Friday Inspiration 542

secret old subway station, a private banker on how wealthy people live, How To Die (And Other Stories)

This is kind of an ad for a new video camera, but the more important part of the video, the visit to the secret New York subway station, is worth it. (video)

This comic, “16 Scenes Of You And Your Dad In Cars,” was moving in such an interesting way, and I keep thinking about the decision to put the scenes in reverse chronological order, and how that made it (I think) way more powerful.

Tomorrow morning is the start of the Western States Endurance Run, which many, many legendary runners will be competing in—including Tara Dower and Jeff Browning, who, like me, wear Injinji toe socks when they run (but of course much faster than me). Injinji is sponsoring this issue of the newsletter, and lucky for you, this link will give you 20% off your Injinji purchase—and also show you some new prints of one of my favorites, the Trail Midweight Crew.

Maybe like me, you also have a complicated relationship with technology, and you often think, “I hate lots of things about the online world and what it’s done to our everyday experience,” and that is totally valid, but I also would like to point out that someone decided to make a website all about movie scenes with elevators in them, including said clips featuring elevators (which I found out about via Kottke.org)

I love three things about this Reddit post:

1. That is a really huge banana

2. That the person was like, “wow, this is a huge banana—maybe I should share it with the world on Reddit”

3. The comments

A friend shared this Substack piece, What I Learned About Wealthy People as a Private Banker, and it’s not the usual thing I’d find myself clicking on (I didn’t even know that “private banker” was a real job), but it was really interesting, and it definitely shows that there are a lot of ways to be rich—or maybe that there are a lot of ways to appear rich.

I’ve shared Mike Monteiro’s essays in this newsletter a few times in the past, and when he announced that he was compiling a bunch of them into a book called How To Die (And Other Stories), I of course bought a copy immediately. I’ve been slowly reading it for a few months now (it feels like I’m rushing through it if I read more than one or two per day), and I loved the book exactly as much as I thought I would. [Here’s one of my favorite essays that appears in the book.]

Several months ago, I was talking to Arran Fagan about the My Favorite Things podcast, and I mentioned that he should come on the show sometime. He replied something like “I don’t know if I’m that interesting,” but I knew he would be (semi-professional singer/songwriter/guitar finger-picker, high school zoology teacher, ultrarunner), so I convinced (coerced?) him to let me interview him a couple weeks ago. We had a wonderful chat about The Tallest Man on Earth, the movie Her, Typhoon’s White Lighter album, Sum by David Eagleman, and East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

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