Light and Momentary

30/30

Thirty days, thirty posts. Thanks for reading, friends!

Party season returns

I love living close enough to work to commute on foot. It also means that we can walk to Gladlyville's cute little downtown, which everybody appreciates. And it also means that there's student housing in the area.

For a long time warm spring evenings meant that we could hear parties in the neighborhood on weekend evenings (and nights, and sometimes in the small hours of the morning). Then the pandemic came along and there were no parties. For a while people who hosted parties could get fined. Even though the penalties have been gone for a while, there didn't seem to be a loud party season last spring. I can't say for sure when indoor parties first trickled back onto neighborhood social calendars, but I can tell you definitively that outdoor parties are making a comeback.

Last weekend I went to bed at my usual middle-aged-lady bedtime and I slept terribly for the first half of the night because there was a party in the neighborhood. "What is that NOISE?" my brain kept demanding. "It's VERY LOUD in this neighborhood. Is everything okay? WAKE UP, is everything okay?!"

There is another party happening tonight and my brain is very busy again. "Loud!" it is telling me. "Why is it so loud around here?"

I am sure I will adjust again and learn to filter out the noise. Brains are adaptable. For the moment, though, mine is not quite sure what's going on around here.

The Potluck

Today I joined the grad students for a potluck, to which I contributed a pan of blondies. Right before I slid them in the oven I added chocolate chips and walnuts. "Should I leave the walnuts out?" I thought briefly. "Nah. Nut allergies aren't that common."

A student asked me about if there were any peanuts in the bake, and I told her clearly: no peanuts, but there are walnuts. No problem, she said, and took a slice.

A little bit later, she left the room. A little bit after that, another student followed. A few minutes afterward, the second student came back. "Does anyone have any Benadryl?" she said. "Kayla is having an allergic reaction that's different from anything she's ever had before. She's going to health services but she is hoping she can get some Benadryl right away. She isn't going to come back in the room because she seems to be reacting to nut particles in the air."

You guys, I just shriveled up inside. The idea that I had contributed to a student's respiratory distress when I could easily have kept the walnuts in my cupboard -- UGH. My colleague ran downstairs to see if any further assistance was needed, and came back once she had ensured that the student was in good hands. "You look terribly stressed," she said. "I feel so guilty that I put walnuts in the blondies," I told her.

About half an hour later the student showed up in my office doorway. One of her classmates, I think, must have told her what I said to my colleague. "Dr. Gladly," she said, "I am fine after a dose of Benadryl. I wanted to let you know that it wasn't the walnuts. I eat walnuts all the time. Another student put peanut butter in her brownies, and I reacted to those even though I didn't touch them. That's what was different for me: I've never reacted to peanuts from a distance before." We talked for a few minutes, and she really did seem fine. I teared up a little after she left -- I was so relieved that she was all right.

And I was relieved, too, that I hadn't been the cause of her distress. Is it weird to say that I think this is pandemic-related? I haven't been to a potluck since 2019. I think I've forgotten how to cook for people other than my family and friends. It used to be a fairly standard question: does anyone have any allergies? I'll remember to ask about it next time, that's for sure.

Birthday boy

Today Pete turned 17. Seventeen! Can you believe it?

Take two vegetarian shepherds

Once when we lived in Edinburgh a friend had us over for dinner and served us vegetarian shepherd's pie. A few weeks later I decided to try my own version. Elwood came home and sniffed appreciatively. "What are you making?" he asked me.

"Vegetarian shepherd's pie," I told him.

"What's in it?" he asked me.

"Vegetarian shepherds," I said.

This has become a family joke, but the actual answer is usually red lentils. Usually I dice an onion and a carrot and sometimes a stalk of celery, and let them get brown in hot fat. I throw in a few cloves of garlic, and once they have had a minute to soften I stir in a cup or so of red lentils. I add a can of petite diced tomatoes with their juice along with some stock, and cook the lentils until they are tender. Once they're cooked I season the mixture (it will take a fair amount of salt) and plop leftover mashed potatoes on top. If you dot it with butter, sprinkle it with Parmesan, and run it under the broiler, you'll have a tasty frugal reasonably quick vegetarian meal. It's a pretty standard way for us to move leftover mashed potatoes out of the fridge and into people's bellies.

