One Week 100 People 2026 Day 3
We had a rocket attack every three hours last night so I was very tired today. Got only 10 sketches out of the 20, although I may be able to get some more tonight.
Field Notes sketchbook, Faber Castell Pitt pens.
Book Review: The Pine Barrens by John McPhee
John McPhee is a master creative nonfiction writer. He excels at bringing people and places to life, bringing interest and life into topics that seem at first esoteric or dull (like oranges).
The Pine Barrens is a huge near wilderness sandy pine forest in New Jersey, enclosed by suburban industrial sprawl. A handful of people live there, (“pineys”) many of them living an almost pioneer way of life, steeped in folklore and local traditions. The pine, cedar and oak forest ecosystem is also unique, tempered seasonally by fire, growing on poor sandy soil, with cranberry and blueberry bogs dispersed among them.
McPhee zigzags across the land, painting a portrait of people and places, moving between past and present, science, history, folklore and myth like the master storyteller he is. It’s clear from the elegiac tone of this book that McPhee circa 1967-68 was expecting the place to be gone within a few years. Plans for a monstrous jetport, a sprawling city, industrial estate and housing was in the works, and the ecology, history and spirit of the place was about to be utterly destroyed. McPhee was there to document the Pine Barrens, preserve what he could before they were gone. They are still there, and the development fell through, like most other Pine Barren real-estate bonanzas.
Being McPhee he also shows you the developer’s side of the story, the state’s view of the place, and the darker side of the Pine Barrens and its people.
While I understand McPhee’s deliberate choice to make this a wandering narrative, much like the sandy trails in the forest that people get lost in, I think that The Pine Barrens isn’t the best of his writing precisely because of this structural choice. The resulting charm of the piece doesn’t make for the lack of “oomph” that other McPhee pieces have. Comparing The Pine Barrens with another elegiac book of his, Looking for a Ship, and you see that the ending lacks something. Perhaps a wildfire would have brought home the fragility and resilience of this unique place.
All in all, a recommended book, well worth your time even if it isn’t McPhee’s masterpiece.
One Week 100 People 2026 Day 2
Shelter sketches today as well, on a battered Field Notes sketchbook using Faber Castell Pitt pens. I have a cold, so it was a struggle to get these done today.
One Week 100 People 2026 Day 1
It’s time for the yearly one week 100 people challenge. This year I’ll be doing most of it out of a bomb shelter.
The first three sketches were done at a morning zoom meeting on a Stillman and Birn Alpha.
The rest were done in the bomb shelter throughout the day, on a a Field Notes sketchbook that has seen some water damage.
Sketched with a Faber Castell Pitt 0.3 pen and brush pens.
Book Review: The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins
This is a book review that requires a bit of a preface.
I had no idea who Mel Robbins was but I did notice “The Let Them Theory” explode in popularity from the minute it was published. There are some self-help books, like “Atomic Habits,” that become phenomenons, and “The Let Them Theory” was clearly one of them. My first encounter with Mel Robbins was through a YouTube video Ryan Holiday made of her visit to his bookstore. Her over the top reactions seemed wild to me, particularly considering the setting. Once doesn’t expect people to be this vocally enthusiastic in a bookstore. As my interest in the video was more focused on the children’s books that Ryan recommended, I didn’t give Robbins much thought beyond noting that she was quite a character.
The YouTube algorithm being what it is, it next offered up her appearance on Rich Roll’s podcast. I don’t watch podcasts on YouTube (I listen to them on Overcast, usually during long runs or when I’m doing mindless chores), and I don’t subscribe to Rich Roll’s podcast, but I have listened to an episode here and there over the years. He’s generally a good interviewer, and as I was intrigued by Mel Robbin’s character and the book’s meteoric success, I downloaded the episode and listened to it while I was training for my latest 10k. I later also listened to Ryan Holiday interview Mel Robbins, and I have to say that was just pointless marketing fluff where both of them appeared to talk but not really listen to each other.
