Scope of work

“White Elantra, there she is — Samantha,” I said. I was pointing at the white Elantra driving slowly towards me. Then the white Elantra drove right past me, and I said “Oh — there she goes.” I had been waiting for Samantha to pick me up for something like seventeen minutes. When she accepted my ride she was to the east of me, and heading further east, on US 1. I needed to go west on US 1, and for a worried moment I thought about canceling the ride.

Our buildings are often long lived things, capable of outlasting the society that produced them. The Egyptian Pyramids are still with us, thousands of years after the civilization that produced them collapsed. The shrine of Ise Jingu is an interesting contrast to this - the buildings there are always young, perpetually renewed by a thousand-year old cultural practice. The Ise Jingu Grand Shrine sits in the forests of Ise-Shima National Park, in Japan’s Mie Prefecture.

A PSA: I’m pleased to announce that the SOW Reading Group is reading Brian Potter’s The Origins of Efficiency as our next book! We’ll be discussing it on Thursdays at noon ET from now through August, with a group conversation with Brian when we finish the book.

My coffee table is kind of a mess, the number of books on it having become ostentatious over the past couple of months. Of course there’s House, which I’m enjoying reading with the SOW Reading Group, but that’s just the tip. Indeed there are dozens of texts next to, underneath, and on top of my paperback copy of House, each with a bookmark sticking out to indicate my meandering progress.

Recently I had cause to purchase a bag of perlite and realized that I had no idea what the stuff was. Perlite is a mineral, which we mine from the ground and then process in different ways for different uses. Agricultural or “expanded” perlite, the kind you might mix into some potting soil or use to root a couple of monstera cuttings, is incredibly light by volume; the eight-quart bag I purchased made similarly-sized bags of potting soil seem positively leaden.

It was the third week of July, 2024. The high temperature for the day was twenty-nine degrees Celsius, which for the unfamiliar is hot enough that I made sure to ask the people at the bake shop if the cupcakes’ frosting was prone to melting in the heat. They looked up my order — three six-packs of confetti cupcakes — and said no, the cupcakes’ buttercream frosting would be fine. “They won’t melt,” this young woman told me, her hair tied back into a taut, slick bun. She smiled reassuringly.

Red Rocks At first I furrow my brow. This post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign in.

I can see the basketball hoop now, through my window, on this warm Wednesday evening in June. I walk underneath it almost every day. It belongs to someone on my block, and is installed on their property. But it faces the sidewalk, away from their house, and as a result it has become infrastructure of real import. I see kids from all over the block, and sometimes from other blocks, shooting on it, their practice interrupted by every passing pedestrian.

For cosmetic purposes, your “face” extends well past your chin, and all the way around your neck, and down past your clavicular notch to somewhere in your upper sternum. This is just one of the things I’ve learned recently. After I learned it, I started putting face lotion on the whole area, all of my face. I can’t say I’ve noticed any improvements since I started doing this, but I’m trusting the system; it doesn’t seem to be making my face any worse, at least.

2026-06-08 • 11 min read One of the things I’ve been struggling with recently is whether to write about my personal life, and if so, whether to publish what I write. There’s a subtle relationship between these two questions — whether to write, and whether to publish — and its orientation is the opposite of what I would have expected. That is, I mostly think that I should not publish much about my personal life.