have to glare into the setting afternoon sun … hence a pitcher’s left arm was facing south as he stood facing the hitter. From the opening dedication (“…to Wrigley Field before the lights were installed.”) to the final “Science” section (“What is the purpose of a slide?”, “How does a curve ball work?”) this book expands and deepens a love for the game. The book is long out of print but I notice there are still a couple handfuls of copies left (as of this writing) on AbeBooks, ThriftBooks, eBay, and (perhaps) Amazon.

2. The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Read this book because it is good, but more importantly, it is short. My copy is 127 pages, 11 point font, 1-inch margins, 1.5 spacing. Fast read! A perfect book to add to our Great Books Under 150 Pages list and help us with our 2 pages a night challenge. I first read it five or six years ago on the suggestion of Jonathan Fields (Goodlife Project), who picked it as one of his 3 most formative books along with ‘Mindset’ by Carol Dweck (03/18) and ‘When Breath Becomes Air’ by Paul Kalanithi. This month I reread it out loud to my 11-year old before bed. It hit different this time. I could feel my son developing a stronger relationship with pacing as his curiosity slowly and slowly piqued. I felt the book helped me slow down my algorithm-addled daytime brain before bed, too. More than a few times my kid nudged me because I had just stopped reading, staring at the book, my eyes fully open, fast asleep. Here it is from the library—or you can get it at The Strand (or your local indie!), Libro, Indigo, B&N, Audible, or Amazon.

3. The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life by Morgan Housel (b.1988). You know that scene in ‘Stand By Me’ with Lardass at the pie contest?

I was Lardass reading this book. I was barely breathing! It was so good. I couldn’t stop. Once in a while I’d pop up for air—

—and when I did my face was covered in words. I’d just highlighted most of the last few pages, yet again. By the end of this book I had five pages of notes written all through the inside jacket and title and copyright pages, burned through a highlighter, and was left with so many questions, wonderful lines, provocative quotes, and endless tunnels I now want to dig into separately. Morgan Housel is some kind of young Warren Buffet. “He lives in the same house in Omaha,” they always said of Warren. “He lives in the same house in Seattle,” I feel like they’re going to say about this guy. I notice he even has the same kind of 1-page website as Berkshire Hathaway. In the opening pages Morgan tells us how this book differs from his 10-million-copy bestseller ‘The Psychology of Money’: “If The Psychology of Money taught us how to earn freedom, this book is about how to make the most of it.” So it's for rich people? I guess that's one shot against the book. But, then again, the majority of lessons here aren't income-specific. And he does remind us in general that if you’re reading a book about money there’s a chance you have the bug. I would say it's for people who have the bug—or at least some of it. Paraphrasing a 1907 book called 'The Quest Of The Simple Life' he cites the author showing that “those who were trying to get more money were actually held captive by it” and that “money could buy them everything except the ability to not be obsessed with money, which led to constant anxiety, which led to unhappiness.” So watch out, all of us! We live in the most materialist society we’ve ever lived in and social media endlessly reflects back to us how much worse our lives are than everybody else’s. But if you’re expecting clean advice, clear to-dos, or a bulleted list of 7 habits, you’ll be disappointed. This is a Wisdom book—slipping into that non-existent bookstore category somewhere between Self-Help and Business. Morgan reminds us that “all behavior makes sense with enough information” and this book adds up to information—lenses, really—that you can apply to your life to live life much richer. On Page 15 he tells us “You think you want nice stuff but what you really want is respect, admiration, and attention.” On Page 23 he shares that “…the things that make me happy with a higher income are the same things that made me happy with a much lower income: spending time with my family, doing things outdoors, a long chat with a friend. If flying first-class to a five-star resort and building sandcastles on the beach with my kids is a 10, playing LEGOs with my kids on the living room floor of a small apartment was still a solid 8 or 9.” He quotes Buffett saying “When you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.” Love that! A powerful chapter called “What You Don’t See” begins with the line “Happiness depends on so much more than income. There are thirteen divorces amongst the ten richest men in the world.” And then, as he does, in one of his many magical Sivers-esque stories, quote, and metaphor distillations is he lands his backflip on the gym mat with “The best measure of wealth is what you have minus what you want.” (Page 35). My favorite chapter was probably “Your Money and Your Kids” where he starts by telling us a couple memorable stories from John D. Rockefeller and Charlie Munger and says parents with money have the option to “ruin their [kids'] ambition with inheritance or risk some form of strife by denying them an easy life.” LOL. He then shares a snip of a letter he wrote to his own kids “This may sound harsh, but I hope you’re poor at some point … there’s no way to learn the value of money without feeling the power of its scarcity” and shares that “When they’re older, I want to use my money to be a last-resort safety net for my kids, but never as a fuel. So much of success in life is learning how to fail without failing so hard you can’t recover. I want to prevent collapse. But I never want to use money as a crutch for my kids to avoid learning—on their own—the values of hard work, dignity, and managing failure.” This ultimately adds up to a wonderful collection of insights to provoke, shift, and expand your thinking about how to maximize the quality of your life through the quality of your financial decisions. A really incredible book.