The Rich Roll interview on the other hand is worth listening to if you have any interest in the book or the phenomena around it. Roll not only delved into the ideas in “The Let Them Theory” but also pushed back against a good chunk of them, and the back and forth between the two taught me a lot about both Mel Robbins and her book. If you’re at all curious about “The Let Them Theory” I recommend listening to this podcast. You’ll get 80-90% of what’s in the book, plus a lot of interesting insights from Rich that go beyond what Mel Robbins provides.
End of preface.
I bought the book and read it. The amount of hate and vitriol that people seem to enjoy spewing at this book in places like GoodReads beggars belief. You’d think that Mel Robbins is the source of all the world’s problems.
The reality is that this a pretty standard self-help book. There’s two and half ideas in it, it could have totally been a blog post, and most of the book is anecdotes, personal stories, repetition and fluff. The ideas in it aren’t new. Mel Robbins doesn’t claim they are – she just found a pretty useful way to package them. If you’re familiar with detachment, there’s nothing new this book will teach you. It is, however, easily digestible, entertaining and light hearted. The main ideas in it are: “let them” (detach but preserve your ego in the process), “let me” (don’t be an aloof a-hole), and put yourself in their place to encourage empathy with other people and their perspective.
The thing that I find curious is the kind of “Oprah Winfrey” vibe the whole thing has. Robbins is very enthusiastic, seems very mercurially sincere, and seems to enjoy using herself and her close family as test subjects and example for her “theory”.
And here we come to the word that has maybe angered more reviewers than any other when it comes to this book: “theory”.
Let me be clear – this isn’t a theory, it never was a theory, it’s a catchphrase. But the “Let Them Catchphrase” doesn’t sell as many copies, does it?
In then end I’d give this book 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4. Why? Because I grade books on a curve, and compared to other self-help books this one is entertaining and is potentially useful. The ideas in it aren’t new, but there are practically no self-help books that present new ideas – it’s all in the packaging. I’ve tried the ideas in it, and I’ve offered them to others, and they work, because we are egotistical beings, and because remembering “let them” is easy when you’re in the heat of the moment. It’s also readable and fun, which is a rarity for a self-help book. Robbins knows how to tell a good story, and her character comes through in her writing. That may rub you the wrong way, or you may find it joyful – that’s mostly up to you.
Would I recommend this book? Maybe. Listen to the Rich Roll podcast. If you want to delve a bit more into the ideas there, then get the book. Otherwise, skip it. Just don’t buy the book to rage review how books like this are ruining Western Civilization. That’s neither true nor helpful.
Weekly Update – What Have I Been Doing Lately
Edit: sorry for the typos in the first paragraph- they were written on my phone in a rush.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here and a lot has happened and is going on.
I have been focusing very hard on getting a challenging professional accreditation . The test was under an extreme time limit – two hours for 16-17 questions, about half of which had two or more sub questions. For those keeping score that’s about 7 minutes per question.
It was also a practical test – you get an environment for every question and you have to fix it, or run things in it, or create things in it. It was “open book” in that official documentation was allowed, but no Google search or AI agent was permitted. One of the things tested was your ability to quickly navigate the documentation, old school.
The details of the test aren’t what I want to focus on, but rather on the challenge, effort and approach to learning complex things in depth.
What helped me stick to a very tight and challenging to study schedule was two things:
- My quarterly plan. One of the main blocks in it is “Professional Development” and under this block I broke down 8 weeks of focused study and review for the last stretch before my proctored exam.
- Scheduling a date for the exam. Having a definite deadline pushed me to take my studying seriously in much the same way as signing up for a race gets me focused on improving my running.
I had someone ask me what is the point of going through a stressful exam that doesn’t really simulate the way I currently work (as no AI agents or Google search is allowed). My answer was that I believed that through challenging myself I would improve the depth of my knowledge and experience and become better at what I do regardless of the tools at my disposal. This has proven to be the case even while I was still studying for the exam – as both AI agents and searches improve if you know how to guide them. In other words, the more professional and experienced and knowledgeable you are, the better and more effective you get at using these tools and others.
