It’s Friday night, and you’re home alone making Nutella. Remind yourself it’s an enviable skill that will add to your dowry and that you will not die alone.

Whisk Away: Homemade Nutella. A couple friends of mine have a food blog and a way with words.

A couple of other things that you might not have heard yet, because they’re not available: There’s a fantastic compilation of music that was recorded and released originally on 78s, and it’s called Black Mirror: Reflections In Global Musics. I would recommend it to anybody. But anyway, on that album there’s a song, and when I first heard that song, it just completely blew me away, because all the sudden I had heard the greatest note that I’d ever heard anybody make up to that point. The song is called “Smyrneiko Minore,” and it was sung by Marika Papagika, a young woman who emigrated from Greece to the United States, and she recorded it in 1919 in New York. When you listen to that song, you’re totally unprepared. At least I was. I was totally unprepared for her entrance. When she comes in, that first note, it’s unbelievable, the sense of human sorrow and the feeling of that note.

Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington | The A.V. Club Chicago. The song in question.

The best way to describe it is I’m like this energy-gathering dynamo. I suck in the energy from the crowd and right at the point they’re drained, ready to slump over and fall over and pass out, I bring it to a crescendo and [expletive] shoot it all back at ‘em. And then I’m [expletive] slumped over and ready to pass out and they’re energized and ready for the next artist or end of the party or whatever.

Interview with Coolio, describing what it’s like to perform.

Most intellectual failures, people who are smart but still don’t succeed, tend to be underspecialized.

That’s Andy McKenzie summarizing 11 main points from Colin Marshall’s interview with Robin Hanson. This point from their talk struck home for me. No, I don’t consider myself a Failure, but I know very well how endless curiosity doesn’t necessarily make you productive. Constraint is liberating, etc.