My Almanac

The West Wing S. 4 Ep. 3 “College Kids”

Roasted Acorn Squash with Maple Butter

Joshua Tree National Park is an immense wilderness, protecting nearly 800,000 acres of California desert. The park is home to exposed granite monoliths, rugged canyons and extensive stands of the Joshua tree – the peculiar looking plant that is the park’s namesake. Sunsets are pretty spectacular here too. Photo by David Curry (www.sharetheexperience.org).

Oh and for those wondering and can’t read it, the stickers say “basically everyone’s been winging it since forever you’re not the only one” and they are super adorable.

For Luttwak, capitalism is synonymous with boring adulthood: ledgers, marginal returns and the expectation that the world will fundamentally remain the same. As a strategist, Luttwak sees the presumption of predictability as a damning vulnerability. As a historian of the ancient world, he is too alive to the prospect of civilisational ruin to put any faith in the idea that capitalism contains its own solution. Now that he is rich, making money for Luttwak has become a kind of pastime, and raising cattle is his attempt to make it in the least dreary, most archaic way possible. More and more it seemed we had come to the Amazon to provide Luttwak with another chance to “raise a thirst”, and it was understood that I was there to experience an endangered sanctuary based on values such as honour and daring, in which Luttwak prowled around as a Homeric hero. “Take as many pictures as possible,” he repeatedly told me. “Note everything down.”

Watch: GoldieBlox’s tribute to the year in feminism will make you jump out of your chair in joy.