Odds & Ends: October 2, 2026

The Wind Beneath the Stone by David Keohan. For millennia, stone lifting was an important part of cultures around the world. It was not only a feat of strength, but part of weddings and funerals, used as a job interview to assess someone’s fitness as a farmhand, and included in rites of passage and tests of all-around manhood. I really enjoyed having David Keohan on the podcast back in 2023 to talk about his quest to discover the lost lifting stones in his home country of Ireland, and he’s got a new book out about his passion. Keohan is a world champion kettlebell lifter who, after hearing the old tales of stone lifting in Ireland, set off to find the stones himself, working from a 1930s archive of local folklore. He tracked them down to churchyards and pastures where they’d been sitting untouched for generations and found people who still remembered the legends attached to them. He then lifted the stones himself. The heaviest weighs over 450 pounds. As word got out, other lifters started showing up to pick them up alongside him. The book will make you want to find a heavy stone in the middle of a field and hoist it.

Trader Joe’s Fall Harvest Salsa. Last week my family made the trip down I-44 to see my folks in OKC. One of the small pleasures of these visits is to check out my mom’s snack stash. She’s always discovering new things, and this latest visit didn’t disappoint, as she introduced me to this tasty salsa. Along with tomatoes, it’s made with fire-roasted tomatillos, honey-roasted pumpkin, diced butternut squash, and chopped sweet apples, plus jalapeños for heat. Tastes like fall. In addition to pairing it with classic tortilla chips, Trader Joe’s suggests spooning it over ricotta on a cracker or adding some vegetable broth, heating it up, and turning it into a soup. I’ve gone through a jar of it in a few days putting it on my morning eggs.

Pressure. This film came out this year, and it’s about time someone made a movie about one of the most difficult and agonizing decisions in world history: when to launch the D-Day invasion into France. Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had to decide whether to go ahead with the original target date or delay the invasion due to the threat of potential storms; moving ahead held the danger of capsizing the landing forces, delaying might reveal the plan to the Germans. It’s not often that a film makes a weather forecast the fulcrum of the plot, nor places a meteorologist as its protagonist. But it manages to turn these elements into compelling narrative grist, as a Scottish and an American meteorologist battle it out as to who knows what’s coming. It’s a good film, prevented from being a great one by the miscasting of Brendan Fraser as Eisenhower; he’s not buyable as Ike in either appearance or demeanor. 

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner. If you feel like fewer people host dinners and parties than did in your parents’ and grandparents’ day, it’s definitely not in your head. Over the last fifty years, the share of Americans who say they host friends and family in their home at least monthly has declined by 70%. In this interesting article, Derek Thompson unpacks the phenomenon and what may be behind it: the rise of busy dual-earner households, an increase in the amount of time parents devote to their kids, and a decline in people having the most fundamental thing you need to host a party: friends to invite! Being alone in your house has also simply gotten more comfortable and at least superficially sating; hosting events requires time, money, and overcoming significant issues of social coordination; it’s a lot easier to just lie on the couch and watch short-form videos on your phone. It’s led to a situation where “Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over.” But as Derek points out, while we may think that’s what we want, it’s not really what we want. Parties add true pizzazz to life. Don’t wait for someone else to host something; take the initiative and do it yourself! 

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: Attention Is a Gift and Dying Breed Dialogues: Gretchen Rubin’s Dark Secrets of Adulthood.

Quote of the Week

Ability involves responsibility; power, to its last particle, is duty.

—Alexander MacLaren