New Year/Book, Taking the Plunge, and One More Thing

Happy New Year, three days late. What’s three days? Not many, for a writer. Not many for a writer who is behind on a book. 

I’m on a short book sabbatical, reworking the first few chapters, trying not to be online, and looking for non-distracting ways to stay in touch with friends (and also, find new sources). This newsletter is part of these efforts. So thank you, truly, for opting in to yet another newsletter. I won’t be publishing often. In the next dispatch I’ll probably put out an explicit request for more sources; something to look forward to.

I have no expert framework or magical thinking to share around the new year, but one thing that’s been rattling around my brain since last August is the theme of surviving the surviving. 

This theme arose from two completely unrelated works: Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time, which won the Booker Prize in 2023, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise, which I haven’t had the chance to read yet, but listened to Brodesser-Akner talk about at length on a podcast. “It’s about surviving what you survived, which is also known as the rest of your life,” is how it’s described. Whew. 

Spoiler: These are not uplifting stories. One of Barry’s characters self-immolates years after a traumatic event, and that’s just one example. But they’re reminders of the complexities and long tail of destabilizing events, human resilience, and how we can best support the people around us after the initial survival period. That might be one way to think about the new year, and the potential for destabilizing events, which I’m not saying are definitely going to happen but I’m not saying are not going to happen. I mean, some days I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that we’re at the midway point of the 2020’s. (We were literally just living in a pandemic, were we not?)

Not a Tech Newsletter

This is not a tech newsletter [important caveat], but this story about Meta introducing AI-generated character profiles to its platforms is yikes and another glimpse into a dystopian future in which the characters we interact with online become almost indistinguishable from the human beings we’re trying to connect with. 

The timeline of this story is slightly confusing; Meta’s AI characters are in the news cycle right now because of statements a Meta exec made about the future of bots on its platforms, while the company has actually been experimenting with different AI characters since 2023. Maybe this just further convinces me that we need to eliminate the word “future” when we talk about our realities being broken by AI. It’s already happening. It’s been. 

When Was Cold Plunging? 

My friend Jay and I sometimes say “When was ___?,” insert word here. It’s how we ask each other when a historical event took place or when a phenomenon first emerged, and a fun way to place events on a timeline and in our brains in an era of infinite context collapse. When was the French Foreign Legion? When was Mesopotamia? When did people start wearing pants? 

Sometimes the point is to feel small in the context of things. 

On New Year’s Day a quad of us headed to Ocean Beach for the annual Polar Plunge, submerging ourselves (without wetsuits) in a salty Pacific that was only three degrees warmer than the air temp (50°F). It was worth it. The cold shock reminded me that I haven’t been surfing since last summer, when I was lucky enough to surf very small waves off of West Cork, Ireland. (Writing a book, or thinking about writing a book, will destroy everything else in your life.)

Thanks in large part to Instagram wellness gurus and health podcasters, cold plunging is de rigueur. But the practice long, long predates the podcast manosphere. So, when was cold plunging? Turns out one of the earliest cold-plunging influencers wasn’t Huberman, but…Hippocrates. I loved learning this tidbit. 

The beneficial effects of cold-water immersion (CWI) on human physiology dates as far back as 3500BC with the Edwin Smith Papyrus making numerous references to cold being used for therapeutic purposes (Wang et al. 2006). Ancient Greeks utilised cold-water for therapies as well as relaxation and socialisation; Hippocrates in fourth century BC documenting the use of cold for medicinal purposes and analgesic benefits (Tsoucalas et al. 2015). In Hippocrates’ work entitled “On airs, waters and places”, he makes the statement that “the water can cure everything,” further emphasising its value (Hippocrates, translated by Lloyd, Chadwick & Mann 1950). 

One More Thing

Starting off the new year with The Moon That Turns You Back, a poetry collection by the Palestinian-American writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan. I recommend it. I’m inspired by the experimental, choose-your-own-narrative format of some of Alyan’s pieces in this. “Spoiler,” which first appeared in The New Yorker in 2020, is a poem that wrecks you in a way that no AI bot ever could. It randomly popped into my head again last year and I was happy to see it included in this collection when I picked up the book on New Year’s Day. Also adding Alyan’s Salt Houses to the TBR list.  

I’m working through a stack of non-fiction books, but this feels obligatory at the moment, the way it sometimes does, so I won’t bore you.

More TK. Send me your thoughts.