Daniel Nesbit is here for the broken things.

I am here for the broken things.

The daily struggle to just make ends meet. The harsh unfairness of dumb chance. Cracked dreams. Unbearable cruelty.

I am here for the broken things because in them I see the hope of a world repaired.

An unshakable foundation of well-being for all. Triumph over the privilege of circumstance. The unimaginable fruits of dreamwalking. The joy of a true neighborhood.

Things are broken. That hurts. It should. But even brokenness can, in a way, break.

Writing in Creative Boom, Katy Cowan has a fantastic interview with creator Frank Chimero. I love this concept.

Good trouble is questioning and re-imagining the status quo, and having your actions stand in contrast to the norm. Maybe it’s society’s status quo. Maybe it’s your own — all fair game. There’s usually a fair amount of cleverness in it. Civil disobedience for social causes is good trouble — consider the criticism offered by the peaceful protests of MLK, Gandhi, and their supporters.

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world”, and all that. But that’s a big form of good trouble, and I just have my little life, so I’m particularly interested in the small version — how the smallest thought can get under your skin and make you re-evaluate, you know? It’s the mischievousness of changing how you think by finding a new lens.

This last bit of advice is just perfect.

…slow down, find a quiet place, and create time for solitude so you can hear yourself. It’s so noisy out there. And find the good ones around you — the patient, compassionate, and interested — then elevate the conversation as often as you can. The things that nourish you are also the things that will nourish your work, give it purpose, depth, and soul. It’s hard to say what those things may be, but life has taught me over and over that, you don’t need to know if you are willing to ask.

Isabelle Kohn, in MEL magazine, has an in-depth story on the latest wonder drug, Phenibut. I admit, I had no idea about this drug, but the story is intriguing. I know I wish there was some sort of “Limitless” drug that could help everyone achieve greatness.

It almost makes me want to try it. Almost.

Nicholas Bate with just a 100 words for us.

Stuff, stuff and more stuff. Pings and mails and requests.

One walk along a deserted beach at dawn puts everything in perspective. Of course, it’s not really empty. It’s just full of the things that heal rather than the things of TotallyTotallyGlobal Inc which debilitate.

That which heals: a fellow walker, sun-rise of course. Fresh, fresh air. Sand, rocks and water. Time standing still. Freedom returns. Ozone from waves rather than radiation from screens. Perspective and horizon. Not a number in sight. Nobody suggesting: connect! Being rather than doing. Just a dog which understands joy doesn’t need much at all. 

Chuck Wendig has a new novel out titled Wanderers. I’m four chapters in and hooked beyond much of anything I’ve ever read in the last few years. I’ve never read Wendig before, and his similes and descriptions are interesting, fun, and original.

Here’s the big blurb -

A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. In the tradition of The Stand and Station Eleven comes a gripping saga that weaves an epic tapestry of humanity into an astonishing tale of survival.

Wendig, on his own site, has all the answers to several questions you might have (where to buy, how to get a signed copy, etc). io9 has Chapter 3 if you want a preview.

It’s a big book with a big story. I highly recommend it.

Sue Bird, writing in The Player’s Tribune, has one of the most delightful and jubilant stories all about how Donald Trump, the real honest-to-god President of the (literal) United States hates her girlfriend who happens to be Megan Rapinoe.

Bird is a three-time WNBA champion. Rapinoe is a professional soccer player currently leading the U. S. Soccer team in their quest for the Women’s World Cup. Trump is an orange colored confidence man with fascist tendencies. I know who I got.

Every summer we end up getting a rewrite of the “Action Park was American’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park” story. This time it’s Jack McCallum, writing in Sports Illustrated, slinging the text. It’s a great story and I look forward to the movie.

Heather Timmons, writing in Quartz, has a harrowing account of a dozen lawmakers visiting the detention centers in Texas.

CBP officers were “contentious and uncooperative,” said Joe Kennedy, the Democrat from Massachusetts. “They tried to restrict what we saw, take our phones, block photos and video.” Some people had been in their cells for 50 days or more, and were sleep-deprived and filthy, the lawmakers reported. Women they encountered were sobbing after being separated from their children.

It is inhumane.

At this point on July 1, the Democrat nominee for President will be Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders. Warren, Sanders, and Biden will not be anyone’s choice as VP, and, of course, Biden would never be asked.

If it’s Biden, he’d do well to convince Harris to be his running mate (good luck) but will likely be stuck with Klobuchar. I don’t think Warren would take it. Biden probably needs a woman running mate to balance out his ticket.