But last night I made an even quicker version: I tossed in two cans of chickpeas in lieu of the lentils, and hey presto! It was a lightning-fast tasty frugal vegetarian meal. If you try it, you'll probably want to add something for umami -- I went with a spoonful of Marmite. And if you are feeding hungry teens, you might think about adding a little extra fat for satiety and staying power -- I put in a dab of tahini to boost flavor and creaminess, just as I might add a spoonful of peanut butter to a pot of vegetarian chili.

Hit by the DOMS truck

So you guys, the downside to whole-body movements is that they make your whole body sore when you haven't done them in a long time.

I woke up yesterday with sore abs, and then it spread. I was sitting on the couch for a while yesterday morning-- I got home from 7:30 Mass and bopped around the internet for a while before my weekly Zoom chat with my college rooommates. We wrapped up the call and I realized I had been creamed by the DOMS truck as I sat there: lats, triceps, biceps; glutes, quads, hamstrings. I joked about it with my family all day. "Would you like to hear about my sore muscles?" I kept asking them. "Oh, yes," they would say, "I'd like nothing better."

I went out for a slow and limping run last night, in which I observed that my calves were weirdly fatigued -- as if I was using more lower-leg muscles than usual because everything higher up the posterior chain was toast. I did a 12-minute bedtime yoga video and it was ridiculously painful. Adriene told me to start with some nice cat-cow stretches and even those hurt. You know you overdid it when cat-cow hurts. In the middle of some hip-opener thing she said, "REALLY FEEL what it's like to be in your body right now," and I said, "It feels like arson, Adriene; it REALLY FEELS like someone committed arson on my middle-aged muscles." She put us in happy baby and I had to wonder to myself if there is an asana called "grumpy middle-aged person regretting her life choices." It would have been more suitable.

That last bit is just me exaggerating, though, because I do not regret that particular life choice. It was so nice to be back in the weight room. I am going again tomorrow. I am looking forward to it hugely. I've missed lifting.

Back at the gym

Yesterday I went back to the gym for the first time since...probably November.

Here is a weird thing: the tiredest muscles were the ones in my hands. This is a thing I remember from May and June of last year, when I first started lifting. My forearms would tire out then, too, which wasn't a problem yesterday. But my hands hit a point where I just couldn't do it anymore. They were still tired when I went to bed last night, actually.

In my home workouts through the winter I had been doing three sets of band-assisted pull-ups from a hangboard, which requires a different grip -- it's a bigger surface, too big to wrap your thumb around. Yesterday I decided I'd do a version of my fall split, which always kicked off with four sets of machine-assisted pull-ups. I think that was a chunk of the issue: higher volume with a squeezier grip.

Deadlifts felt great and bench felt good. My working sets were at about 70% of my November levels, but I'm optimistic that I'll progress briskly once I'm back in the weight room regularly. And I do want to be back in the weight room regularly. I texted Joe while I was resting between sets to say, "Oooooh the dopamine! Barbells 4EVER!"

I had planned to finish up with a couple of accessories, but my hands had had enough. The first set of hammer curls felt great. The second set felt less great. I stopped in the middle of the third set, totally maxed out, and decided to call it good. 

But that's how you tell your body to build strength: you max it out (or come pretty close), and then you offer it protein and rest. I'm feeling optimistic, and happy that I took the plunge.

A winner!

The winner of a free copy of Reach is...Andrea! Check your email, Andrea, so you can choose your format and I can get your book to you.

A ukulele/trombone duet about my friend Becky's book

Another thought about dissatisfaction

I don't know exactly how clear it's been here that my job has been making me grumpy for a while. It might not be the smartest thing for a person to blog that her job is making her grumpy. But smart or not, that's how it is, internet friends: I haven't been very happy at work lately.

