The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. Kate recently wrote a great piece on Dying Breed, pulling out seven insights modern folks can get from this short story/novella published in 1909. I’d known about “The Machine Stops” for a long time, but her piece finally nudged me to read it. The story takes place in a future where humanity lives underground in individual pods, each person isolated in their own room, every need met by a vast mechanical system simply called “the Machine.” People communicate through screens. They never travel because everywhere looks the same anyway. They’ve grown soft and pale and have developed a “horror of direct experience.” When the Machine breaks down, civilization, completely dependent on it, unravels. The story is incredibly good and incredibly prescient and will make you think about the role of tech in your life. It’s available for free online and short enough to knock out this weekend.
The Monastery of the Damned: From the Ivy League to the French Foreign Legion by Nicholas Tobias. The French Foreign Legion has always fascinated me. The mystique of guys from 140 different countries forming up under the French flag, the notoriously harsh training, the willingness to take in men with messy pasts and forge them into something new. Tobias (a pseudonym) was a Princeton-trained Renaissance historian and a recent convert to Catholicism when he ditched his academic track to enlist. The book covers his twenty months in the Legion, including a six-month deployment to Afghanistan in 2009, and how the whole experience reshaped his romanticized notions of soldiering, manliness, and what he was looking for in the first place. Really enjoyed this one.
Cloudhiker. Back in the late 2000s, there was a service called StumbleUpon. You hit a button and got sent to a random website based on your interests. I discovered a lot of weird corners of the internet through it, and I reckon a good number of you discovered AoM that way. Sadly, StumbleUpon shut down a few years back, and I’ve missed it ever since. Recently I came across Cloudhiker, which works basically the same way. Hit a button, get teleported somewhere you didn’t know existed. I’ve landed on a bunch of quirky sites like Stop Alien Abductions, a page of live airport webcams, and hypertext.tv, which is hard to describe but a lot of fun to interact with. Surf the web like it’s 2010 again.
Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66. Mendes was the guy who brought bossa nova to American audiences in the 60s with his group Brasil ’66. Mixing Brazilian rhythms with English-language pop covers, his tunes make for great work music for when you’re grinding through email or filling out spreadsheets. It’s lively enough to keep you awake, but mellow enough to stay in the background. My parents had all the Sergio Mendes albums on vinyl when I was a kid, so I grew up listening to him. I still have those albums in my collection. If you’re looking for more bossa nova for your chill summer work soundtrack, check out Astrud Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Stan Getz.
On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Memento Mori Not Working for You? Try Contemplating Your Immortality and Sunday Firesides: The Peace of Being One Person.
Quote of the Week
What the fool does in the end, the wise man does in the beginning.
—Spanish maxim
This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.