Lars Mytting:

Many people feel that a living fire gives a rich experience. We are drawn to the fire, just as we once gathered around the flames in former times. For many there is a qualitative difference in the heat supplied by a radiator and that provided by a woodburning stove. A stove can glow with heat. Your feet won’t get warm when you turn on the inverter, and a radiator has to be on for quite some time before it will drive the chill from a cold house. Electric radiators seldom deliver more than two thousand watts, whereas even a small woodstove is easily able to generate six thousand watts, and many stoves as much as fourteen thousand watts. Scientifically speaking, there is no measurable difference between the heat generated by electricity and that produced by combustion, but the body reacts in a different way to the more intense heat from the stove, not least because modern fireplaces with glass doors radiate heat. An ordinary electric radiator or heat pump warms only the air in the room, but flames and glowing embers release electromagnetic, infrared radiation that has much the same characteristics as sunlight. Warming occurs in the skin and the body as the radiation arrives, with an immediacy and an intensity that bring a feeling of well-being and security. The indoor climate is also slightly changed. The consumption of oxygen encourages a degree of air circulation, and the stove absorbs a quantity of dust. These factors, combined with the smell of wood and a little woodsmoke, and the sight of the ever-changing play of flames, connect us with the primordial magic of the fireplace.

Something else to consider is the way the woodburning stove brings people into a very direct relationship with the weather. You are your own thermostat, you are the connecting link between the subzero temperatures outside and the relative warmth within. When you heat with wood you have to go out to the woodpile, come back in again, and start your fight against the cold. It’s bitter, and it bites, but you can do something about it. In this one small but vital arena you are in touch with the bare necessities of life, and in that moment you know the same deep sense of satisfaction that the cave dweller knew.

It may also be the case that we have become modern enough to look back and appreciate things that the generation before us did not value. Things go around. With the advent of kitchenware made out of hard plastic, the wooden bowls and utensils were consigned to the flames (those that survived are now sold everywhere as “rustic antiques”), and people were happy to see them go up in smoke. At last they were rid of that heavy, crude rubbish that was impossible to clean properly. They probably felt pretty much as we do today when we finally get rid of a sluggish old computer. The generation before ours covered the oak floors with linoleum and hid the intricate beauties of the Swiss chalet-style houses behind sheets of plywood. For us, their time has come again.

Yet heating with wood is not a nostalgic gesture on the part of the Scandinavians. It is both a source of energy and a deeply rooted part of our culture. The way a person cuts and stacks wood can tell you a great deal about him, and the woodpiles you see round about in the countryside are a reminder that wood is the connection between the forest and the home. It’s a modern and practical form of the old Romantic nationalism, as much a part of the soul of our countries as cross-country skiing, mediocre local newspapers, and elk hunting. […]

Henry David Thoreau is frequently quoted on the subject of our relationship to wood. In 1845 Thoreau went to live in the forest because life in modern American society had become too hectic for him (that’s right, in 1845). In Walden he wrote: “It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors.”

Cf. Jeremy Abel on the participatory act lighting, using, and enjoying a fire.

(I see now that I’ve quoted some of this before in a post appropriately titled “woodstove ethics,” and included this later quote from Mytting: “…wood is [not merely] a source of energy; it is … an extremely adaptable form of energy. It can be shared with your neighbor, it doesn’t leak, it doesn’t need cable, a match will light it, it can be stored for year after year, and even inferior-quality wood will still do the job for you. There is peculiar security in the fact that this is energy in solid and tactile form. You can carry it into your house and know that the weight of what you are carrying represents exactly the amount of heat you will be getting.”)

Mr. Hadden Turner:

There are reasons that supermarket apples taste so barren in comparison. Our national supermarket chains are antithetical to local food. They stock and sell the products of the global food system, which have been adapted not to suit local climates, local soils, and local culinary preferences, but the needs and wants of the system: transportability, perfect appearance, standardization, and efficiency. Taste is subordinate to these industrial qualities, as too is nutritional value. Hence when we, the consumers, bite into a supermarket apple, we are left with a weak and watery taste in our mouths rather than the rich and juicy flavors our forefathers experienced.

In short, the global corporations that produce and sell supermarket foods are so powerful, profitable, and popular that local heirloom foods  scarcely stand a chance within that system. Apples, like tomatoes and cheeses and almost every other kind of local food, are neglected and outcompeted, with tragic results. Every year, many acres of traditional orchards are grubbed up as their owners succumb to the financial pressures of the modern food system, and their local varieties become scarce or lost altogether. With each variety that is lost, a unique taste becomes extinct, never to be enjoyed again.