Today I had a little lightbulb moment: the pandemic hasn't just made things harder in the classroom, and it hasn't just made things harder for students. The pandemic eliminated a number of the things that made it really pleasant and rewarding to work on a college campus, and they are just now coming back.

I spent today at the library with a bunch of other faculty. It's a recurring writing day, and I go whenever I can. Today my political science colleague Julie said, "Hey, Jamie, long time no see -- how are you doing?" and we sat down beside each other and ate our lunches together. We chatted about the perils of junior high with our across-the-table neighbor, who turns out to be researching an area adjacent to mine -- close enough that I emailed her about a possible future collaboration. Another faculty member with a personal interest in our shared area of study came up to tell us her story. My friend Laura, whom I haven't seen in person since 2019, showed up in the afternoon and we talked briefly. It's mostly a working day (and it was an unusually productive day for me today), but there's enough space for conversation to make it fun too.

It has been a long time since I wrote a giddy post about getting to work in a place where our shared mission is to advance the sum total of human knowledge, to enrich our understanding of how the world works. But do you know, it's still nice to have that shared mission, and it's nice to be able to talk to people about it in person too.

Dissatisfied

Over spring break, when I was feeling glum about gray skies and endless grading, my daily exercise resolution skidded off the rails and I have not been able to get myself back on track. I am not entirely couchbound -- I'd say I've been exercising a couple of times a week, and my life always has a fair amount of built-in walking since I commute on foot. But I've been in a mental spiral with running (it will be discouraging -> maybe let's do it later -> now we are discouraged about being out of shape AND about procrastinating -> let's eat chocolate instead of running -> alas, everything is discouraging) and also with lifting. I haven't been back to the gym since I un-froze our membership in the aftermath of the omicron wave. (Of course, now we seem to be having a BA.2 wave, so maybe it's okay that I haven't been back to the gym.) There is a part of me that is really eager to get back into compound lifts with barbells. I want to deadlift, in particular -- there's something especially satisfying about standing up tall with a barbell loaded to the very edge of what I can lift with decent form. And I KNOW, I really do know, that "the very edge of what I can lift" is not going to get closer to what it was before omicron if I don't get in there and do the workouts. 

The part of me in charge of actually hopping in the car and driving to the gym does not seem to be as enthusiastic as some other parts of me, however.

I keep thinking that I want to change things up: eat better, exercise more, grade more promptly, write more diligently. I think if I am more focused on exercise, some of those other changes will happen all on their own as the result of increased energy and focus. So here is my plan, O my internet friends: run tomorrow morning, even though it will probably rain on me, lift on Saturday, run + yoga on Sunday.

More thoughts from Stolen Focus

I am nearing the end of Stolen Focus, and it is full of things to think about.

One thing Hari writes about is the cost of distraction in terms of brainpower. The idea that distractions make us dumber is pretty familiar by now, but the degree of the diminishment is startling. He cites research that suggests we perform 20 to 30% worse if we're working around smartphone interruptions. He says, in fact, that you'd be better off working stoned than working while toggling between texts and Facebook and work tasks.

His most scathing chapters are focused on the companies that are profiting from our fractured attention. He says there are six ways that they are causing damage to our capacity to focus and think hard about complex issues, and I found the breakdown especially interesting. The first one is familiar: you don't have to read much about social media to know that the slow drip of likes and favorites and retweets affects our brains. I have to think anybody who uses social media has used it in that particularly frustrating way: did anyone like my joke? how many people liked my joke? is there more engagement now? now? Creating a desire for unpredictable rewards is straight out of the B.F. Skinner playbook.

This behavior fosters (#2) more frequent task-switching, which makes it harder to do the actually important parts of your job, and data mining means that the Big Tech folks have access to (#3) surprisingly specific information about how to worm their way into your unique brain and lure you back in. He quotes a former Google engineer who calls it attention fracking -- an apt metaphor given the way that these sites can poison the well.

