The Apartment. My most recent Zone 2 cardio movie was this 1960 Billy Wilder film. And man, it was sadder than I expected. Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an ambitious insurance clerk who lends his apartment to his bosses so they can carry on affairs, hoping they’ll return the favor with a promotion. Sounds like it’d be a comedy, and parts of it are, but the movie gets pretty heavy. Lemmon’s performance is top-notch. He perfectly captures a guy who keeps compromising his dignity to climb the corporate ladder, all while quietly pining for an elevator operator played by Shirley MacLaine. Wilder doesn’t pull any punches. By the end, you’ve watched all the characters hit bottom before bouncing somewhat back.
EPIC Provisions Sea Salt Beef & Beef Liver Bites. Lately, I’ve been wanting to incorporate some liver into my diet. It’s packed with nutrients and minerals like iron. But I’m not ready to sauté a whole liver with onions. These jerky bites from EPIC Provisions are a baby step to get into the offal game. They’re made from 100% grass-fed beef, mixed with a small amount of beef liver. They don’t taste quite as good as straight beef jerky, but I’m fine with trading a bit of liver flavor for the benefits liver brings. A serving packs 11 grams of protein and hardly any carbs, making them a macro-friendly way to hit your protein goals.
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. My march through Tom Wolfe’s canon continues, and this one might be my favorite so far. Wolfe takes the story of America’s early space program and turns it into both an enlightening history and a hilarious character study. What he captures brilliantly is the manly ethos of these early jet test pilots — men who pushed experimental aircraft to their limits, sometimes dying in the process, to prove they had the right stuff. The irony Wolfe hammers home is how the Mercury program actually stifled everything these pilots valued; instead of pushing the envelope in demonstrations of skills, the astronauts had to submit to being what they themselves called “spam in a can” — passengers strapped inside rockets, pressing buttons when told. Wolfe’s writing crackles with energy, and his ability to get inside the competitive, death-defying culture of test pilots is masterful. This was a lot of fun to read.
Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up. A lot of the concern around artificial intelligence and young people has centered on the way they can be robbed of learning academics by employing A.I. to do their schoolwork. Clay Shirky, a vice provost at New York University, says an even more worrisome danger is “emotional offloading, the use of A.I. to reduce the energy required to navigate human interaction.” Young adults are using A.I. to draft emails to their teachers, send messages on dating apps, and respond to friends’ texts. Anxious about saying the wrong thing, they deprive themselves of the experience of having real, unscripted — sometimes messy but ultimately refining — interpersonal interactions. One haunting anecdote I heard on this front was that a young man and woman who liked each other were each using A.I. to write the messages they exchanged, so that their early courtship was actually two robots talking to each other. Dang dystopian.
On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: You Don’t Have to Be Perfect, Just Aware and The Power of “I Like,”or Why Do People Hate the Idea of Motivation?
Quote of the Week
Head knowledge is good, but heart knowledge is indispensable. The training of the hands and feet must be added to make a rounded education. We must all learn these days to become spiritual pioneers if we would save the world from chaos.
—E.V. Hammond
