2025-08 | Český Rozhlas Liberec: žijeme tu s vámi
Dog days of summer on the Czech-Polish border. Long walks, making hay whilst the sun shines
(quite literally: the neighbours’ daughter demonstrated how she dries hay for her pet rabbit,
which was hella endearing). There are more feral cats than I remember, so going on my little
runs I sometimes get the feeling of being watched by a pair of ears sticking out of the tall
grass, which is vaguely ominous in a cute way. I went to a brilliant wedding on more espressos
than hours of sleep. Love won’t save you, but love creates the world, etc. I found a king bolete
and our absurdly aged dog still remembers me; what more could one want. (Annoyingly, I forgot
about the Perseid shower even though the sky was dark, so, maybe: that.)
Attempting to buy a rocking chair for the child, I read the following great line of copy on a
website selling rocking chairs:
“This relationship we have with gravity, which perhaps precedes our relationship with everything,”
Speaking of gravity, I am reading Albert Einstein’s The Evolution of Physics,
and I enjoyed this slightly pretentious but relevant paternalism:
Whilst writing the book we had long discussions as to the characteristics of our idealized reader
and worried a good deal about him. We had him making up for a complete lack of any concrete knowledge
of physics and mathematics by quite a great number of virtues. We found him interested in physical
and philosophical ideas and we were forced to admire the patience with which he struggled through the
less interesting and more difficult passages. He realized that in order to understand any page he
must have read the preceding ones carefully. He knew that a scientific book, even though popular,
must not be read in the same way as a novel.
A way less lucid thing I also read: For reasons that I should have seen coming, I read
“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, Marc Andreessen’s fever dream about how tech will save us
(and how universities and nonprofits and regulatory bodies are bad, actually). I know I keep saying that
love won’t save you, but between tech and love my bet remains on love, I guess. Anyway, it was written
two years ago and any number of people have written things about it, and so maybe I don’t need to add
my lines too much, but have you met me? so I will: I too like programming and trying hard, but I don’t
think there will be 50 billion people who go to Mars, and my skepticism comes not from my nebulous
lefty leanings but from physics, and knowing how to code isn’t actually a replacement for a functioning
government. (Adam Tooze
dryly pointed out that it wasn’t entirely new, remember the Italian Futurists —
was I imagining an unspoken “gee, I wonder how that went for them”?) Anyway, the venture capitalists are
powerful and they have a direct line to the American president, so I guess it’s good to keep abreast of
these things, but good grief. What struck me, though, was how it’s a powerful strategy to offer a concrete
positive vision of the future, even if you are a vaguely frothing fascist at it, and that it’s something
the left sometimes struggles with.
A concrete, positive vision of the future, or at least a bravely stoked thing:
Laura Marling on the (surprising?) joy of parenting
(it’s changed to paid since I read it, may be worth it). I agree with LM here, and, while everything is
always changing, right now I’m amazed at how stoked and just inherently cool my child is. The list of
things he dislikes as of this moment remains small, and reasonable: being hungry, having wet trousers,
being bored, the sound of the metro brakes, the sound of a bushtrimmer (křovinořez, what a good word);
whereas the things he likes seem to encompass the whole wide world. This month he and I both watched our
first horror film together: Alien, with Sigourney Weaver, to while away a very long flight, which he seemed
to extra like, judging by the coos and wide eyes.
I had a funny conversation with someone I don’t know at a workshop:
“How do you find having a child? You must be an activist, do you find yourself guilty that you’re not as active right now?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
(Am I even an activist? Sometimes I drive for the foodbank and email the government, does that count?)
A number of Czech journalists signed an open letter explaining to their government that killing journalists is bad,
actually. Another Czech journalist wrote a novel on Facebook about how she didn’t sign because it’s all very
complicated and she’s actually having a very hard week right now (no one had asked her why she didn’t sign;
it’s good to keep one’s main character tendencies in check), and a bunch of senators wrote a letter to their
government about how it’s all actually fine that contained the magical phrase “empathy without context”.
That’s where things stand.
I’m finally reading Šeptej Nahlas, Miloš Hroch’s book about Czech shoegaze in the 90s, which is of course excellent.
The book is only in Czech, but
here’s a great hour that MH put together for NTS,
and
here’s a deep-dive youtube channel of sound.