Every Friday for a few years in the early days of 9others Katie and I used to share our ‘Weekend Reading’. These were a few interesting articles that we’d seen during the week that, being a little longer, made for ideal reading at the weekend.
From today Weekend Reading is back. That means that each Friday via the 9others SubStack we’ll share a handful of the longer, deeper, more thoughtful articles that we’ve found interesting, inspiring or thought provoking. We hope you enjoy them too. And if you do please share this post far and wide…
Survivor’s guilt in the mountains by Nick Paumgarten.
- Mountain climbing is a modern curiosity, a bourgeois indulgence. It consists mostly of relatively well-to-do white people manufacturing danger for themselves. Having been spared war, starvation, mass violence, and oppression, its practitioners travel great distances and endure great sacrifices to test their bodies and minds
Yesterday, the Beatles and why talent isn’t enough by Dorian Lynskey
- …success is contingent on several factors — timing, momentum, charisma, connections, luck — of which inspiration is not necessarily the most important. “I was lying in bed one night thinking, if Star Wars hadn’t been made and I just came up with the idea for Star Wars, I bet I wouldn’t be able to sell it”
The Three Sides of Risk by Morgan Housel
- I have no recollection of why, or how this came about, but I didn’t want to go.
The myth of Henry Kissinger by Thomas Meaney
- It also fell so far short of its strategic aims that more than one historian has wondered whether Kissinger — who personally tweaked the schedules of the bombing runs and the allocation of planes — had some other motive.
- The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves.
