News! Podcasts! Living the Good Life! Happy to report on my new podcast, Required Reading, with my collaborators Matthew Meschery and Steve Goldbloom. We’ll be producing one 45-min show weekly(ish) on all the stuff you should have read, watched, and listened to in the previous week but couldn’t fit in. Next week: The Life and Death of Mike Wallace, The $1 Billion-Dollar Photo, and The Strange Case of Augusta National. Check us out — you can listen to RR right there on the link above. And it’s FREE!
I went out to California a few weeks ago to finalize podcast details and on the way I had to drop by my dear mom in Truckee, my hometown. Sometimes it’s nice to be a tourist in your hometown. For the first time, I did not stay with family or friends but at a (gasp!) hotel! Not just any hotel, though: The Richardson House. Anyone who’s ever been to Truckee has probably seen it: a gorgeous Victorian sitting atop the hill overlooking downtown Truckee. I’ve lived, at different points in my life, within a two-minute walk of The Richardson House yet I’d never stayed in it — until last month. It did not disappoint.
My son referred to it throughout our trip as “The Mansion” and it did feel like that. Gorgeous, high-ceilinged rooms, beds covered in seven layers of featherbeds, and a view of Mount Rose from our room. It was amazing. I may never stay at my mom’s house again (sorry, Mom). The Richardson House is a Truckee treasure — try it!
That’s my Truckee Insider Tip for this month. Hey, I should add that to the podcast….
PS: Here’s our podcast crew: Steve, Matthew, Leo (our producer, with pacifier), and Me. Hope you enjoy the show!
How nice to read the Boston Globe today and see such a nice review of Shaking the Family Tree. I don’t know who this Chuck Leddy fellow is, but he sure seems like a heck of a wonderful guy.
That’s right; it’s not just the big Hollywood movies that get their own fancy trailers – now it’s books like Shaking the Family Tree, too! The 2-minute video is now available on YouTube right here.
Many of the *real* people featured in the book are also in this film, as well as many of the far-flung places I visited during my research.
Huge thanks to the geniuses at Madhouse Muse for making this lovely film, as well as Matthew Meschery and Billy Bouchard for their contributions to the audio and music. It’s so great to have talented friends.
Yep, it’s pretty much what you’re imagining: sheer visual bliss. No pesky text to get in the way, just money shot after money shot of… bookshelves filled with gorgeous books. Some are big, some are small, some are curved, and some are way too hard to describe in words.
Good old Errol Morris. His ongoing series for the NY Times exemplifies the benefits to simply following one’s tangential interests to their strange, winding, sometimes banal conclusions. In this (5-part!) series he investigates the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which describes the depressingly common phenomenon in which incompetent individuals believe themselves to be much more competent than they are – because they lack the ability to comprehend their incompetence.
I’m not going to name names here, but if you’ve ever wondered why certain apparently dim public figures keep on charging ahead, convinced of their own brilliance… well, that’s the Dunning-Kruger effect. As Morris puts it, “knowing what you don’t know… is the hallmark of an intelligent person.”
