October 2024

This newsletter is a collection of things I have found in the last month that I enjoyed, found interesting, or simply wanted to share.

You can follow me more closely at my personal website or if you or someone you know is looking to buy or sell a home, you can point them to my real estate website.

Moleskine Mania

How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era

You don’t need me to tell you what a Moleskine looks like, but you may not have considered how insistently its design sends messages to the contemporary nomad. The minimal black cover looks, at first glance, like it might be leather: robust but also luxurious. The non-standard dimensions, a couple of centimetres narrower than the familiar A5, let you slip the notebook into a jacket pocket, and the rounded corners—which add considerably to the production cost—help with this. They also stop your pages from getting dog-eared and, together with the elastic strap and unusually heavy cover boards, confirm that the notebook is ready for travel. The edges of the board sit flush with the page block, ensuring that your Moleskine can never be mistaken for a printed book. In use, it lies obediently open and flat, and the pocket glued into the back cover board invites you to hide souvenirs—photos, tickets stubs, the phone numbers of beautiful strangers. Two hundred pages suggest that you have plenty to write about; the paper itself, tinted to a classy ivory shade and unusually smooth to the touch, implies that your ideas deserve nothing but the best, and the ribbon marker helps you navigate your musings. Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled Nike, Mercedes, or Apple—and, like the best cues, the messaging works on a subconscious level.

Hoop, there it is

The Secret Code of Pickup Basketball

In 2015, Nick Rogers, now a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh, conducted an ethnography of a pickup-basketball game. Like an anthropologist who heads into the bush to live with tribe members, Rogers became one of the game’s regulars. During breaks, he took hurried notes on his iPhone. (Nice work, if you can get it.) Rogers wanted to understand the paradox of pickup basketball. Its culture is aggressively masculine. Its players tend to be diverse in age, race, and class. They jostle one another, elbow to elbow. They collide with full force. They get loud. And yet, fights are relatively rare. Rogers believes that this carefully pitched intensity is enabled by a special set of norms. These aren’t etched into stone like the Ten Commandments, he told me, but the players he interviewed on the sidelines were all fluent in them, and even reverent toward them. This unspoken code keeps the game from tipping over into violence. It allows a small group of perfect strangers with little in common besides basketball to experience a flow state—a brief, but intense, form of group transcendence.

Turbulence of Tennis

‘I’m good, I promise’: the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player

All serious tennis players – from gods such as Agassi to college players like I was at the time – have to grapple with isolation. For people who are comfortable with it, pro tennis can be a refuge: they find it behind a hotel door, with headphones on in a far-flung airport and, above all, inside the white lines of the court. The downside is that the victories are often private, too. When you remove the headphones, there is probably no one around to talk to; and even if there is, you probably don’t speak the same language. We were a strange cohort: sharing courts, canteens and coaches around the world but remaining ultimately alone.

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Thanks for reading. Have a great month,

Clay

Hi, that's me!

How kind of you to make your way down here.

A bit about me: I can be interested in anything, for better or worse. I love photography, travel, golf, and baseball. My latest pursuit is learning the guitar. I write a rad newsletter that I publish monthly.

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