"Zhuzh up"? Shut up!

 More and more I find I have to look up the meaning of unfamiliar language casually tossed off in staid textual sources I've never found alien (-ating) before. There are better older words for this in our native tongue. (And if that makes me sound old, so be it.)

The mere idea of cigarettes is being adopted to zhuzh up* tamer indulgences. Diet Coke has been jokingly renamed the “fridge cigarette”; on TikTok, a viral video of a can being cracked open in the sun is captioned “time for a crispy ciggy in the summer.” “Wow, that’s so real,” one of the more than 1,200 commenters responded. “It just takes the edge off.” nyt

*make something more stylish, lively, or attractive.

Into the Unknown

A good discussion of Something and Nothing, in ch3...

Baloney

Grant & Walt, peripatetics

"Perhaps his most remarkable extracurricular activities were his solitary walks around Washington, sometimes covering five or six miles. Grant disbanded his personal guard and sauntered around town alone, hands clasped behind his back, smoking a cigar. On these rambles, he often passed Walt Whitman, then working in Washington. The poet told his mother, “I saw Grant to-day on the avenue walking by himself—(I always salute him, & he does the same to me.)”"

"Grant" by Ron Chernow: https://a.co/aguNTho

For the Children

by Gary Snyder

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

"For the Children" by Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island. © New Directions, 1974. Reprinted with permission. https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-sunday-july-27-2025/

The children

Shelby Foote, delighted

Ron Chernow's Mark Twain sent me back to his Grant, which has now reignited my interest in the Civil War. 

I'm recalling the day we were moving Older Daughter into Rhodes and, finding myself more an obstacle to dorm-decorating than not, I went for a walk down East Parkway to find Shelby Foote's home. "Empty rooms now."

 

He'd been gone for several years at that point, and the property had fallen sadly into neglect. But I had no difficulty conjuring an image of him at work on his mammoth Civil War there, a twenty-year period he told Brian Lamb he'd delighted in.

 

More Purring, More Buying? Why Bookstores Showcase Their Pets.

Why Bookstores Showcase Their Pets. At shops across the country, some of the most popular sales associates have four legs, twitchy ears and whiskers.

...Dog lovers, never fear. Plenty of bookstores cater to the canine crowd, including Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn., where employees are welcome to bring their best friends to work. The current roster includes Miller, a French bulldog; Barnabus, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel; Winnie, a tiny hound mix; and Nemo, who is half Bichon and half poodle, according to the novelist Ann Patchett, who owns the store.

Her rules for shop dogs are simple: “No barking. No biting. You have to like children and be patient, and you can’t run out the front door.”

Patchett recalled a lively beagle, Eleanor Roosevelt, who bolted out of Parnassus, across five lanes of traffic and into a parking garage before being corralled by an employee.

“Eleanor worked remotely after that,” Patchett said...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/books/review/bookstore-pets.html?smid=em-share

Writing is thinking/Philosopher-builders

 I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students

…What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.

Will the wide-scale adoption of A.I. produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity? It is a little bit too easy to imagine that in a world of outsourced fluency, we might end up doing less and less by ourselves, while believing we've become more and more capable.

As ChatGPT once put it to me (yes, really): "Style is the imprint of attention. Writing as a human act resists efficiency because it enacts care." Ironically accurate, the line stayed with me: The machine had articulated a crucial truth that we may not yet fully grasp...

Meghan O'Rourke 

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Reminder: writing is thinking. This article in Nature is doing the rounds — noting that outsourcing writing to LLMs is THE SAME AS OUTSOURCING THINKING. “Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner.” There has never been a more important time than right now to pick up a pen and engage in the act of creation.

- The Culturist

Read on Substack

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Philosopher-builders

Cosmos Institute

Walking with Kierkegaard