Weekly newsletter: Hold thy tongue (and loosen thy pen)

This week: telling your notebook the stuff you shouldn't tell anyone, idleness, and more...

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Hey y'all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

It's full-on summer now, and temperatures and tempers will just keep rising. I wrote (again) about telling your notebook all the stuff you shouldn't tell anyone else (yet).
Every year or so I like re-read Tim Kreider's essay, "The Busy Trap," which contains the line, "I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know." (If you haven't read his essay collection, We Learn Nothing, you're in for a treat.) An ancestor of "The Busy Trap" is Robert Louis Stevenson's "An Apology for Idlers," which you can get in a handsome paperback, part of Penguin's Great Ideas series. (Also check out my "idleness" tag, which is, last I checked, about 50 posts deep.)
How the band OK Go gets ideas.
I've been reading Neil Postman's 1993 book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. It's not quite as good as Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, but it's really helping me understand this cultural moment we're in. (The other writer who has helped is Ursula Franklin, especially her book, The Real World of Technology.) Actually, I might add Mike Judge to that list, too: Silicon Valley continues to be hilarious and skewering.
This profile of pianist Craig Taborn is a fascinating read about creativity, process, and the tension between making and sharing. Somewhat related, here's a great Twitter thread about rethinking self-promotion as showing your work.
The story behind a photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe looking through a piece of cheese.
You know those stone monuments of the 10 Commandments people are always defending or destroying? Turns out they started as a publicity stunt cooked up by producer Cecil B. DeMille for the movie.
Ear candy: the "deluxe" release of Prince's Purple Rain is, unsurprisingly, fantastic. (Many of his b-sides would be considered career highlights for any other artist.)
Eye candy: if you like violent action movies, I re-watched John Wick with my wife (we still haven't seen the sequel!) and it was even better than we remembered. (RIP actor Michael Nyqvist.) If you don't like violent action movies, here are some Muppets singing to The Beastie Boys.
Need some summer reading? Here's a list of my favorite books from the past ELEVEN (!!!) years of my reading life.

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xoxo,

Austin