And, like, that's a little funny. When I came back from the store with so, so many books, Becky said, "Oh, so, are we poor now? Did you spend all our money on books?" and it was certainly looking that way. I only had half of them with me, after going to the store, the rest arrived in the mail over the coming days, which added to the comedy.

This is a bit of a sidenote: I can't decide if I'm embarrassed or not to have all these books. I return to this theme from time to time, as I think about my job and work, many of you will have spoken to me and are familiar with that. Is it cringe to want to do a good job? A little. If work were more embarrassing and I leaned in anyway, we would be in comfortable territory, irony-drenched camp, a guilty pleasure. If I didn't care at all, then that's also solid ground. I log on, I log off, who cares, the earth spins on its axis and God is in his heaven. But work at my email job is a little bit silly, and I care a significant amount, so it sticks in my head because I can't resolve it into something that makes sense.

Regardless. If I ever were to really commit to refocusing and getting better, now would be the time. When I ordered the books, my manager floated the idea that I would read them over the Christmas break, which speaks to an impulse, prevalent this time of year, that it is time to refresh and to get better. Now is the time to fix everything. (I did have not read my books yet, I spent my break from work not working.)

When people talk about resisting the idea of New Year's Resolutions—it's a lot of pressure, it's so arbitrary, if you want to make a change then make it—I'm very agreeable in conversation. "This is the darkest, coldest time of year," I say. "We can get things moving again in the spring." And maybe that's true for some people, but not me. I love the fresh start. I love the idea that this time we're going to do it right and this time it's going to work. This isn't in favor of specific New Year's resolutions as much as it is in favor of an overall ambition for improvement.

So over Christmas vacation I organized everything. took down the four-cube shelving unit that had towered over the left side of my desk, and also the picture ledge above the desk that ran the length of the wall. A side table, painted the same color as the desk, had opened up, so I moved the entire desk left and slid the new table in to the right. Instead of having a cutout on the left side where nothing ever was, the cutout is on the right side, open to the rest of the room. I brought in a bigger bookshelf (to hold all the new books I'd bought about working, including the HBR 10 Must Reads Boxed Set with Bonus Emotional Intelligence). I found a spot to put the trash can so the dog wouldn't get in it.

At the same time I was doing this, Becky was in the front closet, setting up new shelves to hold all our hats and gloves and tote bags. Later we would go through the closet that has all our art and toss the things we don't want and all the frames that are broken. That was the same weekend I reorganized the garage, which had lost two of its best sets of shelves to the front closet and to my office. They were replaced by two low pieces that had been in my closet, which were moved out to make room for the four-cube shelves from the side of the desk. I bought an identical unit and now have eight cubes in my office that function more or less as a dresser. Reorganizing the closet required looking through my clothes with a critical eye. Am I wearing this? Does it spark joy? Most did. Some didn't. An ongoing process. When that was done we swapped out our cobbled-together collection of food containers for a fresh, cohesive set of brand-name Tupperware® we'd received as a gift. It was as close to a full reset as we could feasibly get.

One nice thing about being me is that it is my birthday today. So after the fresh start of the new year I also get another one on January 7.

Already some people have asked, "What did you learn about yourself at age 28? What have been some highlights from the year?" and well I would say the marriage is the big one. "What changed besides getting married?" I would not say, with confidence, there was much. Age 28 was completely transformative. I don't know how much the 27-year-old would recognize. I don't know if he'd be surprised, though, because he knew big change was coming.

I had a bad night a little while back worried I'd lost some sense of identity since getting married, but after a good night's sleep I remembered "Oh, right, time changes a person." [1] I'm not the same person at 29 than I was at 28, but I was never going to be. The time passes regardless. And, I want to put on the record, I like who I am, and who I've grown to be over the past year. Cutting through the cultural pressure in favor of new year's resolutions, and the backlash to that pressure, and the counter-backlash from people who feel defensive about it—despite all that meta-commentary, one thing true is that it is possible for everything to change from one birthday to the next, and to be in a much better place from one to another. For me, that happened comparing and 2022 to 2023, and 2023 to 2024.