The fourth mechanism is very familiar but I had wondered if it was just me. Does Twitter make me mad because I'm an easily angered person? No, says Hari. Twitter makes me mad because making people mad is profitable. It keeps them consuming your content -- and the fact that anger is terrible for focused attention is secondary. On a related note (#5), they give you the sense that you're immersed in an angry world, which tends to send people into a vigilant state. Vigilance (the need to attend to the world around you) is bad for sustained attention (the attempt to focus on the thing right in front of you, to the exclusion of other stimuli). 

Hari is most concerned about the attention economy's effects on our collective attention (#6). "These sites," he says, "set society on fire." His section on the potential for Facebook and YouTube to enhance polarization and spread falsehoods rapidly is bleak and sobering. I don't want to believe it. And yet -- what is the proportion of Americans who believe the 2020 election was stolen? Hari says that if you are being fed a steady diet of nonsense and falsehood because it generates ad dollars, it becomes harder to know what is true and to think carefully about what is right.

Reach!

Today is launch day for a book called Reach, written by Becky Robinson.

Becky owns a business called Weaving Influence, which focuses in large part on book marketing. Reach is a distillation of what she's learned over the past ten years about building an audience that wants to hear your particular message. Becky has been my dear friend since we were in high school together, and her voice in this book is just like her voice in real life: thoughtful, accessible, clear, and interesting. It's one of my favorite voices. I bet you'll enjoy it too -- check it out! You may find it especially helpful if you hope to write a book someday, but it's full of strategies for anyone who wants to share ideas effectively online.

Launch day was the impetus for the composition of the silly song I mentioned a few days ago. I was asked to contribute to a video in honor of her book launch, and my first thought was, "I bet this video will need some ukulele! And a trombone solo too!" Then I thought to myself, "This video will probably be a compilation of serious people saying smart things about marketing books and ideas, and maybe I should not go full-on Invasion of the Goofballs in the middle of it."

But here on my blog, otherwise known as Goofball Central, my ukulele and I will have some musical thoughts to share about Becky's book. On Saturday I'll post my serenade, and I'll tell you more about my favorite bits of the book, and I'll give away a copy. If you're in the US, you can leave me a comment here or a reply on Twitter between now and lunchtime Saturday. I'll choose one commenter/tweeter to receive a copy in her (or his) preferred format. 

In which I render unto Caesar via passenger pigeon, practically

I finished almost all of our federal taxes a couple of weeks ago, and then I stalled out. I didn't pull the trigger because I wanted Elwood to look our tax return over before I filed it, and because I wasn't fussed about the state taxes. The state tax forms are quick and easy, usually.

The exception to the "usually," in my experience, is if a person tries to do them at the last minute. The last time I tried to do them on the evening they were due, the server seemed to be creaking and groaning beneath its load. "Toooooo maaaaaaany peeeeeeople," I could practically hear it saying, as my pages failed to load for long exasperating minutes.

"Maybe it will be better this year?" I said optimistically to myself as I sat down to crank them out this evening. Alas, I will never know if it would have been better. I couldn't log in, I couldn't get the system to send me a password reset email, and the other option seemed to be for me to request a paper letter in the US mail that might take 10 business days to arrive.

So I pretended it was 1998, and put paper tax forms in the mail to my state.

This required some High-Speed Tax-Filing Action, because I came to the conclusion that this was the best option at 6:10, and the last mail pickup in Gladlyville is at 7, at a post office about 10 minutes from our house. Forty minutes is not the amount of time I would choose to allot for old-school tax form completion, but TRA-LA-LAAAA, the forms are done and in the mail.

I am out of practice with all the schedules that they want you to print out if you are downloading old-school forms, though. The state's online filing interface takes you pretty seamlessly from one to the next, and automatically includes them all in your electronic submission. I think that in my haste I forgot to include a physical copy of the form that tells them what my dependents' social security numbers are. Perhaps they will not mind too much since they will get their money on time. Perhaps the people opening the envelopes will say to themselves, "Yeah, probably their dependents' SSNs have not changed." Let us hope so.

