I completely believe it. When young parents ask me for early homeschooling advice, I tell them to start curating a good home library (used are great!) and keep it in the public spaces in the home. Then designate mandatory DEAR (drop everything and read) time once a day, where everyone reads for an hour. If you do this, you’ll be 90% of the way there for the earlier years (and heck, even the adolescent years if you’ve built this into a habit).

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving. Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free. I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these." "They just come with the table, man." They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner. This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat. I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared. "Did we…?" "Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless." Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined. My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude." Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man. I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy. Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived. I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most. Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

70 years of marriage for my parents. Eleven children, 68 grandchildren, 109 great grandchildren with 11 on the way. One of the grandsons is a priest and celebrated a Mass for them while other grandsons served. A schola by great granchildren. We filled the church. Blessed!!!

After a year of reading the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Church Fathers, Roman Stoics, tons of historic documents, and more… On the last day of classes I love giving my go-to graduation gift to my senior students.

Happy 100th anniversary of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien's first meeting, and this entry from Lewis's journal. “He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap … No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.”

This radio station is called “classic rock” but it’s playing cool current music like Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

"Sic transit gloria" is Latin It means "You have a nice car, Gloria"

May the fourth be with you

AI-generated Amazon review summaries: Some say this product is the best thing ever, while others say it's the worst. Some say it's perfect in every way, while others say it came from the pit of hell. Some people claim you will win a million dollars, while others say you will regret the day you were born.

This is where “uppercase” and “lowercase” came from. In the early days of printing, capital letters were kept in the upper compartments of the type case, while the smaller letters were placed below for easier access.

NEW: Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman reflects on being MOVED to tears by the Christian cross after returning to Earth from the historic expedition: "When I got back on the on the ship — I'm not really a religious person — but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything." "So I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to just come visit us for a minute, and when that man walked in, I'd never met him before in my life. But I saw the cross on his collar, and I just broke down in tears." "It's very hard to fully grasp what we just went through."

Being in your early 40s is weird, man. People around your age are in every stage of life. You have people who are grandparents. You have people who have newborns. You have people dating 25-year-olds. You have people celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary. Some of them look 60, and some of them look 30. All the bases are covered when you are in your early 40s.

I built my first vibecoded project! It's a browser extension I've wanted for a long time, knew was doable in theory, but did not have the time to learn to make. Now when I open twitter, there's a 15 second delay, and I see a prayer intention I've added to my list.

5, 3, or 8 — and with 8 I’d just ignore Heidegger.

This is Sadie. She was finally reunited with her human, astronaut Christina Koch, after her mom’s voyage around the moon took her the furthest any human has ever been from their dog. She can't wait to hear all about the universe. 14/10