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​Friday Inspiration 515​
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As 2025 winds down, I've been revisiting all my Friday Inspiration newsletters from the year and picking out my favorite links from each of them. I was going to do one "best of 2025" post at the end of the year, but there was a lot of good stuff, so this week's Friday Inspiration is a collection of my favorites from the first half of the year, January through June 2025.

First things first, though: I convinced newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration to put together a sample pack of my favorites from them, tried and true for me over the past year and a half. This link will give you 15% off the sample pack, which includes a box of 10 packets of PH 1000 electrolyte drink mix, 3 PF 90 gels, 3 PF 30 caffeine gels, and 4 PF 30 chews.

Onto the best of the first half of 2025 then:

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This is not exactly new, but WOW, building a scale model of the timeline of the history of the universe in the Mojave Desert—in a day. (video)

From a short but brilliant essay titled, “You might just have to be bored,” subtitled, “Or: How to fix an attention span”: “Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own." (January)

I have been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately, after reading about a study that showed we all basically think the best everything happened when we were approximately 10 years old. So of course I clicked on this piece, “Your brain is lying to you about ‘the good old days,’” and the science behind why we think things were better in the past. And it applies to how we think about progress, and improving society, but I think also, specifically this passage, how we remember things like mountaineering, endurance events, and all things “Type 2 Fun”: “Thanks to ‘selective memory,’ humans have a tendency to forget negative events from the past and reinforce positive memories. It’s one reason why our feelings and memories about the past can be so inaccurate — we literally forget the bad things and give the good things a nice, pleasant glow. The further back the memory goes, the stronger that tendency can be.” (January)

I found Robin Wilding’s Substack this week through her post about putting her senior dog down (which was wonderful but maybe not what everyone needs to read this week), and I clicked around a bit and found this gem she wrote last September, The 11 Traits of Utterly Unfuckwithable People. My favorite might be #5, They Treat Servers Nice. (February)

I assume that you, like me, have had no less than one thousand instances in your life in which you had a weird or awkward conversation/confrontation with someone, walked away, and spent the next few minutes/several hours thinking, “you know what I should have said to that asshole?” If my assumption is correct, I think you will find Michael Estrin’s latest quick story very satisfying (and also hilarious). (February)

I have been trying to put my finger on why algorithms just don’t work that well to introduce me to new music/books/videos/shows/whatever, and I think lots of people are having the same feeling. This Atlantic piece about the new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, dives into a bit of it, but also captures what I think many of us have been feeling: “Like so many other products influenced by machine learning, Spotify’s playlists can’t generate something new—say, a wholly fresh and unheard sound—for its users. They instead offer the flash of recognition, rather than the mind-scrambling revelation that comes only when you hear something you’d never expected.” [GIFT LINK] (February)

I don’t know how I stumbled on Mike Monteiro’s (non-Substack) newsletter, in which he answers one question every issue. But this one, answering the question, “How do you decide which donut to get?” begins thusly: “First off, congratulations on your donut. Donuts are fucking amazing and everyone should have a donut. Some of you might be thinking about donuts and attaching the word “deserve” to it. Fuck that. Deserve has nothing to do with donuts. You want a donut. You should have a donut.” (March)

David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World is one of my favorite reads of the past five years, maybe because it validates my tendency to try lots of things instead of just one, or maybe because it encourages us to go ahead and be real human beings with multiple interests—like he does in this recent piece, “Why Hobbies Are An Advantage, Not a Distraction.” (March)

I think there’s a pretty easy response you could have to people who say things like “empathy is a weakness,” and certainly there were probably many, but the phrasing of this one was my favorite. (April)

​This is a Substack post about paper(and really, using paper and writing utensils to think), from a writer I’ve never read before encountering this piece, and it just made my week. Because, I don’t know, I love paper too? And wish I used it more than I use my laptop and iPad. The author writes in the intro, “Also, the world needs way more mundane blogging,” but I don’t think this is mundane, and it also reminds me of the best advice I give myself when I’m stuck trying to come up with something to write about: Go smaller. Stop trying to solve the world’s problems and just write about something small. (April)

Love this display at a college library: Is it Kendrick Lamar or Shakespeare? (Subtext here: Is Kendrick the Shakespeare of our time? Was Shakespeare the Kendrick of his time? If they met, would they get along?)(April)

If you have a) ever tried to move a photo within a Microsoft Word document and b) somehow not seen this yet, I believe you will feel quite validated, and probably also laugh at this seven-second masterpiece. (May)

I love finding good writing, and I think I kind of suck at describing why it’s good—like this essay by Niko Stratis, whose work I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter. Her essays are always fascinating, weaving together music, culture, and scenes from growing up in the Yukon and becoming a journeyman glazier, and discovering her gender identity. Anyway, her new book, The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman, came out on Tuesday, and this week’s essay is one of my favoritesI’ve read of hers, maybe partly because I also put songs on repeat for an hour sometimes. (May)

Trust me: Take 60 seconds, or 90 seconds (OK, maybe more like three to four minutes) and scroll through the photos created by the winners of the Milky Way Photographer of the Year Awards (via Kottke.org). (May)

I have mentioned before in this newsletter that I have been enjoying the live DJ mixes I often find on YouTube, but I think the production of this one might be my favorite yet: camcorder footage, a few different angles, a little bit of video editing, and a bunch of R&B tracks (and some live drumming). Plus the title is “the homies mixing R&B and chilling with a pineapple.” (May)

Years ago, I was climbing a multi-pitch route with a French friend who was pretty fluent in English, and we paused at a belay to eat a snack and drink some water. Simon pulled a small stuff sack from his pack and from the stuff sack a few food items, including the most battered energy bar I had ever seen. He held it up and said to me, “Theese ees my friend. He goes weeth me everywhere.” I of course understood exactly what he meant, as I, like every one, had the one bar that I kept bringing on hikes and climbs, but never eating, because I had better options. It was like an emergency ration that I kind of knew I would never eat unless I was on the verge of starvation. If you know what I mean, you will love artist Cy Whitling’s latest comic, “The Eternal Granola Bar.” (May)

I was clicking through Substack yesterday, wanting to find someone who wrote an actual story, a narrative of something that happened in real life. It wouldn’t have to be anything spectacular, just a story. And I found it. It was titled “I Agreed to Help Pick Up a Couch and Ended Up Participating in a Street Performance” and it made my day. If you read it, I am betting you will say to yourself, “Yes, I know or have met someone like Moonbeam.” (May)

Look, I am not saying everyone should drink five or more cups of coffee per day, but I’m also not saying people shouldn’t. Anne Kadet, whose Substack is a treasure, interviewed a handful people who drink prodigious amounts of coffee, and it made me feel both happy, less weird, and less alone. And also validated in my choice to make a 9-cup moka pot yesterday afternoon. (June)

I don’t know how I found the Why Cheap Art Manifesto this week, but something about the typeface and the style and the very simple message of it really hit home for me, and perhaps it will hit home for you too. If you are really into it, there’s a link at the bottom where you can purchase a print of it, which, at $20, I guess is technically cheap art, which is very meta, to support artists by buying a print of a manifesto about cheap art. But of course you can just read and enjoy it for free, too. (June)

If you have ever seen Christoph Niemann’s art and design work, you will probably not be surprised at how interesting and accessible this interactive piece he put together about artists and AI for the New York Times is—the first time I read it, I scrolled through it on my phone, which honestly worked just as well as viewing it on my laptop. It really covers some ground. Here’s a gift link to see it. (thanks, Fitz)(June)

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