Earlier this month I was feeling a little indignant about TurboTax's offer to file my state taxes for the low low price of $49, which seems to me like a blatant and ethically sketchy effort to separate people intimidated by tax forms from their money. But you know, if I get hit with some kind of penalty for filing an incomplete state tax return, I might wish that I had been a little less indignant and a little more willing to be separated from my money.

Easter Evening

There was a moment earlier today when I had to stop and take a deep breath, and say to myself, "It's reasonable that you would feel stressed out about hosting. It's the biggest family gathering you've had here since 2018." 

We were expecting two of Elwood's three sisters, and their kids, and my parents-in-law, and four of our kids plus Marie's delightful friend. I have been totally out of that particular groove. I forgot one of the cardinal rules of big gatherings (Always Make Extra Potatoes), but it turned out well anyway: good conversation, lots of laughter, tasty food. Ten of us played Telestrations and there was much hilarity.

I am hoping you had a joyful weekend at your house, however you spent it.

Use it or lose it

I think hosting big holiday dinners is like flexing a muscle. If you're doing pushups regularly, it's no big deal to knock out ten pushups. But if you've been sitting on the couch doing Nonograms (for instance), it feels harder to do ten pushups.

When I was prepping for Thanksgiving, our first big holiday meal since the pandemic began, I was like, "Whoa, my big-holiday-meal muscle is rusty." I am not sure the situation has improved in the intervening four or five months.

In my fridge there is a lamb shoulder. Elwood tells me it is a nine-pound lamb shoulder, but the internet tells me that lamb shoulders are more likely to be 2 pounds, or possibly 4, or maybe 6 if you have a truly exceptional lamb shoulder. I am wondering what happened there. Is it, like, a mislabeled cow shoulder? (What do you even call cow shoulder? We must eat it, right, but it has some other name? The first time we bought a quarter-cow it came with a cut called "arm roasts," which I had never seen and do not recommend. Are those cow shoulders?) Nine pounds would even be big for a cow shoulder, I'm thinking. Maybe it's a maiasaura shoulder that got shuffled up to the front as the butcher was cleaning out the stuff that had been in the freezer for a long time. Like, a loooong time.

Anyway. In the morning I suppose I will brown this steroidal lamb shoulder along with some flavorsome veggies, and braise it until it is done. I can shoehorn it in the Instant Pot somehow, can I not? Then I will recruit a bunch of sous-chefs to cut up a bunch of pans of other veggies, and we will roast them until they are brown and tender. I have five pounds of potatoes awaiting their destiny, but I am not exactly sure what that destiny is. Maybe the easiest thing is just to roast them too, do you figure?

Before the pandemic I felt more optimism about sailing into holiday meal prep. Dinner for a dozen seems more onerous these days. Guess I'd better do it more often.

I hope you are having a glorious Easter weekend. The Vigil was lovely (aside from the part where my hair caught fire briefly); Marie's guest seems to be rolling with the weird level without too much difficulty. Tomorrow will probably go more smoothly if I hie myself to bed promptly tonight.

Weird in a good way, but definitely weird

Marie texted me this evening to ask if she could bring a friend home for Easter. I texted right back: Sure! 

And then I kept texting: Have you advised her re: the weirdness level?

Because the thing is, our Easter is pretty weird. I love it and I wouldn't want to change anything about it, but I have to acknowledge that it's got a very distinctive flavor. As far as I knew this friend had been an atheist dipping a toe into theism, and it seemed like Easter weekend at our house might feel like A Lot.

There is the annual reading of this old old homily about the harrowing of hell. I can't get through it without choking up, but I try every year anyway. There are the egg-dying traditions, with their inside jokes that sprouted from inside jokes that grew out of other inside jokes. There is a whole list of Essential Eggs. (Is it even really Easter if you don't have a map-of-the-world egg? My kids might have some thoughts about that one.) There is a lot of food prep, because Lent is over and dernit we are going to feast on Sunday.

