Greetings from … Bar Harbor, Maine! TLW and I made the trip up Down East yesterday so I could visit an intern who is doing her internship at Mount Desert Island Hospital. We’re combining business and pleasure and staying on for a few days in this beautiful part of the Northeast. When I was a kid, I lived not too far from Bar Harbor for a few years, so it is fun to pass through towns I vaguely remember and reminisce. Last night we went on a Bar Harbor ghost tour (learned there is a ghost cat named Seawater who roams the streets at night), and later today we will do our favorite thing to do when going to a new area, take a food tour! We also plan to hike in Acadia National Park and some other cool things. I’ll report back next week on these things if they turn out well so you, too, can plan your trip up Down East. Oh - and the student is doing great!
On to the links! As usual, willing good for all of you!
(Pic above of the Harbor at sunset)
Read
What: Open Culture, Why You Do Your Best Thinking In The Shower: Creativity & the “Incubation Period”
Why: Sometimes you put something out into the universe and the universe answers. Last weekend I wrote about “the shower time test” and after I published it, I thought to myself, I wish I had a reference to support my musings. And the next day this article about why we have creative thinking in the shower popped into my feed. It’s a fun article - the incubation period is useful to think about.
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Watch
What: TED, Bari Weiss: Courage, the most important virtue (21 min)
Why: Weiss makes an argument for conserving classical liberal values, like a rules-based society. I know, it’s crazy talk. If you listen to either the MAGA Right or the Social Justice Left, you know we have to just burn it all down because America is a failed experiment. But maybe it isn’t. And maybe we just need to stick to the classical liberal, Enlightenment values that have been steadily bringing the reality of America closer to the ideal of America over the last 250 or so years. In other words, Weiss has gone from being a liberal to being a conservative. To be clear, she is a conservative in the sense that she thinks there are things worth conserving, which is what it means to be a conservative. Those things worth conserving are the values of classical liberalism - a focus on and respect for the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of contract, respect for property rights amongst other things. She tips her hand when she talks about the thin line between civilization and barbarism - the classic words that define a conservative. (More on that in this coming Sunday’s FITW newsletter).
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Listen
What: Hardly Working with Brent Orrell, Brad Wilcox on Marriage and Family Stability (52 min)
Why: Wilcox is a sociologist who does research on marriage and family stability and makes an argument for the beneficial effects of marriage not only on child rearing, but long-term financial well-being of individuals, and ultimately long-term happiness. He’s clearly a conservative focused on heterosexual marriage, but I think the lessons he draws will be shown over time to apply to same-sex marriage as well.
Based on this interview I read his book “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization”. Note the civilization-barbarism axis again. The book is excellent, and has good insight into what it takes to sustain a long-lasting marriage. He does favor (as do the statistics) religious participation (he does not discriminate among particular religions - they all seem to work based on his research).