Dear Reader,

Only a handful of days ago I wrote, right in this space, “I get the sense that most of us are saving up what we can for whatever it is the rest of this year will require of us.” I’m sorry, everyone, for jinxing us.

I feel such sorrow and fear and grief, just over the events of the last few days. What is there to say? The gangsters in Washington have kidnapped a foreign head of state for the memes, celebrated the anniversary of their failed coup by trying to re-write history, changed vaccine policy so more kids will die, and murdered a woman—the mother of a six-year-old, a poet—in broad daylight.

Wednesday was also the anniversary of the start of last year’s L.A. wildfires.

My body tries to process it all. I’m sure yours does, too.

I don’t know exactly what days like these call for. That Yeats poem always springs to mind—truly “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” And in response, it’s natural to want to write about the evil they’re doing. But as someone who would work for peace and justice and freedom, I always ask myself if that would best served by… serving up political punditry? Sometimes it is, I’m sure. But there’s other work needing doing, too.

Today: a brief essay about exceptionally tiny books.

Maybe to write about such things, at such a time, is to turn away from the world. In my worst moments I think myself rather impertinent. But other times I suspect that the appreciation of small things and the cultivation of wonder may be more relevant than CNN would have us believe. Either way, thanks as always for reading. May Renee Nicole Good rest in power.

– Jasper

The Zen of Tiny Books

Over winter break I trimmed, folded, and bound 15 extremely tiny books.

Just as soon as I finished binding one, my child would insist that I read it to him. Once we were done, he would have me read it aloud one more time, for good measure. Then he would place it on the tiny bookshelf included in the kit.

The 8.5×11” sheets of paper kept turning into tiny but still real and readable books, and we found ourselves enchanted.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that the texts selected by the creators of this kit are mostly fairy tales. Fairy tales regularly feature wild fluctuations of scale. Case in point: the library includes The Princess and the Pea, The Elves and the Shoemaker, The Frog Prince, and Thumbelina.

Dramatic changes in scale are well-known to elicit wonder. They also have the effect of destabilizing one’s sense of reality. I think of Derek Zoolander throwing an architectural model to the floor and raging, “What is this, a center for ants!?” I also think of a young Vladimir Nabokov being given “a giant polygonal Faber pencil, four feet long and correspondingly thick,” and wondering “whether the point was made of real graphite.” As he explains,

Just as it would be aesthetically wrong for the giant pencil to have only an inch of lead at the point, the tiny book might be impractically small, yet it still must be carefully typeset. Indeed, it must be printed with a real, complete literary work. Only then, as you actually read this book sized for a mouse, do you get the full experience.

A phase change occurs when you fold paper. Though the surface area remains the same, the paper gains a third dimension. Now the book can be flipped through. You can tell where you are in it just by feeling how many pages are to the left and right of the fold. You bind the book, giving it a front and back cover, a spine.

A book is a bounded quantity. It literally is what fits between its bindings, and no more.

The book feels suddenly full of secrets. Each page turn is a revelation.

The opposite of a book is a scroll. Or a smartphone, which takes scroll and makes a verb of it. One of the most basic things you can say about a scroll or a screen is that it lacks depth, lacks a third dimension. Instead of a binding—flat infinity.

The smallest book I own is a Russian-language copy of the Lord’s Prayer. My friend Abraham gave it to me years ago.

The book is made of cast metal, yet the text is legible and the prayer complete. It comes with with a loop for you to string a chain through, so you can wear it around your neck as an amulet. Its protective magic flows directly from the miniaturized scale of the object.

Puppets, pincushions, inflatable frog suits—unconventional methods allow us to engage our world and our preconceptions in playful ways.

Playing with scale does, too.

Lisa on the Fires

Best practice in linkblogging is not to recommend the same author or publication over and over. Unfortunately, my partner Lisa just published another great essay—this time a sprawling, intense, intimate account of our evacuation from the L.A. fires one year ago. I don’t want to quote any section out of context, so I’ll just share this picture she includes, one that our friend David took of us on Ocean Beach just a few days after our panicked evacuation:

I’m too close to the author and the story to be an impartial reader. So go read Lisa’s essay for yourself, see if it’s as powerful as I think it is.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is a great book. But man, could I love this reissue’s cover any more? (Spotted at the surprisingly fun Barnes & Noble at the Grove.)

The Giant Tarp

A month ago, a day before the first rains of the season, workers covered the perennially unfinished luxury condos across the with a vast blue tarp. Watching them attach it I groaned, anticipating its loud flapping and chaotic energy. I hated it.

Then my mom visited. She pointed it out and said, “I think that’s the biggest tarp I’ve ever seen.” I started to feel a little proud.

Gradually I came to acknowledge that it’s actually, alas, beautiful. These days, I look forward to windy Saturday afternoons when I can sit on my couch with a cup of hot herbal tea and enjoy its magnificent billowing.

Yesterday, on the way home from the kid’s preschool, I walked beneath it. I suddenly recognized it as a giant, trapped wave, tall as Nazaré and in its way just as strange.

Synth Reviewer/Anarchist

Benn Jordan has another barn-burner of a video out: “Gadgets For People Who Don't Trust The Government”.

It’s a “gift guide” of adversarial, open-protocol, anti-surveillance tech, interlarded with a pretty good summary of anarchism. The word “anarchy” is, for a lot of people, a hot pan handle—too scary even to touch. This video gives a zero-entry-pool explanation of what anarchism actually means in practice. This subject is, um, relevant right now.

A user by the handle of @epstinian had a good comment:

Altruism🤝Capitalism

Follow up Benn Jordan’s primer on anarchism with David Graeber’s Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art & the Imagination, which has more thought-provoking ideas in each essay than many full books muster. You can read many of the essays for free on Graeber’s website. A favorite is “Army of Altruists,” which refutes the so-called Effective Altruists en passant and includes this incredible observation about missionaries:

I just finished it a few weeks back, and I’ve got more books of his essays waiting in the wings. Graeber’s work feels deeply relevant and illuminating to the experience of being alive here in 2026.

A Good Syllabus

With the President of the United States admitting, boasting even, that the federal government will use its military to seize another country’s oil, I appreciated journalist and climate activist Bill McKibben on the climate / petrochemical angle on the invasion of Venezuela: Just possibly it’s the oil? I find this concept in particular to be highly compelling:

The deeper suggestion here—that solar power technology might be inherently decentralizing, peace-promoting, dare I say anarchist—is not a new one. But it’s a good thing to think about in these days.

I first heard this idea from my brother Elias, who is currently finishing up a master’s degree in energy technology and policy. The other day, as I chewed on these ideas again, I hit him up for a reading list on the subject. He texted me back:

I don’t know about you, but I love a good syllabus. More to read!

When it gets real gloomy and wet, why not head for a nearby hill, right at nightfall, and indulge in some fog-bathing?

I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?