The solutions offered are not at all surprising: grow more local food in your backyard if and when you can, and buy from small, local farms and businesses if and when you can.

Of course, few of us can afford to shop exclusively at the local farmers market or farm shop, and the last thing I want to do is to burden the conscience of anyone living paycheck to paycheck.  No one should feel guilty for not buying organic or local, when doing so would make it impossible to feed himself and his family.

I am convinced, however, that many more of us could afford to consume in a more local and ethical manner if we sat down and thought about it. We don’t realize how little we spend on food as citizens of western nations and how anomalous this state of affairs is in the course of human history. If we made other budgetary sacrifices — fewer consumer goods, fewer ultra-processed foods, fewer streaming subscriptions — and instead bought more local good food, we would be doing our local places good at the same time as doing good to our bodies. Which, when you  think about it, is not that much of a sacrifice after all.

Moreover, for those of us who are able to regularly and consistently shop local, who can afford to buy what is delicious and of superior quality: we ought not to enjoy these goods by ourselves. All of us are members of local communities, whether big or small. Thus, there exists ample opportunity for us to share this goodness convivially around the table with others. What better feast to offer your neighbors and friends than a table laden with local delicacies and local produce, all rich with flavor and quality, and prepared with love? We are feasting to the health of our place, the health of our communities, and the health of our bodies. I can think of few things more delightful than this — especially when there is an apple crumble for dessert.

Meghan and I are always looking for ways to improve, but it’s nice to affirm that we’re basically doing a lot of what we can right now. Not much of the growing — a cherry tomato plant for spur-of-the-moment plunder is about it — but the insistent and self-limiting act of buying from small, local farms and businesses. I can confirm the obvious: that it’s much more expensive; but, prices being what they are, it’s not as much more as you’d think, and sometimes actually cheaper. And that self-limiting part is important; it’s good for your purse, your health, and your soul — and beyond:

When we find ways to preserve and value (and enjoy) local foods, the truth is that the fruit we gather comes in many forms beyond plums and meat and apples. Many ways of supporting local food also create neighborly ties and foster goodwill and gathering spaces for a local community. These are the things that help not just local economies, but local cultures thrive. We share greater conviviality, learn more about each other’s backgrounds and struggles, and put our time and money where our mouths are, showing that we truly value the landscape and the people around us.

“Yes” by Mr. Paul J. Pastor:

Were I a molecule, I’d make my home
Within the vast halls of a solid stone,
Pass through magnetic fields, ascend my throne
And rule the echoes, permanent, alone,

And if I were a particle of light,
I’d sear my burrow through the velvet night,
With perfect elegance, prismatic might,
And skewer darkness. Such would be my right,

But I am merely human. Sinew. Skin.
Too large to hide—instead I’m hid within.
A little righteousness. A little sin.
One little word that flutters out and in.

Within hours of the truce ending, Russian glide bombs struck a Ukrainian school building in Komyshuvakha, a village in the region next to Kherson, seemingly timed to coincide with a weekly aid distribution there. It killed at least 43 people, with 30 still unaccounted for.

Noah Smith:

This midterm blowout was the first step toward building a better country and putting the chaotic, shameful Trump Era behind us. But there’s a lot of work to be done, both on the ideological side and in terms of crafting a policy program. The morning after the revolution is always when the hard work begins.

Mike Warren:

And so the fight for the future of the Republican Party, and the political right in this country, begins in earnest.

Personally, what I’m reminded of most is that old saying, “This too shall pass” — and how we generally forget the point is that it applies in both good and bad times.

Abraham Lincoln, Wisconsin State Fair, September 30, 1859:

And by the successful, and the unsuccessful, let it be remembered, that while occasions like the present, bring their sober and durable benefits, the exultations and mortifictions of them, are but temporary; that the victor shall soon be the vanquished, if he relax in his exertion; and that the vanquished this year, may be victor the next, in spite of all competition.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

My tea leaves don’t suggest any significant rejection of AI or crypto present in last night’s results; less causation than simply indirect, if still genetically related, correlation. But it’s nice to see.