4. Ernest Hemingway on Writing. Edited by Larry W. Phillips. It’s weird to me which writing books are famous and which ones aren’t. ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King (04/18), ‘Bird by Bird’ by Anne Lammott? Famous, famous, justifiably famous. Amazing books! But then there are writing books equally as good that aren’t as popular. Like ‘A Swim In A Pond In The Rain’ by George Saunders (06/21), ‘Zen In the Art of Writing’ by Ray Bradbury (07/18), or, yes, this book. One issue! Hemingway didn’t write it. Sort of did, sort of didn’t. In his life Hemingway didn’t write any books on writing. Said he never would, said it takes away “whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.” Fair point, Ern! Only issue: You forgot about the literary paparazzi. Book nerds fishing through back-alley dumpsters. Well, I am grateful for dumpster-fisher Larry W. Phillips, who chased down Hemingway’s interview transcripts, letters to friends, letters to critics, letters to editors, and, of course, quotes from careful readings of his novels, and he put it all together into this wow-stack of writing insights. The craft! The habits! The doubts! The life. On confidence and artistic ownership from a letter to an editor in 1925 around age 25: “As the contract only mentions excisions it is understood of course that no alterations of words shall be made without my approval. This protects you as much as it does me as the stories are written so tight and so hard that the alteration of a word can throw an entire story out of key.” From around the same time on style we get this via a letter to a friend: “What I’ve been doing is trying to do country so you don’t remember the words after your read it but actually have the Country. It is hard because to do it you have to see the country all complete all the time you write and not just have a romantic feeling about it.” On his famously tight, hardboiled manner of prose we get this from a 1945 letter: “It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.” And we get so much specific writing advice. Like this pearl from a 1932 letter to a friend: “Remember to get the weather in your god damned book—weather is very important.” Because it was culled from letters this book gets around writing in a way most writing books don’t. It’s Hemingway’s take on the craft, yeah, but also the business, the doubts, the habits, the routines. There’s so much space in this book. A solar system of thoughts and ideas to inspire you to get back to the page. It might not turn you into Hemingway but it will certainly add fuel to your fire for the craft.

5. Hello, Friends! Stories From My Life and Blue Jays Baseball by Jerry Howarth (b.1946). Do you remember when fax machines were … this new and revolutionary thing? You could write whatever you wanted on a piece of paper and send it around the world! I was around ten when Blue Jays radio announcers Tom Cheek (RIP) and Jerry Howarth announced a new feature on their radio broadcasts called something like “The Hewlett Packard Fax of the Game!” They invited fans to fax them questions, picked one to read on the air, and then if you were chosen you won some prize. I can't remember the prize but I remember being disappointed it wasn't a fax machine. Anyway, since I listened to Tom and Jerry for most games on CJCL 1430 AM while also watching lots of TV with Don Chevrier, Fergie Olver, and ol' Buck Martinez I decided to go ahead and fax a question. And it was read on the air! By Jerry himself! Probably because they only got three total or something. But, anyway, I still remember my question. Something like: “If a pitcher is called up from the minors and throws 1 pitch and allows a home run what is their ERA?” Because I knew ERA was earned runs allowed divided by innings pitched and innings pitched was calculated in thirds based on number of outs so ... technically their ERA would be ... undefined? I think Jerry said it was infinity, though. Or that some people put 27.00 in as a placeholder. Even the Internet feels unclear about this today. Many years later I sat down with Jerry Howarth in the Skydome during a Blue Jays batting practice and asked him about his 3 formative books as well as his memoir. Jerry famously began every broadcast with the phrase “Hello, friends!” and when you listened to the game you felt like you were sharing space with a big-hearted community. As Jerry writes: “Every game, I took a fresh white canvas in my mind and artistically painted it to the best of my ability for our audience. Then at the end of the broadcast, I would initial it in the lower right-hand corner and look forward to painting another blank canvas the next day.” The book is filled with Jerryisms like “Umpires are required to start from a state of perfection and then they are asked to improve” and mentions his famous home run call “There she goes!” He called 36 straight years of Blue Jays games from 1982 to 2018 and did so with energy, optimism, and love. As an example: he got a letter in 1992 from a fan who explained why he found the name “Cleveland Indians” as well as related indigenous terms and phrases—“the Tomahawk chop”, “powwow on the mound”, etc—derogatory ... and then you know what Jerry did? Without any announcements or fanfare? Without telling anybody? He just quietly stopped using them. He'd say "Cleveland" but that's it. It was subtle, but a form of quiet activism that preceded the team name change by 29 years! Jerry is one of my biggest inspirations for 3 Books. His community-creating on Jays games—reading letters, referring to listeners by name like old friends—is part of the inspiration for our Cover to Cover Club, End of the Podcast Club, and the super-secret entirely-through-the-mail analog fan club that we have for 3 Bookers on the podcast. (Btw, if you're in the analog secret club you just received a reading light from me in the mail! You have to listen to the podcast for clues on how to join... ) This is a great book if you want to go down memory lane with Jerry.

