Six Lines

One of the main reasons that I stopped posting here regularly was that everything I wanted to write about was negative. This didn’t feel particularly healthy. When I came across The Broccoli Tree, I really started to think seriously about what I wanted to write about and why. I wanted to share good news, things that make people happy.

Sharing things that make you happy is, I think, an incredibly important part of life, but I’ve found it hard to do in the format of a blog post. (And harder in social media.) There’s a well-known negativity bias in the press. As the saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads.” Academic research shows that we read and share negative news more readily than we do the good things we come across.

Anyhow, I’m not sure I have solved this problem, which is why I’ve not really advertised that I’m blogging again. Maybe I will eventually, but for now, I just want to see if I liked the way it changed how I was thinking about the things that I’m reading.

All of this is rather recent, so it was rather serendipitous to see the latest Vlogbrothers video:

I’m really looking forward to this, having become an unabashedly huge John Green fan since discovering him through The Broccoli Tree video. I’ve read all of his books, followed his various podcasts, become a fan of his brother Hank, read all of Hank’s books, subscribed to their coffee service, and just generally felt better about this part of my life as a fan than I have about almost anything else I follow. I know it’s crazy, but absolutely everything just clicked into place with them almost instantly. I literally cannot believe I hadn’t heard about them before. I just wasn’t into YouTube much, so I didn’t know about the Vlogbrothers. I had never read YA books, and I hadn’t even considered them. I still don’t really read them outside of the Green brothers.

But I was a big fan of Tracy Kidder, who died last week at 80 years old. I read his Soul of a New Machine as a grad student, became a fan of his writing, and was blown away by his Mountains Beyond Mountains. So, when I learned about the work that the Green brothers are doing with Partners in Health, I just couldn’t help myself from becoming completely bought in to their stuff.

(Add to all of this the functional death of American Christianity at the hands of Donald Trump… Well, let’s just say that it’s easy to justify paying attention to people who take morality seriously.)

I could wax poetic about them all day. I won’t, today at least. I’ll stop simply by saying that I’ve already preordered Hollywood, Ending, and I’m looking forward to reading it. I hope you find something today that makes you as happy as this news made me.