Omar Mohammed:

There was one man who did not run. I heard him. From inside the house, beginning at three in the morning on June 6—the hour the attack on Mosul began—I could hear sustained gunfire from a single position. It did not stop when the other positions fell silent. Through the hours that followed, I heard ISIS fighters calling out to him, telling him to surrender, promising that if he gave himself up, he would live. Each time they called, he answered with gunfire. The exchange repeated itself for hours-the voices, the offer, and then the shots that refused it. Around six in the morning, the shooting from his position stopped. I do not know whether his weapon jammed or whether his ammunition was simply gone. What I heard next was a storm of gunfire directed at him—a concentrated volley from multiple weapons at once. Then silence. He was the last man to stand against ISIS in Mosul. I never learned his name.

The emergency bell at the University of Mosul rang at the wrong time—and it had never worked before, not once in all my years on that campus; when trouble came we got warning shots from security if we were lucky, and if we were not we found ourselves caught in the cross fire berween soldiers and terrorists, but on June 5, 2014, the bell that had never rung actually rang—and then an ambulance was burning with a policeman’s body still inside it, and then the city I had spent my life studying began to disappear. Not slowly. Not in stages that could be debated, contested, and perhaps reversed. It disappeared the way a man disappears when soldiers abandon their uniforms and walk away from their posts: all at once, and with a silence underneath the noise that was worse than the noise itself.

The beginning of Mosul’s fall does not return to me as a clean sequence of facts. It comes back first as a disturbance. Heat. Dust. A bell ringing at the wrong time. A city loses confidence before it understands that it is losing itself.

Mosul sits on the Tigris River in northern Iraq, roughly halfway between Baghdad and the Turkish border. The Tigris is one of the two rivers of ancient Mesopotamia—the land between the rivers, the territory that textbooks call the Cradle of Civilization—and Mosul is built on and around the ruins of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital that fell to Babylon in 612 BC, a city whose name appears in the Hebrew Bible and whose stones are still visible from across the streets. For most of the modern era, it was Iraq’s second-largest city, home to more than a million people, and it was the kind of place that carried its age consciously. The Tigris runs wide there, the color of hammered tin, and the old city rises from its western bank in a dense layering of neighborhoods that have been inhabited continuously for centuries. Moslawis—the city’s people—had a word for those who did not understand this: They were people who had not yet sat long enough by the river.

My family had sat by that river for a long time. My grandfather on my father’s side came from generations of wool traders who had shipped their goods south to Basra along the Tigris, with England as the ultimate destination—families whose trade news had once flown between Mosul and Basra by pigeon, long before any nation called Iraq existed.

The family home was in the city’s oldest neighborhood, a few minutes walk from the water. My grandfather on my mother’s side had been an unrepentant communist under first a monarchy and then a succession of military dictators, sentenced to death four separate times for refusing to bend to prevailing political winds. Each time, a change of government spared his life, and he died in his seventies—a normal death, I would later say, after Mosul had spent years learning what abnormal deaths looked like. Between them, these two men gave me something I would not fully understand until my city was occupied: the wool trader’s patience with systems, routes, and the slow accumulation of practical knowledge, and the communist’s insistence that it was possible to refuse the terms imposed by powerful men, even when refusal seemed futile. I grew up in a house that loved the sound of music—a house where music was part of the air, part of how the family understood itself, long before anyone thought to forbid it.

I could quote every paragraph of the opening chapter. I’m sure I’ll quote more. This is a book and a “topic” — a landmark event and tragedy beyond words — that I can neglect other things for.

On June 10, 2014, the city of Mosul—Iraq’s second largest, home to nearly two million people, built on and around the ruins of the Assyrian capital Nineveh—fell to the Islamic State in a single night. The Iraqi Army dissolved. Soldiers abandoned their uniforms in the streets. By morning, a city that had been continuously inhabited for seven thousand years belonged to a force that intended to abolish everything it had been.

I was inside the city when it fell. I am a historian. When ISIS took Mosul, I made a choice that would define the next three years of my life and reshape everything I understood about myself. I stayed. I documented. I refused to let the occupiers become the sole authors of what was happening to my city.

What followed—what I built, what I carried, what I lost, and what it did to me—is this book.

It is not a policy analysis, though it contains evidence that policymakers will need. It is not a military history, though it documents the largest urban battle of the twenty-first century. It is not a spy memoir, though the work it describes required deception, concealment, and the daily possibility of death.

It is the record of a historian who was compelled by the fall of his city to become something he had never intended to be. I have written it because the record demands it. Because the dead deserve to be counted by someone who knew them as people, not as categories. And because someone should say, clearly and without evasion, what it costs a human being to carry a city’s truth through three years of terror and come out the other side uncertain whether the man who came out is the same man who went in.

Trust no one. Document everything.

That was the rule. This is the book.