6. Carbon: The Book of Life by Paul Hawken (b.1946). First up, ignore the title. Ignore the title of this book! I think it could easily have been called “One Of The Wisest Elders On Planet Earth Tells Us Everything He Knows About This Place And Our Relationship With It.” That’s what it felt like to me. I loved this book and I think you will, too. I first 'met' Paul Hawken via his 2009 University of Portland commencement speech. The title of the speech was “You Are Brilliant And The Earth Is Hiring” and I was blown away by his Feyman-like ability to distill complex truths down to their simplest innards. Like how he puts his thesis within fifteen seconds of that speech's opening: “Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.” Everything Paul says is written in disarmingly simple prose—tenth grade essay in September styles—but then, upon inspection, it's not. Tricked you! Hiding under his words are so much wisdom from a huge mind and heart. This is an “enormously hopeful book”, according to Elizabeth Kolbert (‘The Sixth Extinction’). And, I guess yeahhhhh, Liz, I hear you. If you can see it that way—which is really, really hard to do—then I guess you could say it's hopeful? But that’s a tough place to land when every single living system on earth is declining. Birds? Declining! Clean water? Clean air? Healthy soil? You know the answers. We all do. That’s why it’s hard. But I believe a big part of things is understanding. We don’t know what’s going on so we don’t know how to talk about it so we don’t know what to do. Enter P-Hawk, master illuminator. First he clarifies the state of things on Page 3: “Earth’s climate is not breaking down as some would have it”—phew, thanks P-Hawk, Earth’s gonna be fine guys, relax!—“However, it is changing faster than humans can adapt.” Oh shit! Vintage Hawken. You think this? You’re close! But it's really that. From Page 5: “In all of Earth’s multibillion-year history, that which did not work, that which did not serve life, was discarded.” We won’t be discarded. Our kids won’t be discarded. But their kids’ kids’ kids? Could be a tough go! But we can change things. We will change things! We are changing things. But we have to go back to go forward. On Page 8 Paul tells us how we got here: “Western science became the dominant basis for classifying the living world in the Age of Enlightenment. Plants were things, forests were cellulose, fungi were food, soil was dirt, animals had no feelings, and nature was there to be extracted, commodified, and sold. It was a profound failure of imagination and perception.” Every chapter here begins with a little epigraph like Chapter 2 “Elements” which begins with Werner Heisenberg (“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”) or Chapter 12 “Primevel” with Mary Oliver (“For me, the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”). Paul tells us that “Life-giving communities are smaller, submerged, and unnoticed by mega-institutions” (Page 6), he re-tethers us to ancient wisdom and zooms us out to our micro-time with mind-expanding paragraphs like this: “Compared to Western cosmologies, ancient teachings propose unimaginable time scales wherein the universe expands and contracts repeatedly during millions of maha kalpas. The mythical duration of a maha kalpas is how long it would take for a mountain three times higher than Everest to be worn down to dust by a dove flying above and rubbing a silk cloth over the peak every 100 years, approximately 311 trillion years.” (Page 22). And he points us to simple truths that are right in front of us but which are hard to see like: “There are an estimated three hundred thousand edible plants, but less than two hundred are commonly used by humans … Today, twelve plants and five animals provide 75 percent of the human diet.” (Page 48). One provocative point he mentions near the end of the book on Page 190 is that “Einstein famously said that the most essential question for humanity is whether the universe is friendly or not.” That has been rolling around my head like a marble since. It feels like the wisdom of our species speaks to us through this book and I loved it and I felt it and I needed it. A gorgeous book from a sage of sages.

