Odds & Ends: November 6, 2026

Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann. I like to collect rules of thumb: little heuristics that help me think better. One source that collects a lot of great ones is Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, and statistician Lauren McCann. The book rounds up more than 300 mental models pulled from psychology, physics, economics, and other fields, and explains each one in plain English. Some you’ve probably heard of, like Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity (one of my favorites!). You’ll find ones you’ve never heard of either. I’ve turned to it a couple of times over the years. It’s just a good rundown of things to help you think better and make better decisions.

The Lowdown. I’ve really been enjoying FX’s crime noir show The Lowdown, created by Tulsa-based director and writer Sterlin Harjo. It’s set in my fair city and has all these crazy, spot-on references to Tulsa and Oklahoma. Ethan Hawke plays Lee Raybon, a “truthstorian” (i.e., a muckraking journalist for a local magazine) trying to solve a murder in a prominent family, using clues the victim hid in the novels of Oklahoma native Jim Thompson (he wrote The Killer Inside Me, a brutal, brutal book). The acting’s top-notch, and a lot of the cast is from Tulsa, including Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tim Blake Nelson, and Pulitzer-winning playwright Tracy Letts. Harjo has done an amazing job making a TV show that feels like reading a classic noir novel. One storyline hit close to my family: Lee steals a Fish and Wildlife Service jacket to do some snooping on a boat at Lake Keystone (I’ve been there lots of times!) and ends up coming across a paddlefish poaching operation. That was a real thing here. Back in the ’90s, Russians were coming to Oklahoma to poach paddlefish for their caviar, and my dad, a game warden and the senior agent for the Fish and Wildlife Service in the region, headed up a lot of those cases. Heads up: there’s a lot of foul language and violence (befitting the noir ethos) in this show.

Inside the unconventional college that blends classical building trades with liberal arts education. The American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, SC, is an accredited college where students major in one of six traditional building trades (blacksmithing, timber framing, and plastering among them) while taking liberal arts classes built around their craft. Instead of chemistry, for example, they take building science. The school started in 1999, when Charleston was still restoring buildings wrecked by Hurricane Hugo and had to import tradesmen from around the country because there weren’t enough locals who knew how to do the work. First-year blacksmiths forge their own hammers. It’s basically Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft turned into a college. And while professors elsewhere fret about AI, these students don’t seem worried about their job prospects: 86 percent of grads are working in their trade six months after graduation.

Lint Brush. A wool suit picks up lint and dust every time you wear it. If you let that stuff sit, the grit wears down the fibers over time. Also, having flecks of old food or dandruff on your suit isn’t a good look. So every guy who owns a suit should keep a lint brush in his closet. When I get home from church and take off my suit, I give it a good brush, and I do a quick one before I leave, too (to remove any dust that’s settled on it). You don’t need anything fancy. A natural-bristle clothes brush is the traditional choice, but a cheap velvet lint brush from the drugstore works fine. It won’t do anything for stains or wrinkles, but it’ll keep your suit looking sharp between trips to the dry cleaner.

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Some Thoughts on Friction and Sunday Firesides: A Child Can’t Choose the Roses He’s Never Seen.

Quote of the Week

Man is still responsible. He must turn the alloy of modern experience into the steel of mastery and character. His success lies not with the stars, but with himself. He must carry on the fight of self-correction and discipline. He must fight mediocrity as sin and live against the imperative of life’s highest ideal.

—Frank Curtis Williams