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Finished and I can’t get my thoughts beyond 😍🤯😱

Essay: Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance
John discusses perspective and photographs
“They are reminders that I, too, would in time be surprised by history, and that a picture, though static, keeps changing as its viewers change.”

Essay: "New Partner"
John discusses how music can transport us in time
“I hope it carries you to places you need to visit without asking you to stay in them.”

Essay: Sycamore Trees
John discusses despair and belief
“When I was a teenager, I used the why game as a way of establishing that if you dig deep enough, there is no why.”

Essay: The World’s Largest Ball of Paint
John discusses roadside attractions
“I'm fascinated by roadside attractions because they are one place where we see the work of huge systems intersect with the work of tiny individuals.”

Essay: The QWERTY Keyboard
John discusses human invention
“The keyboard is my path to having thoughts, and also my path to sharing them.”

Essay: The Mountain Goats
John discusses music
“The Mountain Goats have shaped the way I think and listen so profoundly that I don't know who I would be without them, only that I wouldn't be me.”

Essay: The Notes App
John discusses technology and time
“I can still parse some of the notes, and taken together they do form a strange kind of autobiography, a way into knowing myself through the lens of what I cared about.”

Essay: The Hot Dogs of Baejarins Beztu Pylsur
John discusses hot dogs and cultural experiences
“I don't even particularly like hot dogs, but that hot dog was among the most joyous culinary experiences of my life.”

Essay: Wintry Mix
John discusses weather and pathetic fallacy
“The weather may not have human emotions, but it does cause them.”

Essay: Plague
John discusses historic plagues and human connection
“But for me, the most gutting repetition in plague accounts is the abandonment of the ill, who were often left to die alone due to fear of contagion.”

Essay: Viral Meningitis
John discusses viruses and pain
“We end up expressing our doubt in the face of their certainty, which only compounds the extent to which pain separates the person experiencing it from the wider social order. “

Essay: Whispering
John discusses time and secrets
“All talking is made of breath, but when someone whispers you are hearing the breath.”

Essay: Hiroyuki Doi’s Circle Drawings
John discusses obsessive behaviour and repetition
“On the other side of monotony lies a flow state, a way of being that is just being, a present tense that actually feels present.”

Essay: Bonneville Salt Flats
John discusses relationships and geology
“There's a certain way I talk about the things I don't talk about. Maybe that's true for all of us. We have ways of closing off the conversation so that we don't ever get directly asked what we can't bear to answer.”

Essay: Bonneville Salt Flats
John discusses relationships and geology
“There's a certain way I talk about the things I don't talk about. Maybe that's true for all of us. We have ways of closing off the conversation so that we don't ever get directly asked what we can't bear to answer.”

Essay: Super Mario Kart
John discusses games and power structures
“Some might argue that games should reward talent and skill and hard work precisely because real life doesn't.”

Essay: Monopoly
John discusses capitalism and the board games’ origin
“To me, the worst thing about Monopoly is its convoluted, self-contradictory analysis of capitalism.”

Essay: The Indianapolis 500
John discusses car racing
“But the Indy 500 isn't really about going fast; it's about going faster than everyone else, which reflects one of my top-level concerns about humanity: We cannot seem to resist the urge to win.“

Essay: Kentucky Bluegrass
John discusses lawns
“The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.”

Essay: Indianapolis
John discusses his new hometown
“Indianapolis is more typically American than almost any other place. We are spectacular in our ordinariness.”

Essay: Googling Strangers
John discusses personal info on the internet
“Of course, this loss of privacy has come with tremendous benefits- free storage of photos and video, a chance to participate in large-scale discourse via social media, and the opportunity to easily keep in touch with friends from long ago.”

Essay: Auld Lang Syne
John discusses the good old days
“we live in hope-that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not.”

Essay: The Yips
John discusses performance anxiety
“This complicated interplay between the so-called physical and the so-called psychological reminds us that the mind/body dichotomy isn’t overly simplistic; it’s complete bullshit.”

Essay: Harvey
John discusses mental health and hope
“Elwood offered me a kind of hope that wasn’t bullshit, and in doing so helped me to see that hope is the correct response to the strange, often terrifying miracle of consciousness.”

Essay: CNN
John discusses live news 24/7
“This flood of information without context can so easily, and so quickly, transform into misinformation.”

Essay: The Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest
John discusses competitive eating
“The hotdog eating contest is a monument to over indulgence, to the human urge to seek not just more than you need but also more than you actually want.”

Essay: Piggly Wiggly
John discusses the history of grocery stores
“I think about how the get bigger by eating the small. Piggly Wiggly swallowed up the small town grocery stores only to be swallowed itself by the likes of Walmart, which will in turn be swallowed by the likes of Amazon.”