7. Fun and Games by Dave Perkins (b.1953). I grew up walking barefoot onto my freezing suburban concrete porch every morning to gather our rolled up copy of The Toronto Star with its skinny blue rubber band belted around its inky torso. I’d slide that rubber band up the paper on my walk to the kitchen—with that unique rubber band on pulpy newsprint sound—and then crease open the paper on our small kitchen table while my mum made scrambled eggs and my dad peeled badams that he’d soaked in water in an old yogurt container the night before. I’d pull out the Sports section, skip the Game Summary (I’d already listened or watched), and jump to the daily Opinion piece by Dave Perkins. I loved Dave Perkins. I missed him when he was on vacation! Dave had the trust of the players, of the team, and he got us places beyond the game that we can’t reach even now in our Panopticon culture. An example of this comes on Page 47 when Dave is telling Jesse Barfield how Lou Gehrig made $33,000 in his best year and Jesse “…chuckled and put it into his own personal focus: ‘How good could he have been if he didn’t make no cake?’” Dave has a Susan Orlean-like ability to masterfully pull you into short essays with a great opening riff. Like in his Introduction to the whole book, which was published in 2016 after his 2013 retirement, goes like this: “The gentleman said right up front that he didn’t wish me to die, at least not any time soon. What he hoped for, he said, was that my children got rectal cancer and died, painfully, in front of me. That would serve me right, he was implying, for saying something he did not appreciate about his favourite hockey team.” LOL! I love actual newspapers. I still do! And the current best Blue Jays columnist is Cathal Kelly who jumped from The Toronto Star to The Globe and Mail and wrote a wonderful memoir called Boy Wonders (04/20). While I kind of wish this book was just a big packet of Dave’s best columns it is the next best thing: sharing space with a voice who deeply knows sports and how to tell stories that pull you deeper into the games.

8. 1-Page Pamphlet: ‘Concussion Treatment & Rehabilitation’ by 360 Concussion Care. And now it’s time for this month’s Leslie’s Pick. But… there is no Leslie’s Pick this month. No book, anyway. But a pamphlet! Why? Poor Les was whipping around the kitchen when she walked straight into a cupboard door—like one of those thick 3-foot wide IKEA ones that sticks out sideways like an old garage door. Bam! She fell to the ground with a scream and burst into tears. Our youngest kids were at school and I was in Dallas. My 11-year-old was home and he ran over and put his hand on her back. “Are you okay, mom, are you okay?” Through tears she assured him she was, she was honey, she just needs a minute. I cry as I write this. I feel so bad I wasn’t there. But then, you know, it’s Les. She’s made of steel. (“Good stock”, as Bess Kalb would say.) She gets back up and five or ten minutes later and feels totally fine. Hudson takes off on his bike, she whips off to school … she texts me about it an hour later. She didn't think she had a concussion! She went about her day. You're supposed to lay off screens, lie down, take things easy. Next day she realized she was having trouble concentrating, had a bad headache, and was super sensitive to light and sound. Then she saw the ER doc who said “Yup, you have a concussion” and suggested she reduce screens, get a 20 minute walk outside once a day, and try to cognitively go till her edge … then pull back. We ordered the earplugs that her multiple-time-concussed-fellow-busy-mom-and-teacher aunt suggested (these ones!) A trusted health professional told her to jack Vitamin D and omegas. And so she’s been resting (hard for her) and some friends have brought by teas and soups and kindness. One thing that she’s posted on the wall of our home is this little printout from a concussion clinic. (Here it is online.) The idea in these 3 little graphs is that “‘Doing too much’ or ‘pushing through’ can make your symptoms worsen and take many hours or days to recover from.” (Current Activity Pattern) and that the goal should be “with planning and pacing to engage in activities for longer without new or worsening symptoms” (Target Activity Pattern) with the eventual plan to “remain below the symptom threshold and stop activities before entering the red zone” (Long Term Activity Goal). Life, as ever, so unpredictable. One day at a time for now.

