The Magnet 091: Meditation, Monsters, and Musical Marvels
A few things I've been reading, watching, and listening to lately
Hi and welcome to my newsletter, The Magnet. I’m Mark Frauenfelder and in this 91st issue, I look at Scott Snibbe's book How to Train a Happy Mind, the engrossing horror series From, a captivating interview with renowned cultural anthropologist Wade Davis, who shares fascinating tales from his explorations of indigenous cultures worldwide, and a look at the iconic Busby Berkeley's striking choreography in the musical Gold Diggers of 1933, featuring Pig Latin expert Ginger Rogers.
BOOK
How to Train a Happy Mind
I wrote about Scott Snibbe’s book in one of my other newsletters, Book Freak. How to Train a Happy Mind: A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment, is about analytical meditation, which I didn’t know about. I’m more familiar with passive imagination, where you focus on breathing as a way to calm the mind. But analytical meditation is a way to change the mind. As my friend David (who is also reading Snibbe’s book) told me, the different meditations in the book remind him of exercises that Robert Anton Wilson might have shared in the books he wrote in the 1980s, like Prometheus Rising. I’ve only been doing them for a few weeks, but they have already helped me think about the world, and my own mind, in new ways.
SHOW
“From”
Carla and I are big fans of horror and dystopian shows. We're almost done with the second season of From. It reminds me of Blake Crouch's amazing horror sci-fi trilogy, Wayward Pines, as well as the television series, Lost. The Lost part makes me a bit anxious though, because I ended up disliking how the show never fully resolved its mysteries to my satisfaction. So far, From resembles Lost in the way that it keeps piling on more unexplained events and discoveries without giving many answers. It's been renewed for a third season coming in August, and I'm hoping it won't go down the same path as Lost. Despite that, we're really enjoying the series