If it’s Harris, she’d do well to convince either Buttigieg or O’Rourke to be her running mate. Not sure who edges the other out. It can’t be Booker because it doesn’t balance the ticket well, but if the other two say no, then he’s the guy.

If it’s Warren, she’d do well to convince either Harris or Booker to be her running mate. I’m not sure two women running is the best ticket, but it certainly might be.

If it’s Sanders, he’d do well to convince Harris to be his running mate. I really, really don’t want it to be Sanders.

Personally, I would prefer the nominee to be Kamala Harris, with Pete Buttigieg as her running mate.

Imagine it:

Black vs White
Woman vs Man
Square Shooter vs Liar
Prosecutor vs Criminal

Plus, the undercard is a homophobe going up against a Christian, veteran, Rhodes Scholar, who also happens to be in a committed, gay marriage.

That would be interesting.

Michael Wade has some good advice -

We need self-discipline far more than motivation.

Restrict your exposure to life’s never-ending distractions.

So apparently Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer for many, many years is leaving the company.

The only person’s take on this development I care to read is, of course, John Gruber.

I’ve never been an “Apple is doomed without Steve Jobs” person. But part of what made Apple the Apple we know in the post-1997 era is that when Jobs was at the helm, all design decisions were going through someone with great taste. Not perfect taste, but great taste. But the other part of what made Jobs such a great leader is that he could recognize bad decisions, sooner rather than later, and get them fixed.

I think Tim Cook is a great CEO and Jeff Williams is a great COO. But who’s in charge of product design now?

This is interesting to me. Just who leads the “Apple experience?”

I don’t worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he’s not being replaced.

Mark Manson has some good thoughts about ones attention diet -

Long form content should be your bread and butter for news content and the majority of your entertainment content. Long-form content means any medium—Books, Podcasts, long-form articles, documentaries—the key is that shit takes a long time.

I need to read more books. I read a lot of web articles and news stores, but not many books. Even fiction would probably help me. I do listen to a lot of Podcasts, but not many news ones. I rarely watch documentaries, but I’d probably enjoy them.

Seth Godin has an interesting idea for presenters, “memorize your stories.”

Watch a great performance and you’ll see no artifacts of memorization. Instead, you will see someone speaking from the heart.

This is what it means to know something by heart.

Memorizing the words is half of it.

And woefully insufficient.

My suggestion: Don’t memorize your talk. Memorize your stories. Ten stories make a talk. Write yourself a simple cue card to remember each story’s name. Then tell us ten stories.

Be you.

We didn’t come to hear your words. If that’s all we wanted, we could have read the memo and saved a ton of time.

Bring your heart.

Things happen in seconds. We react to them in minutes. We talk about them for hours. They mess up our days. We tell people for weeks. We think about them for months. They have consequences for years and they change a lifetime.

Jack Hamilton, writing in The Atlantic, has a review of a book by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik called The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Apparently, it is a Moneyball version of using “statistical metrics, biomechanical data, and cutting-edge forms of player observation to help players hone their skills.”

The authors argue that baseball has reached a tipping point on player development. They pepper the book with a cast of crazy baseball characters including the loathsome Trevor Bauer.

If Moneyball was “data-fication of jocks,” then this new book is a “jock-ification of data.”

Zach Baron has a tremendous story in GQ that you should take some time and read this weekend. The opening is just great.

When a man was killed in Malibu Creek State Park last summer while camping with his two young daughters, it sent the placid Southern California community into hysterics—spawning amateur sleuths, conspiracy theories, and public paranoia. Was it related to a rash of unsolved incidents in the area? But while the tragedy’s aftermath publicly played out like a new season of Serial, there was also a family left picking up the pieces after a seemingly random act of violence. This is a story about what happens when lightning strikes in the most chilling manner imaginable.

Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll has accused President Donald Trump of raping her in her new book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.

The cover story in New York magazine is believable and horrifying. The excerpt is realistic and in any other time would force a resignation.

This is the killer passage –

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

I guarantee you what pisses Trump off the most is the line, “thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain…”

The bottom line is he raped her.

Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. My wife reminded me this morning. Today, we get the most sunshine out of any other day of the year.

Unfortunately, as I look outside all I see are rainclouds and all I hear is thunder.

So much for the hours and hours of daylight.

Michael Wade on small acts -

No matter how small an act may be, if it is kind or cruel and needlessly done, there is a good chance that it will be remembered for many years.