our bodies weaken, our minds become more contemplative. At first, we try to reverse the makings of time. We then hope to avoid them, but it's a futile enterprise. Our running pace declines no matter what we change in our training regime
the usual surf session is on weekdays. Dawn patrol in days with no morning meetings. It’s seldom a solitary activity in the summer, but it can be in winter days when the forecast doesn’t show size. The break is Malibu Surfrider Beach. I…
we visited the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks in early September. Each trip is an opportunity to experiment with answering the question: what is the least amount of gear and clothes that I can possibly take? I’m convinced that…
the usual trail run starts by waking up early morning on the right location. That is four minutes away from Malibu Creek State Park. The clothes selection is governed by the weather, and in this winter I’m loving my Patagonia Thermal…
this is the first book that I have finished from the re-reading list I compiled a while ago. And this is the book, the one I would take with me to a prolonged quarantine, and the one I’d give to all my friends if I knew they were going to…
without us noticing, we have a new ritual. Father and daughter only. Sometimes Sirius comes by and watches us, but he lets us be for the most part. Every evening, after the family has finished dinner, Luna calls me from the stairs, or…
i finished reading Surely You’re Joking on the last day of November and it is definitely one of the most amusing, pleasurable, and inspiring books I’ve read. Feynman won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his contributions in the field of quantum…
ok. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in 2017 and I’m happy to report that I was a bit ahead of the curve. I had already read Never Let Me Go and gifted four copies of the book to people dear to me. Never Let Me Go is definitely high on the…
i picked up this book because it promised to express a bold position not only against religion in general but, given the state of affairs since 9/11, Islam in particular. Sam Harris’s unforgiving appetite for logical rigor and…
marcus aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors, wrote one of the final classical books of stoicism. The Greek title, Ta Eis Heauton, simply means “To Himself”. Someone, somewhere, sometime used “Meditations” as the title, and it…
our perception of time is not linear, but logarithmic. It feels as if every new day were shorter than the previous day. Today, at 40, each year passes almost unnoticed and I struggle finding a significant event to stamp on every single…
and then, gradually and inexorably, the fire begins to fade, and worse: the flames are not extinguished by themselves or by the Islamic powers of Asia but by their Christian brethren of Europe
this is volume II of III of the history of the Byzantine Empire. This volume, unlike the first one, covers a relatively short period of time: from the year 800 with the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Western Empire to Easter…
"our civilization has never adequately acknowledged the debt it owes to the Empire of the East," writes John Julius Norwich in the introduction of this magnificent book. In very rare occasions, historians rise to the level of the history…
It was a long overdue debt with “literature.” A checkmark on a list of titles that the scholarly-bent reader thinks is required to enter the dignified club of literarte.
the song was stronger than the guitar, than the place and everything. The song had to come out because it had to come out. It was as if I was there because the song had to come out, and not viceversa.