—Omar Mohammed

Paris, 2026

(Preface to his book Mosul Eye)

Walking redirects our muddled thoughts. Walking slows us down, and resets our chronometer to the natural speed of life. It helps us to connect with each other in shared conversation, or merely in the silent rhythmic pace. It echoes history and tradition through a most simple movement that has remained “essentially unimproved since the dawn of time.”

Walking? That’s how you keep the barbarians at bay? But… but…, I thought it was Reading, and being Informed, and reminding people that it’s The Year 2026!

Whenever I pick up C. K. Williams’ Repair poems, there are a few that I instinctively flip to. One of them I was just reading the day before reading the Gaskovskis above.

I’ve quoted it before, but this is from his poem “Risk”:

Difficult to know whether humans are inordinately anxious
about crisis, calamity, disaster, or unknowingly crave them. 
These horrific conditionals, these expected unexpecteds,
we dwell on them, flinch, feint, steel ourselves:
but mightn’t our forebodings actually precede anxiety?
Isn’t so much sheer heedfulness emblematic of desire?

How do we come to believe that wrenching ourselves to attention
is the most effective way for dealing with intimations of catastrophe?
Consciousness atremble: might what makes it so
not be the fear of what the future might or might not bring,
but the wish for fear, for concentration, vigilance?
As though life were more convincing resonating like a blade.

“We engorge our little sorrows,” he says, “beat our drums, perform our dances of aversion.” Isn’t that a strange thing about much of our “awareness”? That some of our strictest attention is ultimately an aversion; we use our concentration, our thoughtfulness, in order to avert.

One of the funny things about the ancient sin of sloth is that it has very little to do with laziness as we usually understand it: the hardest working workaholic can be the most slothful person in the world. Slothfulness, acedia, is “a vice of the productive,” says Rebecca DeYoung. “The vice of acedia in its originating context, then, names the monks’ resistance to inner personal transformation (conversio moralis in the Benedictine tradition), as well as the people and practices that foster it. In fact, they would likely raise spiritual concerns about making a virtue out of our diligent busyness or productive activity.”

Humans are good (and bad) at thinking. But nowhere is this ability put to more intense use than when thinking our way out of what ought to be done.

Aquinas, says DeYoung, saw acedia as “aversion to the divine good in us.” (Politically speaking, might it also be aversion to the divine good in others — averting our minds from the always present divine good in all others?) And he saw its opposite, its remedy, not as attention — or not attention per se — but as Sabbath rest.

The final stanza from Williams:

Always, “These gigantic inconceivables.”
Always, “What will have been done to me?”
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,
though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?

I know I have said this before but I’d like to move my attention back in the direction of newsletter writing. There was a time when I easily had time for all of it — working, playing, reading, writing, studying, blogging, hiking, photographing, relaxing. Now, and in many very good ways and for good and natural reasons, not so much.

Probably all digital life inherently succumbs to the fast and superficial, but that doesn’t mean all digital communication is monolithic. There may be some areas where the cons of digital communication are actually outweighed by the pros or, better, where it sufficiently draws on some aspect of the non-digital, the real. (“A record of life lived elsewhere,” to use a phrase I’ve borrowed for this topic before; restoring a self-hijacked visual cortex, to use another. I do like these occasions for being reminded of older posts.)

Regardless of the reasons, I feel my online life has become sporadic and disconnected. And that lack of time I mentioned leaves me striking at almost nothing but lower hanging, less satisfying and less meaningful fruit. One way to reverse this is simply to slow down, to allow more of that non-digital, organic matter to have its effect on this trembling consciousness.

Aside from the usual call to get out and touch grass rake some leaves, it’s not a bad time to adjust my own digital landscape. Importantly, the newsletter thing is for me a way of writing that is, or has certainly felt, closer to the act of walking. And I want more physical, mental, and digital walking.

I am still fairly new to online life, having only started to explore it in 2020. And that began, not a little coincidentally, with this quote from John Ruskin: “It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”

I am haunted regularly by another line from Ruskin, about how the more we speak of our intentions, the less chance there is of our realizing them. So I say this with great risk, but I’ve had 90% of a newsletter written for the better part of a year now, and I’m hoping to get that sent out before Thanksgiving.

September 2021 — Looking east over Bradley Lake from Garnet Canyon below Middle Teton, Meghan hiking up the trail on the left, looking forward to a short snack break before the rock scramble up the Southwest Couloir. Recycling this from one of the previous posts above. More pictures from that perfect hike here.