I also participated in a 10k race about a week ago. My result was much better than I expected, as a result of focusing on strength training, targeted speed work and most importantly – mentally pushing myself during the race. Endurance races are about 50% a mind game – telling your brain to shut up as it’s yelling at you to slow down or stop. While the result wasn’t a PR it was pretty close to my PR which is not something that I’d thought I would be able to do post cancer and chemo.
The morning after the race, when my body was still aching from the effort, war with Iran broke out. Since then my life is stuck in survival mode- I spend my nights on an air mattress in the local shelter and my days trying to work and live in between runs to and from the shelter. I don’t know how long this hellish situation will last, and the uncertainty and helplessness of it all is crushing at times. I do, however, regularly remind myself that I have survived not only multiple rounds of regional war, I have also pulled through a year of cancer and chemo hell. I didn’t choose this, I can’t control it, but I will do my best to pull through it as well as I can.
Book Review: This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
This is another book that got onto my Kindle years ago and I’ve only now finished reading it. This is How You Lose the Time War is a short sci-fi novel about two agents that time travel all over time and space to further the agenda of their warring factions.
“Red” represents the Agency, a techno-dystopia that echoes the Matrix film. “Blue” represents the Garden, an equally destructive faction that is represented more favourably not so much because of the moral or ethical viewpoint they foster, but more because of the biases the authors and the audience are likely to bring to the novel.
The agents start sending letters to each other, at first taunting ones, and then, when you start to get fed up with the pointless repetition of it all, they start developing a friendship which blossoms into a romantic relationship.
The contact between the agents is done entirely through letters, and there’s a lot of literary references and clever uses of narrative and allusion to various “Classics”.
I will not spoil the story, as it’s well worth reading, I will just note that I found it lyrical, moving and very cleverly constructed. It also managed to be readable despite the complex narrative and the sheer amount of worlds and world-building introduced in such a short span of time.
Highly recommended, although it’s not a light read.
How I Use My Notebooks: Work in Progress Notebook – Debts and Lessons
I wrote about my newest notebook, my “Work in Progress” notebook here. It’s basically a notebook that I use for self improvement, dedicated for various exercises in focused meditation, working through gnarly personal issues, and for more intense personal journaling.
One of the things that I do as an ongoing exercise in this notebook is keep a list of people that I personally know (so no celebrities or influencers) and what I learned from them. The idea came to me as I was reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
The book starts with a list of people that Marcus is indebted to – from his immediate family, then onwards to friends, teachers and advisers. This inspired me to create a similar list of my own, also starting from my immediate family and expanding onwards from that.
Some people are kind, inspiring, provide a good example and so they were easy to add to the list. Others were more challenging, but I forced myself to confront my relationship to them, and to find the valuable lessons that I learned from them. The point isn’t to be vicious, cynical, or facetious, but rather to take a second look at people and relationships that you have labelled in a certain way. So the terrible boss taught me what I value in myself and in my managers, certain mean people taught me how to recognise hypocrites, and bad teachers taught me to appreciate good ones and to learn on my own.
I highly recommend doing this exercise and returning to it. It will make you appreciate and feel grateful for the people in your life, and you may even be moved to thank a few of them, even though that’s not the point of this. The point is to realise that:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
John Donne
Book Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
I bought A Visit from the Goon Squad back in 2011, as it was part of that year’s Tournament of Books. It has languished on my Kindle ever since. This year, however, I have decided to read the oldest unread books on my Kindle, and so it was A Visit from the Goon Squad’s turn.
First of all, the book has a dreadful name. It’s trying to be sophisticated, it ends up being uninformative and unappealing. It’s sounds like a book about comedians, or maybe a family saga of some kind, but it’s basically a string of partially connected episodes about people that work or have worked in the music industry.
I almost gave up on this book as about 50 pages in I found myself not liking any of the characters and finding the narrative dull and bland. Then Rhea appeared, and I found myself pulled into the story. She redeemed the book, and it got better and better as I read along.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a very readable book, apart from the deliberately dreadful writing of the only writer in the novel, Jules Jones. There’s a character that didn’t redeem himself – the more I saw of him the less I liked.
