Reading Routines and the Joy of John McPhee
In order to keep relatively current with the goings on in this busy world of ours, I subscribe to a number of print magazines, which arrive throughout the month, and which I try to keep up with. The magazines themselves run the gamut of interests: Scientific American, which I have subscribed to for something like 30 years now, Smithsonian, Wired so that the nerd in my feels younger than my actual nerd age, The New Yorker and The Atlantic because I enjoy long-form essays, and Harper's because of E.B. White1.
I get all of these magazines in print because I need some time each day to read off-screen. I work all day in front of 3 large screens, writing code, or planning projects, or as now, writing for fun. Like most people these days, I look at my phone more often than I should2. So I try to get through one or two feature articles in the print magazines each day. Not wanting to have to make yet another decision, I've written myself a little script that randomly selects one or two articles for the next day, and emails the titles to me the night before. This way, all I have to do is pick up the magazine(s) from the table in my office. Here, for instance, is the email I received last night:
What I do is that when a new magazine arrives in the mail, I enter the feature articles into a file I keep and then my automation takes over. You can see that the script3 is even kind enough to let me know when I have completed all the articles for the issue and the issue is ready for recycling. Running through the contents of each issue gives me a preview of what is to come, and every once in a while, I spot something that I just can't wait for. Today, when the latest issue of the New Yorker arrived, I spotted a new piece by John McPhee.
I can't quite recall how I discovered McPhee, but the first thing I read by him was Coming Into the Country, which I loved, and which made me want to visit Alaska. I immediately moved onto other things he'd written: Draft No. 4, Uncommon Carriers and Irons in the Fire to name a few. Over the years, I tried to catch up on what I missed. I read Basin and Range (the first volume in his Pulitzer prize-winning series on geology), The Patch, The Founding Fish, and Silk Parachute. In one short span in early 2020, I read The Pine Barrens, The Survival of the Bark Canoe, and Table of Contents. Then, in 2023, McPhee came out with a collection of pieces about pieces he'd started to write but never actually finished. It was called Tabula Rasa Volume 1, and I was delighted because it implied future volumes.
Few living writers bring me as much joy as John McPhee does. His long-form essays are works of literary art that I hold up, with the essays of E. B. White, as a form of perfection unattainable to mere mortals like myself. So when I saw the piece in the May 20 New Yorker by John McPhee, and saw it was titled "Tabula Rasa, Volume 4" I was overjoyed. Instead of waiting for my script to randomly select that article, I took it with me to my post-lunch nap4.
I begin these naps by reading from whatever book happens to be on my nightstand. Currently, it is The Scientists by John Gribbon. Today, however, I took John McPhee with me. What a delight! Reading John McPhee write about his Wordle experiences, and the problems he's had proofreading was fun and engaging. Usually, I'll set my book aside once I feel my eyes closing. Today, I had to set the magazine aside in order that I could close my eyes. I'd only read part of the article, but I fell asleep (instantly, as usual) with the knowledge that I had more John McPhee to read before bed tonight.
E.B. White's column, "One Man's Meat" ran in Harper's from 1938-1943 and is one of my favorites to this day. I subscribed to the magazine because of that column, even though it has been extinct for eighty plus years.
Although not as much as I used to. Getting rid of Facebook and Twitter (or X) and LinkedIn apps was one of the smartest things I’ve done recently.
People have asked me for this script, but let me warn you now, it is written in Wolfram Language, a completely symbolic language, which is not very common as compared to, say, Python, but is something that I have centralized all of my automation in because (a) I am that nerdy, and (b) because I wanted to learn something completely new (in my day job, I deal with at least a half dozen languages on a fairly regular basis).
Each day, after lunch, I lay down with a book, read for 5-10 minutes and then nap for 30 minutes or so. I do this because I get up early in the morning, but also because it is the only sleep I get in which I fall asleep almost instantly, with no dreams, and I wake fully restored.