Weekend Reading
Writing worth reading - 12th/13th November 2022
Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz
“I realized it was a perfect description of the kind of person who tends to prosper in the bureaucratic environment. And the only reason I did is because it suddenly struck me that it was a perfect description of the head of the bureaucracy that I was part of, the chairman of my academic department—who had that exact same smile, like a shark, and that exact same ability to make you uneasy, like you were doing something wrong, only she wasn’t ever going to tell you what...”
Katherine Rundell: ‘Larger than the world’s chaos are its miracles’ by John Gapper
“Failure to pay attention has been at the root of many of our failures. I mean attention as a bodily and political act, not just an intellectual discipline…”
I spent 10 days in a secret Chinese Covid detention centre by Thomas Hale
“The queue of buses slowly disappeared into what looked like a brightly lit gate at the end of the road. Cigarette smoke in the night air cast a silver pall over the fields. There was the sense of some vast structure behind the darkness. The placement of suitcases and bags inside the bus meant we were all in slightly uncomfortable positions, though one person had fallen asleep and was…”
Upcoming meals with 9others
Wednesday 30th November — London — details and signup here.
Please book in & share with good people you know in the above cities.