Last Week's Highlights
Last week's highlights on the site, from posts, to podcasts, to new features.
Podcasts
- In this episode, Paul and Howard discuss common misconceptions about resistance training and gym anxiety, emphasizing the importance of just getting started despite fears of doing exercises perfectly.
- You can find the episode here. As usual, premium subscribers get a full, unabridged episode plus a complete transcript.
Posts
- Paper Watch: Heat, Running & the Knee, Elite Coaches, Intermittent Fasting, etc.. Check it here.
What We're Reading, Watching, Listening To, etc.
Audiobooks / Podcasts
Paul has been listening to the audiobook of Peter Frankopan's ecological history of the earth, The Earth Transformed, which is long but terrific. Frankopan traces the myriad human influence on climate and ecosystems over the last few hundred thousand years.
Reading
Paul is reading Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind, a little-known classic on why humans are the way they are, and the important role that "denial" of reality plays in being that way, which has many consequences, both good and bad.
In less weighty reading, Paul just finished Lev Grossman's new book The Bright Sword, a modern update on the Arthurian mythos. It tries to answer the question, What happened after the fall of Camelot? Grossman's answer is a kind of lovechild of T.H. White's Once and Future King and Mick Herron's Slow Horses, with debauched (if intermittently noble) heavy-drinking knights.
Music
It's not Paul's usual kind of thing, but he has been listening to Adrianne Lenker's recent Sadness as a Gift, a kind of rebooted country classic that isn't. Here she is performing it on live on Jools Holland. Wrenching.
Streaming
Paul has been streaming the Tour de France live on NBC Peacock pretty much every morning the last twenty days. Granted, the sprint stages are mostly background noise, but we are living in a golden age of pro cycling, with two of the most amazing talents in pro cycling—Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard—competing against each other. Pogacar has now locked down victory in an epic performance.
Back next week with another edition.