And then there is the Vigil, which is A Lot all by itself. Church with a bonus bonfire, and blazing candles, and an 8-minute a capella solo chant about the glory of God (that digresses into singing about the beauty of bees for a bit there), and umpty-eleven readings with psalms sung in between them all. We pour water on people and give them white garments to wear and bedaub their faces with oil while calling them by funky names like "Joan of Arc." We chant together in Latin; we kneel down before what looks like bread; we sing all the verses of all the hymns.

Marie tells me all will be well, even the part on Sunday where people have to move furniture and open duct covers to find their Easter baskets. (I might not put our guest's basket in the ductwork, because I am gracious and hostessy like that.) Marie tells me that her friend has begun attending Mass, and so (this is Marie's logic here, not mine) why wouldn't she want to come to the most beautiful Mass of the year?

Recently I was reading a post from a mom with young kids, in which she said she would absolutely not be attending any of the Triduum services this year, and I remembered the years in which I felt beleaguered if I went and regretful if I didn't. Hang in there, all you moms of littles. My adult children vary in their views on the Church, a state of affairs about which I can be philosophical only some of the time. But they will all go cheerfully to Triduum services, where they will all sit still and be quiet. The 2003 version of me did not believe that day would ever come, but here it is.

And, it turns out, they will invite their friends to come too. 

Conversation

"What should I post about?"

    "You should write a post entirely in IPA! That would be great!"

[I roll my eyes, thinking that the number of people who would read a blog post written in symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet is less than 5 and I am related to most of them.]

    "You should write a post entirely in German!"

[I roll my eyes, because I am too tired to write a post entirely in German and I don't think the German-speaking readership is very sizable around here.]

    "You should build a conlang and write a post in THAT with just a link to the grammar!"

[I roll my eyes, because are you familiar with conlangs, my friends? They are constructed languages, like Klingon, in which people invent the sound system and vocabulary and syntax. Two of my children have been working for years on a conlang. I want to get this post finished no later than 9:15.]

    "You could do a speed conlang," he assures me.

[I don't know what that is, sorry.]

Can you tell that Pete has decided he wants to study linguistics in college rather than botany?

NLIVA

My second kid, at age 2, used to express strong disapproval by saying, "No like it very all." My mother thought this was hilarious and introduced it at work, where it caught on with her co-workers. Bad news from the higher-ups? No like it very all. The server ate the file you spent hours updating? No like it very all.

I wasn't blogging in those days and I expect this quote would have faded out of my memory if not for my mother and her colleagues. But instead it has stuck around as a family saying, and I pulled it out today.

Yesterday I learned that my dad is down with COVID. It will probably be fine? I hope? He is vaccinated; he is boosted. And also he is 75. He has been feeling crummy.

I am less worried about the idea that he will wind up in the hospital than about the idea that he is going to recover and then have some kind of clot-related event afterward. Who knows? Not me! But: no like it very all.

Then this morning I was texting with one of my big kids, who ALSO has COVID and who ALSO feels crummy. I did not send an all-caps reply (HOW DID YOU GET COVID ALSO DO YOU NEED CHICKEN SOUP I WILL MAKE YOU CHICKEN SOUP), but this definitely felt like an all-caps situation: NO LIKE IT VERY ALL.

My mother concurs. She texted right back: NLIVA indeed.

Stolen Focus

I'm further into Stolen Focus (affiliate link) and finding it more consistently interesting. (And depressing-- awfully depressing.)

Johann Hari, the author, spent three unplugged months in Provincetown. He took a laptop that couldn't connect to the internet and an emergencies-only phone that couldn't text or browse. He read a lot of books; he took a lot of long walks and let his mind wander. He makes it sound pretty awesome, at least to this particular reader (who is currently fighting a losing battle against her Nonograms addiction).

