Nathanael Yellis

My weekly email started as a way to make some use of my incessant online reading habit. Some fraction of what I read seemed interesting and worth passing along. Rather than only make social postings into the void, I thought some friends would find the good things from my stack of reading interesting. And so emerged "recommended reading" which morphed, as all online things do, into a pun, "Nathanael's Reading." But you can't give a fellow like me a platform without making him think you want a ted talk. Thank you for clicking the links and for reading the words at the top!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've been a train commuter during the second half of this summer. First due to real construction in the basement; then due to reconstruction (and finally finishing?) the basement office. When I time it just right, the train and bike will take an hour each way. Commutes are a top driver of unhappiness, according to the social scientists, and it's not hard to see why: knowing you'll hand over two of your sixteen waking hours to repetitive travel isn't a good start to the day. While my train and bike are on the easier (and prettier) side of a Boston commute, I still end up, all those hours later, right where I started.

A few week's ago, Transfiguration Sunday found me at St. Anne's in their oceanside chapel. The day's prayer included this line, juxtaposed with a warm August sun on calm ocean, "...grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold..."

Sometimes consumer technology seems like a get rich quick scheme that actually works. An engineer comes up with an application that does something nifty, some designers and marketers get involved to make it work intuitively and find its audience, and then they laugh all the way to the VC funding or big company acquisition. It seems like the scheme benefits us app users, too: we put the app on our phone, for free or a token fee, and enjoy its delights.

For about a month, off and on, we've had a plumber in our basement. Between his work, with all its noise and debris, and the Tetris-like reshuffling of our basement's stuff, the most notable result of the construction, thus far, has been me taking the train to HubSpot's office in Cambridge most days. We should also emerge with a new furnace.

As a father to three boys, I noted with some interest Richard Reeves's 2022 book about Of Boys and Men. While some people tried to use it as another silly armament in the culture wars, the book wasn't intended that way, nor did the usage really stick. Reeves was far more interested in understanding the problem boys face and straightforwardly solving it than he was in pegging the blame on anyone. (This Guardian review has a bit more on his approach.) Reeves's book was far different from most in along these lines. The people talking about any challenge faced by a group tend to be far more interested in wielding the grievance as a cudgel.

A few weeks ago, I read two wildly dissimilar books. Irresistible by Adam Alter, was one of those books that said it all in the subtitle, "The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked." Makoto Fujimura's refractions was far more difficult to discern, but a deeper work about the power of human creativity in our technopolistic age.

A few weeks ago, the Daily Stoic's email said it all in the subject, "Build a Life You Aren't Trying to Flee." The gist is that if we look to destinations for satisfaction then we'll be perpetually disappointed. External settings don't offer what we're really looking for: happiness, rest, or peace. If we're frustrated with our lives, then a simple a change of scenery will just be a new backdrop for our inner turmoil. The stoic aims for internal peace.

For the past few weeks, I've been dabbling with a version of Open AI's GPT-4. My company gave me access to a screen like the old AIM instant messenger: along the left column are a few conversations and in the main area I type in text and wait for a response from the other party. It's just like high school, except the other side of the conversation uses some automation and a large language model to create its replies.