Few musicians are as prolific as Jenn Wasner, the creative force behind Flock of Dimes. She has made much critically acclaimed music as both as Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes as well as collaborating with...

I was reading some thoughts on _Walden_ the other day, and I realized I hadn’t engaged with one of my favorite philosophical works in some time. I first encountered Thoreau and the transcendentalists as a teenager. Their emphasis on nonconformity seemed really punk at the time. Wasn’t Jello Biafra singing about the same subject? What could be more punk than building a tiny house in the woods and drinking homemade moonshine with the squirrels and other woodland creatures?1 A few years ago, on a trip to Boston to visit my sister, we made a pilgrimage to Walden Pond and went to the site where Thoreau’s cabin stood. It’s now a scattering of rocks, some stacked in the way you would see in a “zen” stock photo. I realize that some cast doubts on the authenticity of our friend David. Sure, maybe he took his laundry home to have his mom wash it. Still, as his meticulous records about what he lived on and by what means he obtained it show, he really made a go of his little experiment. I’m surprised, with all the emphasis on minimizing digital time, that Walden hasn’t been coming up much recently. There are few examples of a retreat from modernity that capture our popular imagination like Thoreau’s deliberate sojourn into the woods. Of course, in my desire to revisit the transcendentalist’s seminal work, I realized I could always read it on my iPad. * * * 1. There is no evidence this happened (other than the cabin part). ↩︎

Sometimes a slower pace is what we need.

It's difficult to decide whether buying physical media is worthwhile.

I was inspired by this post from Adam Wood to go through my Roon library and remove albums that didn’t necessarily belong as part of my collection. These were albums that were taken in as a result of curiosity and didn’t sustain my interest past an initial listen or two. Streaming makes it all too easy to pick up (but not acquire outright) a lot of media. We’re all new to this kind of abundance but what I’m learning is that quantity may be at least somewhat at odds with appreciation and enjoyment. Knowing my proclivity toward collecting and being a digital packrat, I need some sort of tool to help with discernment. It was with great appreciation that I learned of Roon’s “Listen Later” feature. The feature does just what you would expect from the name — you can save items for later evaluation. This alleviates the need to automatically add anything you want to check out to your main music library. It’s very handy for keeping your collection to a reasonable size and stocked only with albums you know you enjoy. The downside to the “Listen Later” feature is that it adds another aspirational media consumption list. I don’t know about you, but I’ve already got queues on multiple video streaming services, as well items to read later in my Reeder app and Matter. I’ll never get to everything but I’m not one of those people who saves items to those spaces only to let them rot. I switched to a combination of the Roon music management app and the streaming service Qobuz a couple of years ago when Apple Music was giving me headaches with hi-res audio and downloads. The advantage of combining Roon with Qobuz is maintaining a robust solution for music files you have purchased and are storing locally while also getting access to a universe of audio you haven’t (yet) purchased. I use the word “yet” parenthetically because streaming sometimes serves as a preview mechanism to music I want to purchase outright. One of the differentiators for Qobuz is the ability to purchase the music you are streaming. It’s not cheap (unless you are on a higher tier plan), but it’s available in hi-res formats. Since Roon is the price of a respectable streaming service and I have to add Qobuz on top of that, I’m paying more than I would be for Apple Music or Spotify (yuck), but I’m happy with the additional benefits.

You don’t have to be a religious demographer like Ryan Burge to notice the decline in church attendance over the past few years. The trend was going south before the Covid-19 pandemic, but that event proved to be a major accelerant. Even my wife, who had faithfully attended our Presbyterian church with me each week before Covid, lost her step after things normalized post-pandemic. Always bucking the trends, the Orthodox Christian Church is, in many places in America, experiencing the opposite movement. So many people (relatively speaking) are flocking to the Orthodox Church that it has become a resource strain. Specifically the most dire need is for priests. There are only 4 Orthodox seminaries in the U.S. and those institutions are only able to produce about 30 priests a year. To keep up with the growth (assuming current rates continue linearly), the output would have to be more like 100 priests. In this video, an Orthodox priest, a deacon and a member of the Orthodox Studies Institute discuss the problem. Fr. Andrew, who co-hosts the excellent and scholarly Lord of Spirits podcast, among others, is slated to join the clergy of my parish next year. When he mentions a priest with an overload of 10-minute confessions, I believe he is referring to our church situation. It’s a lot of pastoral responsibility. To the point that you feel guilty taking up your priest’s time because you know he is carrying such a heavy load. There are some other interesting side effects of this influx of converts to Orthodoxy. After moving his blog to Substack, author Richard Beck noticed the amount of arguments about one tradition’s superiority over another. > A lot of the negative and aggressive energy inserted into these debates is from men who have become recent converts to Orthodoxy. You might be aware of this trend and its impact upon Christian social media. The main take of these Orthodox converts is that every branch of Christianity, from Catholics to evangelicals, is a theological failure. Heretical, even. Only Orthodoxy preserves the one true faith. Beck calls this a lack of “ecumenical charity,” and he is quick to point out that it’s not limited to the newly Orthodox. I myself have fallen into this trap as a new convert. You will note that I don’t post about matters of faith as much as I used to partially in order to avoid these pitfalls. Although the phenomenon is not exclusive to the Orthodox, its prominence within this tradition is enough to have spawned a nickname for the new online male zealots for the faith: Orthobros. The term is plainly pejorative. You typically don’t hear it (or tech bro or broligarchy or really any sort of portmanteau with “bro” in it) used in a positive way. The aggression of these individuals in promoting the Orthodoxy can come off as a bit off-putting. However, Michael Warren Davis offers a generous defense of the Orthobros. He calls attention to the behavior of the Apostles as they followed Jesus and grasped their new faith. In short, they were Orthobros. Their zeal was greater than their wisdom or restraint. Davis singles out the Boanerges Bros (Sons of Thunder), James and John. > James and John are two young men who have devoted their whole lives to following Christ. To put it another way: their religion has become their whole personality. They’re extremely well read in their own faith-tradition, though their understanding of what they read appears to be somewhat superficial. They’re extremely zealous, as young men often are. They’re also hot-tempered, impatient, and overconfident in their own opinions. Most of us know what became of those impetuous young men who followed Jesus as Apostles. They matured dramatically, but only after being licked by tongues of fire and the Holy Pentecostal Spirit. They became leaders, rather than followers, assured in the knowledge they had gained and the Spirit that propelled them. This is an interesting time for Orthodox Christianity in the U.S. It’s hard to predict where things will go from here. It’s heartening to see so many converts but also stressful to deal with the challenges of scale. My prayers are with the clergy especially as they grapple with the influx of catechumens. My prayers are also with the catechumens as they learn to be zealous but also measured and wise.

Inspired by Derek Sivers, this page includes a sample of what I’m thinking about and working on right now. Last updated November 2, 2025. Autumn is on the march. We just finished with the observance of Halloween. My family did more than in most years, carving a jack-o-lantern, getting

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