9. Life According to Vincent: 150 Inspiring Quotes by Vincent Van Gogh (1853—1890). I got to touch one of my idols years ago: after becoming infatuated with the writing of David Mitchell (‘Cloud Atlas’) I interviewed him for 3 Books. Through his publicist I got an email with 4 formative books from him in advance so we had to cull one from the set to fit my obtrusively-rigid format. So before I hit ‘record’ I got to listen to David’s quick but thoughtful reflection on each book and we ended up going with ‘The Wizard of Earthsea’ by Ursula K. Le Guin (08/20), ‘The Duel’ by Anton Chekhov (06/20), and ‘The Reason I Jump’ by Naoki Higashida (01/17), thereby narrowly leaving ‘The Letters of Vincent van Gogh’ on the shelf. I heard David’s sigh as he left it off.

Clearly this was a book of emotional weight and significance! I had already bought the book, flipped through it a bit, but it was massive. The guy wrote almost a thousand letters in his short 37 years … including 650 alone to his brother! So I was thrilled to discover in Amsterdam last month at the Van Gogh Museum this shorter collection of literary gems culled thoughtfully from his letters. His skill with words equalled his skill with brush. He knew it was just as tough! From Page 32: “There are so many people […] who imagine that words are nothing. On the contrary, don’t you think, it’s as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint a thing. There’s the art of lines and colours, but there’s the art of words that will last just the same.” From Page 48: “Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that’s the real way to learn to understand art better and better.” There is inspiration: “I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it.” (Page 81). There is mental health: “I well knew that one could break one’s arms and legs before, and that then afterwards that could get better but I didn’t know that one could break one’s brain and that afterwards that got better too.” (Page 98). And: “Every day I take the remedy that the incomparable Dickens prescribes against suicide. It consists of a glass of wine, a piece of bread and cheese and a pipe of tobacco.” (Page 100). And: “The best consolation, if not the only remedy, is, it still seems to me, profound friendships, even if these have the disadvantage of anchoring us in life more solidly than may appear desirable to us in the days of great suffering.” (Page 112). There are endless beautiful sentences like from Page 56: “How much good it does a person if one is in a gloomy mood to walk on the empty beach and look into the grey-green sea with the long white lines of the waves.” To feel the genius of Van Gogh (pronounced “van-guhh”, with a nasally-phlegmatic final syllable) through a different valance, one with equal depth, nuance, and complexity, rendered down to simple and striking lines, offers deep illumination to his art and many ideas on living an intentional life full of artistic temerity and strength. From Page 53: “I’d almost believe that these canvases will tell you what I can’t say in words, what I consider health and fortifying about the countryside.”

The painting above was painted just a few weeks before he shot himself in the chest with a revolver (which, btw, he only died from in the inn he was staying at a few days later, smiling with a group of family and friends, still smoking and drinking, and assuring everybody he was of sound mind and did this because he wanted to—“My body is mine and I am free to do with it as I wish”). Who knows the full story? Maybe we’ll never know. But when people around his bedside said they would still try to save his life he replied “Then I will have to do it again.”

Thank you, Vincent, who died poor, with no partner, with no children, but with one dear brother (who died six months later at age 33) and a brand new nephew—which inspired his Almond Blossom above—who three-quarters of century later would donate all of Van Gogh’s art to the foundation and museum that now bears his name … and which created this wonderful book. One tip: If you’re going to Amsterdam buy tickets before you go—it sells out every day—and pick an early morning or late night slot so you can enjoy the museum when it’s a bit quieter. And pay the €3.75 for the audio tour! (Museum here, Museum Gift shop here, get the book here.) From Page 99: “Possible that these great geniuses are no more than crazies, and that to have faith and boundless admiration for them you’d have to be a crazy too. That may well be—I would prefer my madness to other people’s wisdom.”

10. There is no ten! Just our regular loot bag of links! Erik Barker tells us how to avoid being scammed. An old pick-up truck becoming a travelling Banned Books store. Lindyman argues we're going back to oral tradition. George Saunders once again examines a tough question in a way nobody else can and announces his new novel! Marc Maron finishes WTF with Barack Obama and talks about the need for human connection and reasons for optimism in the face of challenging times. A new YouGov study looks at exactly how positive and negative various descriptions are seen as being. Cell-phone bans at schools lead to more reading! Do you need some cope? James Clear reminds us about the big habits and Adam Grant reminds us what AI chatbots can't do.

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