And now I get another try! Maybe I'll get organized for real this time in 2025, I'll find all the right systems and put them in place. I'll find a schedule and keep all the house clean and eat better and run more and finish more books (including but not limited to the HBR 10 Must Reads Boxed Set with Bonus Emotional Intelligence). Maybe it won’t all pan out but I'm looking forward to the attempt.

Happy new year to you, and happy birthday to me.

[1] A rule of thumb I like to follow is not to worry too much when it's dark out. This was an example of a time I forgot to follow that rule, whoops.

Strawberry Fields, Not Forever

If we peek into the category called "Things I'd Like To Get Organized, Given The Chance" would be the subcategory "Everything On The Computer." Lotta stuff on there. In church Sunday I spent some time daydreaming about the feasibility of creating an index of everything I'd ever written, so I can go back and remember and find if I want to. Perhaps you remember reading Issue 1x7 and know how much time and effort I can commit to sorting books if I have the opportunity. Information, data, content...where should they go? What is the best place to put them?

It was in this frame of mind that I read an article called "Century-Scale Storage," by Maxwell Neely-Cohen, a fellow at the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab. It's extremely long and extremely good. The premise is very simple: if you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it? And then he goes through the options. Stone is long-lasting but expensive and difficult. The cloud is easy but ephemeral, also nothing digital has ever made it 100 years, so there's more of a risk. And everything else is kind of in between.

I recommend it if you like reading articles online that are 15,000 words (and if so, then I'll also recommend "What Is Code?" by Paul Ford, which is 38,000. Give yourself a challenge). The century storage webpage is also constructed wonderfully.

The day I read that, I was browsing online and saw this ad for Memorex cassette tapes in a 1984 Rolling Stone, touting their longevity. I emailed it to Max and said "I liked your article, I thought of it when I saw this ad. It made me think "It's not forever!! It can be strawberry fields for probably a few decades, if we're careful! Memorex you can't be saying this!!"

That was the same day I went to see The Green Knight (2021) in the movie theater, which was great, and it prompted me to finally read the original poem. I was surprised to learn [2] that the Green Knight saga wasn't an ancient and fungible part of the Arthur legend. The oral, folkloric nature of the means everyone tells it their own way, there's no one source of truth. But for Sir Gawain And The Green Knight there is! There's only one manuscript, and it was saved from a fire at the Cottonian Library in London in 1731. And even then, people didn't realize what it was until the mid-1800s.

Neely-Cohen makes brief mention of the Green Knight in the storage piece. Robin Sloan, an author I really like, picks up the thread in his own newsletter. His idea is that we're all just hanging out online, and the way we experience content is in this kind of quantum, all-at-once type of way. Because like how would you categorize everything that happened with Charli XCX’s "brat"? It was more than listening to an album of music, it was many channels working together in concert. It was a summer vibe.

But when we look back, historians and sociologists and music lovers will not have a summer vibe to reference or experience. They will have a set of songs they can listen to. Sloan says that finishing a thing is increasingly valuable because it creates a durable end product. The social feed online is always a work in progress, you can't really read the whole thing and it wouldn't be worthwhile to try, but a book you can create and complete, and then you can have and hold an artifact that can last.

"Posterity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a book, an album, a video game: at least you are TRYING," Sloan writes. "Finished work remains, stubbornly, because it has edges to defend itself, & a solid, graspable premise...and The Green Knight wins the day."

[2] I took a class on King Arthur in college and I'm sorry to tell you it was so boring. I don't know whether this was something that didn't get covered or if I just wasn't paying attention. But either way, that class is why I know that most of the Arthur legend isn't set in stone. No pun intended.

"Does Finance Benefit Society?"

is a direct quote, in fact it is the title, of this working paper, forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies. The researchers used a large-language model survey of millions of books to see how people were feeling about the finance industry, and then tracked that against the actual performance of the economy. What they found is that sentiment in the books was a leading indicator of economic performance! If the books said the industry was good then the stocks did well a year later! And vice versa! They studied "millions of books published in eight countries over hundreds of years" and drew that conclusion!

