Yearly Archives: 2024

Blog-worthy in 2024

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I’ve been thinking about a “things-Steve-put-on-his-blog-in-2004” post. With 252 posts it could quickly get out of hand and become one of those endless Xmas letters people send out and almost nobody reads. (Much like this post) It seems unlikely anyone would want to browse all 252 posts but this link will pull them up or you can jump to the first posts of the year.

See what I mean? Just like one of those Xmas letters that nobody reads. But this is blogging in its purest form

The Walmart Effect

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From The Atlantic: New research suggests that the company makes the communities it operates in poorer—even taking into account its famous low prices.

“In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.”

“..poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.”

“When Walmart comes to town, it uses its low prices to undercut competitors and become the dominant player in a given area, forcing local mom-and-pop grocers and regional chains to slash their costs or go out of business altogether. As a result, the local farmers, bakers, and manufacturers that once sold their goods to those now-vanished retailers are gradually replaced by Walmart’s array of national and international suppliers. (By some estimates, the company has historically sourced 60 to 80 percent of its goods from China alone.) As a result, Wiltshire finds, five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent, with most of the decline concentrated in “goods-producing establishments.”

Reading Myself to Sleep by Billy Collins

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The house is all in darkness except for this corner bedroom
where the lighthouse of a table lamp is guiding
my eyes through the narrow channels of print,

and the only movement in the night is the slight
swirl of curtains, the easy lift and fall of my breathing,
and the flap of pages as they turn in the wind of my hand.

Is there a more gentle way to go into the night
than to follow an endless rope of sentences
and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page

into the first tentative flicker of a dream,
passing out of the bright precincts of attention
like cigarette smoke passing through a window screen?

All late readers know this sinking feeling of falling
into the liquid of sleep and then rising again
to the call of a voice that you are holding in your hands,

as if pulled from the sea back into a boat
where a discussion is raging on some subject or other,
on Patagonia or Thoroughbreds or the nature of war.

Is there a better method of departure by night
than this quiet bon voyage with an open book,
the sole companion who has come to see you off,

to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?
I can hear the rush and sweep of fallen leaves outside
where the world lies unconscious, and I can feel myself

dissolving, drifting into a story that will never be written,
letting the book slip to the floor where I will find it
in the morning when I surface, wet and streaked with
daylight.

Cliché by Billy Collins

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My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.

It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private.
Every reader must be a translator with a thick lexicon.

No one has read the whole thing but me.
Most dip into the middle for a few paragraphs,
then move on to other shelves, other libraries.
Some have time only for the illustrations.

I love to feel the daily turning of the pages,
the sentences unwinding like string,
and when something really important happens,
I walk out to the edge of the page and, always the student,
make an asterisk, a little star, in the margin.

More room for books

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I love books. Which is not exactly the same as saying I love to read. I love real, paper books. Hardback or paperback. Tried audio books a long time ago but that’s just having someone read a book to me. Just not the same.

While I’m being persnickety, I like to own the books I read rather than getting them from the local library. No idea how much I’ve spent for books on Amazon in the last 20 years. Don’t have to care, fortunately.

I did a book purge some years ago and donated a truckload to the local library for their annual book sale. I tried to hang on to books I thought I might read again but some good titles got lost in the process. But now I’m about out of shelf space again.


So today I assembled a new bookshelf and seeing all that room gives me a warm glow.

Why Do Your 30 Trillion Cells Feel Like a Self?

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I first became aware of David Eagleman in 2011 as the author of a little book titled Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Which led me to his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain As luck would have it, he gave a lecture later that year at nearby Westminster College (How the Internet Will Save the World: Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilizations) which I found fascinating. So when I discovered his weekly podcast I was quick to check it out and discovered he has done a deep dive into one of my favorite topics: the illusion of the self. (73 blog posts) Why Do Your 30 Trillion Cells Feel Like a Self? Part 1 & Part 2

WARNING: These are long. Part 1 is 30 min, Part 2 one hour.

Happy Winter Solstice

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ChatGPT: “The solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year, was celebrated in many pre-Christian cultures. Festivals like Yule in Scandinavian regions and Saturnalia in Rome marked this time with feasts, gift-giving, and decorations—elements that later found their way into Christmas traditions. When Christianity spread, many pagan practices were adapted to ease the transition and make the new religion more familiar. December 25th, chosen to celebrate Christ’s birth, aligns closely with solstice festivals, though the exact date of Jesus’ birth isn’t known.”

Thanks to James Nelson