The rascal David Sedaris, thinking through it, how to finally be happy

Trumplessness, 6.4.26

OK, listen. This is a little thin for several reasons, but largely because this is Pittsburgh’s annual One Beautiful Week. We get one week of sunny skies in the mid-70s and then it’s four months of hell’s front porch.

If it’s also your One Beautiful Week, go read these outside. Or, actually, don’t read them at all. Just go outside.

I love David Sedaris so much; he’s such a rascal: “Take, for example, the woman who asked the author to inscribe a copy of his 2024 children’s book, ‘Pretty Ugly,’ to her granddaughter, Morgan. Mr. Sedaris wrote: ‘To Morgan, you are destructive and difficult to love.’ The grandmother, he said, was ‘furious.’”—Addie Morfoot, writing in The New York Times about Sedaris’ Upper East Side apartment.

The thinking is the thing: “We tend to believe that efficiency is the highest virtue, the four-hour workweek the ultimate goal. Why sweat over the introductory paragraph of an essay if an AI program can sail over whatever argumentative obstacle you have in the space of 15 seconds? But the effort and the hang-ups are, as they say, a feature of the human thought process, not a bug.”—Eve Fairbanks, writing in The Atlantic about how to spot AI writing.

Pursuit of happiness: “So I think Americans are kind of weirdos when it comes to happiness. We’re also focused on optimizing. This feels very TikTok, but it’s something Americans have been thinking about for a long time. Rewind to the early 19th century, and you have scholars like Alexis de Tocqueville, who came over to the U.S. as this anthropological experiment, like, ‘What’s going on with the new country?’ And what he remarked upon was that Americans weren’t just constantly pursuing happiness — they were never satisfied. My guess is if de Tocqueville showed up today, he’d be like, ‘Oh, man.’”—Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist who teaches a class on happiness at Yale, to the NYT’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro.