Notes on what I’m reading, working on, listening to, thinking about. This page is inspired by other homepages using the “Now” genre, including Piper Haywood and Matthew Smith. You can also read all of my past presents.

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Telling the time. I developed most of my financial habits in grad school, on a very limited stipend. It’s probably for that reason that I’m constitutively unable to buy myself anything that costs more than like $50 without feeling at least a little bad about it. But recently, I bought a watch. I like that the color reminds me of my baby’s eyes, and I like knowing that its mechanical heart ticks without electricity: just from the movement of my body and a little maintenance.

Currently watching: NASA’s live feed from the Artemis 1 mission to the moon. Pairs nicely with this discussion of why, this time, the amount of money the US government is pouring into getting to the moon isn’t about a Cold War or humanity’s drive to explore, but access to strategic minerals.

Currently reading: Tamara Shopsin, LaserWriter II. Set in 1994 in a Mac repair shop that looks “as if Santa’s workshop had made love to a Rube Goldberg machine.” A portrait of growing up in NYC in the 90s, quirky punks, and devices whose inner cogs and wheels become animate and speak to each other.

PostScript was a wonder. It compressed images, shapes, and fonts into seeds that were sent to the LaserWriter, which then bloomed into razor-sharp type at any point size, perfect Bézier curves and halftones, all printed at blazing speed in an archival ink. The LaserWriter was the death of dot matrix and the birth of desktop publishing. It cost $6,995 and was worth every cent.