One of the things he writes about is flow: how happy it makes us, and how fragile it is. This was the very best part of sabbatical, the way that on good days I could dive in deeply and think hard about hard things. It feels pretty hard to recapture that feeling in my ordinary working life. There are too many emails, too much reply-all nonsense, too many knocks on the door. You have heard this lament before but it is one of the most important factors in my job satisfaction: am I putting in enough research time? Generally the answer feels like no. And the less I do it, the more friction there is when I try to get back into it. 

I have some stuff coming up this summer that I hope will help. Gladlyville U sponsors a May writing camp and I just found out that my application was accepted. I'm also doing a well-regarded summer program focused on strengthening writing habits. We shall see how much of a difference that makes.

Hari also writes about the importance of what he calls mind-wandering time. It's a little strange to say I'm feeling a dearth of wool-gathering time, but there used to be more of it -- time on the treadmill, time walking alone to and from work. I haven't read any of the science that looks at what wool-gathering does for cognition, but I absolutely believe it matters. 

So I'm mostly on board with what Hari is saying. He talks a fair amount about the decline of reading, but that feels less relevant for me. I am more curious than convicted about those findings. Query #1: he says we do not read text on the screen with the same kind of focus that we use to read text on the printed page. But I'm pretty sure that I have multiple reading modes on a screen. I absolutely do that hopping-around-finding-the-key-facts thing that he deplores if I'm skimming an article to see whether it deserves my full attention, but I can and do give my full attention to text on a screen. I think over 12 years of heavy Kindle use I've learned to toggle between "book mode" and "link mode." A piece of evidence in support of this contention is that I shifted several years ago to peer-reviewing entirely on a screen. That's probably the most demanding kind of reading I ever do, and I do not feel the need to print out manuscripts to enhance my focus. I'm curious -- for those of you who are also regular Kindle users, do you notice a difference in the quality of your attention?

He also spends time talking about the research of Raymond Mar, who reportedly found that people who read more fiction tend to be more skilled at reading social situations than people who read non-fiction. Hari immediately makes a causal leap, saying the fiction drives the understanding of social skills, and I complained to my family over dinner about the hazards of causal inferencing in observational studies. "What if it's the other way around?" I asked them plaintively. "What if Mar is seeing this association because the people who are interested in relationship nuances are more motivated to read books that talk about something they already like?" (After dinner I finished the chapter and discovered that he does give a nod to the reverse-causality idea, but only a nod. Harrumph.)

One more minor quibble: Hari talks about the decline of reading in a world where it's easier to scroll, but I'm curious about the actual numbers. He says, for instance, that paperback book purchases plummeted by 26% in 2011. For me, that timing raises questions. Elwood gave me my first Kindle in 2010, and by 2011 I had made the leap to reading mostly e-books most of the time. I am sure I bought fewer paperback books that year, but I bought a BOATLOAD of Kindle titles. I am a little skeptical about how well stats on print books reflect actual reading behavior. But I guess if you think reading on a screen isn't really reading, the distinction doesn't matter much.

Tell me what you think: do you read less than you did ten years ago? Print books or e-books or a mix? Is it harder for you to read than it was ten years ago? What would you most want to read if you spent three months by the ocean with no job and no internet?

#NAMDRAL, the countdown

Okay, heads up! There are only four weeks -- 28 short days -- until the Ninth Annual May Dickens Read-Along commences. This year we are going to read Nicholas Nickleby. I am going to start on May 10, right after I submit grades. We will be overlapping with the Hardcore Dickens Club, which should be fun. (They are starting a week later and taking it more slowly, so the overlap is imperfect but will still mean lots of interesting conversations.)

If you haven't read Nicholas Nickleby, you should join us. It's a fun one -- lots of lighthearted bits, easy on the bathos. If you have already read Nicholas Nickleby -- well, OF COURSE you want to reread it, don't you? What better way to spend your leisure time in the merry month of May?

So if you have TBR lists that need adjusting or decks that need clearing or any of that kind of business to take care of, this is your cue to get rolling. If you might appreciate a little encouragement, I have two old posts on how to read Dickens and another on why.