I can never quite believe “Within the Context of No-Context” was published in The New Yorker but it was. Saddle up. This could take a while.

The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.

Today marks nine years without tobacco. I think this is the first year I’m not somehow surprised to be a non-smoker. I won’t go into how much I loved smoking, or how much I smoked. Ex-smokers are boring with our two-packs-a-day stories. We all smoked two packs a day. We all loved it. As much as any smoker, it was my identity, my manager, my clock, my comfort, my voice. But however deeply important it was to me, life is better without it.

Things at the shop are settling back into a less fervid routine: the retail holiday season really is a separate planet, orbiting the one we live on the rest of the year, with its own seasons and special days compressed into roughly a month of life here on earth.

Fortunately, blessedly, we have moments of vivid experience when interior and exterior come into a sort of tentative alignment, as if they’re neurons between which a synapse has miraculously fired. Calling these (moments) ‘epiphanies,’ we rejoice in the mere suspicion of transcendence.

— Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die.

How Anxiety Became Content | The Atlantic

Something about the five-alarm fire of moral outrage burns efficiently across the prairie of the social web. But cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, encourages patients to avoid catastrophic thinking, to cool the fire of anger, to reconstruct their feelings and thoughts to be more patient with themselves and with others. The share of adults receiving mental-health treatment is surging, but we have built an online ecosystem that thrives on the very principles that counselors implore us to reject.

What is it to know
and not remember,

to attend to
holy places?

To attend to
holy places is

what it is to know
and not remember.