I commute on MUNI, BART and CalTrain 5 days, roughly 13 hours a week.
I’m not complaining; in some ways it’s awesome. For instance, reading time has been restored to my life in spades. In the last few months I read some good novels, tried to read the most annoyingly terrible book ever to have been called genius, read not as much nonfiction as I should have, and found myself regularly looking over the shelves with to figure out my next read.
Aha!
PROJECT: I will read every issue of the Believer, in order. I will take notes; I will blog about them.
GOALS: This magazine is fantastic, but most issues for whatever reason I didn’t read cover to cover. I want to read/re-read them, both to learn things (I applied totally apropos knowledge of Werner Erhart gleaned from an article in the second issue at a party last night; I didn’t even bring it up!) and to introduce/recommend them to others. Oh I will call you out by name if you should read an article. I also am real new to this blogging thing, and thought this would be good practice writing longer-form and more hyperlinked than facebook status updates. Oh and it’s good to have a project. It’s no AJ Jacobsian effort but, it’s a start.
ABOUT THE BELIEVER: It’s a spinoff of McSweeneys but approximately 8000% better a magazine, even if its formal consistency is almost as reliable as McSweeney’s formal experimentation. If you like reading the long articles in Harpers or New York Times Magazine, you’d like it. Or if you like books and music and visual art and philsophy because it unashamedly is a fan of those too. Its working title was The Optimist.
ALSO: I want to talk to you about these articles, these interviews about the typefaces and colors and charts and all. But I’m sure I’ll leave things out, not address the right things, be inadequate to the task*. Do talk back to me, let me know what you love about the Believer, discuss articles or whatnot. Are you excited? I’m excited!
*Case in point, as of my current reading, issue #2, I’ve decided to do the articles and not the interviews and flotsam, at least this time around. So much failure so early.
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