5 Quick Things #290 🥵

life without 'likes,' the pain of motherhood, work that stays at work, & the great conversation

Hi friends,

I hope you've had a good week and somehow stayed cooler than we did (the heat index rose to 120 around these parts 🔥)... I pulled the cucumber plants because they were absolutely fried, but it's all good — we got more cukes than we could possibly eat in a year, and that's after giving tons away + canning seven quarts of pickles as gifts (we've still got four quarts left for us in our fridge — yeesh). We're gathering green beans by the handful and so far we've got four one-gallon bags of 'em in the freezer (basically, we're running out of fridge and freezer space). Next up is tomatoes, and then peppers, and aside from the herbs, I'm letting the rest of the garden go all Scorched Earth because I've learned after doing this enough that I hate gardening in Central Texas during August and September 🫠. No, thank you.

Today and tomorrow I'm in an all-day virtual conference on classical education, and the first session starts soon—Joshua Gibbs always blows my mind in all the good ways, so I'm sure I'll be taking furious notes nonstop, even as I listen from the passenger seat of the car tomorrow as we drive to pick up my youngest to summer camp.

And a little heads up: after this 5QT there will be one more next Friday, and then it's time for my annual month-long break! I'll take all of July off to do some offline work, travel, and generally play and live my life. I began taking a decently-sized internet break back in 2010 when I could feel the burnout of constant online work, and I’ve never stopped this tradition. This break makes all the difference in the world, and it never fails to reset my perspective.¹

Summer Idyll on the Farm, by Paul Wilhelm Keller-Reutlingen (1920) #

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5 Quick Things ☕️

1. The trend continues—another Commonplace reader deleted her social media and unpacks why in a lovely essay: “I’m still thinking in ‘Instagramese’ even when I’m not on the app. I’m taking photos and thinking of a caption. I want to live the kind of life that doesn’t have captions, or hashtags, or a like count.” Amen.

2. My dear friend Haley had a wild birth experience a few years ago, and this week she both wrote about it and connected it to Mary, the pain of motherhood overall, and the meaning behind the visitation. “Christianity is the strange religion in which God himself chose to have a mother. He not only created motherhood but experienced the beauty of being mothered.”

3. This was a wonderful conversation about the classical cannon of great books, and how it’s not just a “bunch of dead white guys.” Anika Prather and Chris Perrin unpack the diversity of the canon, what standards we should hold to add more (and why we should!), and why the Great Conversation is for all of us.

4. Young people in the work world can’t fathom what is was like pre-cell phone days, when you weren’t reachable outside the workplace. Writer Dan Kois asks several colleagues roughly his age to regale bits of memories of life in the early 2000s: “We’d all sit on barstools in the kitchen, passing back and forth newspapers and reading interesting stories out loud. It was like social media, I guess.”

5. And finally, undergraduate excuses used in other contexts.²

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Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📺

• The new (and final!) season of Endeavour

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Quotable 💬

“We shape our dwellings and afterward, our dwellings shape us.”

— Winston Churchill #

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How do you mostly get the news? 🗞

It's fascinating how quickly trends and mores have changed. I vividly remember getting the newspaper from our front porch every morning and bringing it to my dad, who read it near-daily (and I'd get the comics + crossword). As for present-day me, I tend to get my news from three main types of sources: digital newspapers, podcasts, and newsletters, taking care to hear from a variety of perspectives (right and left).

Find this week’s poll here.

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Quick Links 🔗

• 📐Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📔 Releasing August 29, 2023: First Light & Eventide

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New from Word on Fire: The Pentateuch 🕍

Volume 3 of the Word on Fire Bible is finally here, and as always, it's stunningly beautiful! I have all of them so far, and these are heirloom-quality, gorgeously typeset and designed versions of the Word of God that makes me want to read deeper and more richly, as well as pass down these volumes to my children.

The Pentateuch contains the first five books of the Old Testament, and this volume includes the full text, as well as commentary from philosophers and theologians old and new, word studies, and my favorite: art studies. Throughout this Bible, you'll find the world's most beautiful artwork, both ancient and contemporary, along with details from art historians about their significance and connection to Scripture.

Truly... Commonplace readers are all about beauty that leads to goodness that leads to truth. Word on Fire Bibles are the epitome of this idea, put on paper. As Bishop Barron puts it, they’re “cathedrals in print.”

Yes, they sent me a copy to tell you about it. But I pay my own cash-money for additional copies as gifts, and I wouldn't so enthusiastically sing this Bible's praises if I didn't wholeheartedly believe in it, as well as the previous two volumes.

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Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What’s one thing you can take off your to-do list because you don’t actually need to do it?

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Take care,

- Tsh

p.s. Potato Europe, Tomato Europe.

1. I may post pics of Ireland for paying subscribers (if the connection allows), but otherwise, I'm sure you'll hear from me all about wandering those green hills come August.

2. There are very similar excuses with high school students, too. Lately, these are more akin to, “Reading old books gives me anxiety, so I wasn’t able to read this one. Thanks for understanding.”