Scope of work

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.

2026-05-05 • 1 min read Of all of the questions I've faced during adulthood, perhaps the most enduring is how much of myself I ought to devote to homemaking. There are, I'm told, people who navigate this question with ease, floating from house to house without agony, investing their domestic energy freely, taking whatever comforts are on offer and not stressing it that much when the time comes to move on.

I’m almost done restoring my old sofa, and I think it’s good, and I want to tell you about it. First of all it’s a two-seater, a loveseat maybe. I believe it could be described as a “Selig-style” sofa, but modifiers like “midcentury” and “Danish” would probably get me further. Anyway it’s old, with a wood frame and four rectangular cushions, and I bought it from someone in Greenpoint. I haggled with her a bit on the price.

What’s really been happening with me, over these past couple of months, is that my wife and I are separating. We celebrated our ten-year wedding anniversary this past October. Our first date was in 2009. We have two kids together; they are six and nine years old. We own a house together, and until recently we shared a Spotify “duo” account, and each of us has a change of clothes stashed at the other’s childhood home. And over the holidays we began the process of uncoupling our respective lives.

Recently I’ve found myself trying to cultivate, or really fall into, a sense of sublime capability. I’ll look at a problem, some physical fix or project, and think “I can do that.” And then I’ll think “I can do that and it’s no big deal.” So, for instance, a Cat5 cable wants to be run from the network cabinet, in the basement, up to the TV, in the living room. I drill a hole in the living room floor, then go to see if it comes out of the basement ceiling below. It does not, and it’s no big deal.

Here’s a product that I did not know about previously and have not used myself: Sodium acetate hand warmers. These little goop packets contain a supersaturated liquid solution of sodium acetate dissolved in water. They also contain little metal discs that, similar to the cap from a Snapple bottle, make an audible click if you squeeze them through the pouch. Supersaturation is a weird idea.

One of the joys of reading history is the sense of perfect clarity that it sometimes offers. You might begin with a question about why such-and-such technology developed as it did. Perhaps you’ve got hunches about the answer, but perhaps they feel just a little too neat. Like any thoughtful person you know not to trust your hunches too much, and as you begin your research you find that yes, your hunches are notionally correct, but also no, they don’t capture the full picture.