The book didn’t age well, and will likely age even worse with time. It’s embedded in a certain era – pre smart phones, social media and AI – but it’s not written in a way that will allow it to be timeless. The powerpoint penultimate chapter reads as a dated gimmick, and the last, “futuristic” chapter is truly terrible. It really brings the book down, as even for its time it serves mainly as a window to Egan’s biases and anxieties more than to the true zeitgeist of the time.
Egan’s choice to build the narrative on episodic encounters with loosely connected characters was groundbreaking for the time, and the book won a Pulitzer Prize. In 2019 Bernadine Evaristo will take this concept and do it much, much better with Girl, Woman, Other thus leaving Egan’s novel in the dust.
While I don’t regret reading A Visit from the Goon Squad I wouldn’t recommend it. It didn’t stand the test of time, there are much better books to read, and it’s attempt to capture the zeitgeist of a time so fleeting it practically didn’t exist (the oughts) isn’t worth the reader’s time. Read Evaristo’s novel instead.
January 2026’s Currently Inked Fountain Pens
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, mostly because through November I was still working through the Pelikan Hubs pens and then December was Inkvent time. However, I have just cleaned out all of my fountain pens and started out with a fresh batch for the new year. Here’s the lineup for January, and it’s mostly dedicated to new pens with interesting inks.
- Leonardo Momento Zero Bohemian Twilight fine nib inked with Montblanc Around the World in 80 Days. I love this pen so much – the minute I saw it as I was stowing away my cleaned out pens I realised that I have to ink it again. It hasn’t been far from rotation from the minute I purchased it, because it’s a gorgeous pen with a wonderful nib that is comfortable for long writing sessions. The ink is beguiling – ever since I realised that it isn’t the mustard green that I was expecting I keep trying to figure it out. It’s on the spectrum between dark grey and blue-black, and there’s something about weirdly undefinable inks that appeals to me.
- Pelikan M600 Red and White fine nib inked with Diamine Inkvent 2019 Candy Cane. I reviewed the ink here (it was from the first Inkvent calendar) and I liked the ink enough to buy a full bottle of it. Pelikan M600 is my favourite Pelikan size (even though there’s not much difference between it and the M800) and I didn’t have any of the red editions of the Pelikan Souveran line. When this one went on sale I just had to buy it. Pelikan’s are workhorses with a giant ink capacity and fantastic nibs. If you don’t have one, I recommend buying an M200 at least, and splurging on the M600 or M800 when you can. Note that Pelikan nibs are wider than their Japanese counterparts.
- Sailor Pro Gear Sunlight from the Ocean Floor fine nib inked with KWZ Exclusive for epiora.pl Błękit Warty Poznani. This is my first sparkly Sailor fountain pen (most of my Sailor fountain pens are black, from the time before they started issuing pens in wild colours and sparkly finishes) and I bought it on sale. As Sailor have raised and raised their prices over the years I only buy them when they’re heavily discounted. Sailor fine nibs as usual are very fine and with plenty of feedback. The ink is an exclusive that KWZ created for a lovely local fountain pen store in Poznan, Poland called Epiora. I bought my Pelikan Art Edition there during the last day of the Urban Sketchers symposium and I got this ink for free. My plan is to review it, as it’s an attractive blue-black.
- TWSBI ECO Indigo blue and bronze extra fine nib inked with Robert Oster River of Fire. A brand new pen for me, purchased at the same time as the other TWSBI ECOs in this rotation. The ink is old, from 2017, and an ink that I haven’t used in years. It’s very saturated, we’ll see how well it behaves on various notebooks.
- TWSBI ECO Serpentine and bronze 1.1 nib inked with Pilot Iroshizuku Fuyu-Gaki. A new TWSBI ECO with a new (to me) classic Pilot Iroshizuku ink – Fuyu-Gaki. I’ve learned to love orange inks in recent years, and so I’ve decided to purchase this most classic of orange inks. Looking forward to giving it a try.
- TWSBI ECO Plum with onyx extra fine nib inked with Robert Oster Caffe Crema. New pen with an old ink – recently gifted to me from an ex-fountain pen user. It’s an interesting shade of brown and I look forward to giving this ink a try.
Writing at Large 