Matt Levine, creator of the newsletter Money Stuff which is so dense but very good, wrote about possible applications of this theory for fun and profit:

“If you read a new novel that is like “the banksters are evil,” that predicts a banking crisis, and you should sell bank stocks. If you run a macro hedge fund, you should probably get an LLM to read all of the new books and see if they predict a bank crisis or strong economic growth. Or, if you work in publishing, you can read all the new books before anyone else, so you can get an early sense of the vibes. If all the new books think that hedge funds are evil, then you have advance warning of a financial crisis, maybe.”

Or I have another idea: a big hedge fund hires me and all my friends to write novels about how finance is good and interesting, then we all cash in together. If any hedge funds are reading this and want to pursue this idea obviously please get in touch my email is tim@timhatton.online

Here Is A List of my Ten Favorite Albums of 2024

In order:

1. The Great American Bar Scene, by Zach Bryan

2. Bleachers, by Bleachers

3. The Secret of Us, by Gracie Abrams

4. In Waves, by Jamie xx

5. My Light, My Destroyer, by Cassandra Jenkins

6. In E, by Water Damage

7. OBSERVATIONS FROM A CROWDED ROOM, by Joy Oladokun

8. Endlessness, by Nala Sinephro

9. GNX, by Kendrick Lamar

10. TANGK, by Idles

and also the live albums "Rome" by the National, and "24" by Zach Bryan. Doesn't happen very often you go to a great concert and the band comes out with a live album from the same tour soon after. With Zach Bryan it was under a week between show and album. Everything's coming up Timbo!

I have also updated my in-rotation playlist "acceptance," and I have had the computer generate a playlist of the songs I actually listened to most over the past month.

Here Is A List of my Ten Favorite Movies of 2024

It's a little sillier to make a list of my ten favorite movies of 2024, because I only saw 11 movies that came out this year. Twelve if you count "Your Friend, Nate Bargatze," which I don’t. Here goes:

1. Challengers

2. Conclave

3. Monkey Man

4. The Bikeriders

5. The Wild Robot

6. Twisters

7. The Fall Guy

8. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

9. Gladiator II

10. Trap

Longlegs did not make the cut. Better luck next year Longlegs. Next time there is a movie that says "How are all these murders happening so mysteriously? It seems almost like the devil is doing them!" I hope the answer is more entertaining and clever than "Yep the devil was doing them."

I used to write down a list of all the movies I watched in a spreadsheet and then tally them all up and run my own statistics, but then my friend Carson said, rightly, "you should use Letterboxd and they'll do all that for you." And so they do.

Here Is A List of my Ten Favorite Books I Read In 2024

This list is very much not limited to books that came out in 2024 (though I’ve marked those with an *). It is limited to first-time reads, though, otherwise Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow would be on here for the third year running.

1. Godwin, by Joseph O’Neill*

2. The Power Broker, by Robert Caro

3. The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

4. Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

5. The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman*

6. Trust, by Hernan Diaz

7. Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, by Mark Haber

8. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar*

9. Moonbound, by Robin Sloan*

10. The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley*

More Links

1. "Revision" by Daisy Hildyard. Terrific short story. Sets up its own rules, follows them to the letter in a way you don't expect. It's about final exams and brought me back to the anxious, choked feeling the end of the semester used to bring.

2. "Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art.” Love a notebook. Here are a hundred pages of notebooks that artists used in their work. I actually got a book very similar to this from Becky for Christmas, called, aptly, The Work of Art and I love that, too.

3. Profile on Teddy Blanks, "The Typography Maestro." Cool piece. I feel like every guy on Letterboxd would want this guy's job, designing type for all the good movies. Maybe it's just that I want it really bad and I'm projecting.

Here Is A Photo Of The Dog

You’ll notice she has a pillow and blanket like she is a human person. Who are we do deny her an indulgence

That's all from me this time. Expect the next edition on February 7, which is a Friday.

From Tulsa,