On Why Farmers Agitate, The Best Online Classes You Can Take and Love Letters to Trees

This post was first sent to my newsletter on May 2nd, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) New month, new newsletter! :) Let’s get right into it, shall we? An informed look on the why of the farmers agitation. Vivek Kaul’s post on how Bihar fared when they did away with APMCs in 2006, shows why the farmers are up in arms. Read them here, part 1, part 2, & part 3 ...

May 9, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

Cashflow for Creators

If you want to someday make money from your skills and your craft, you owe it to yourself to read this. If you have never read Lucas, you owe it to yourself to read him. Buy Cashflow for Creators! My highlighted notes from the book follow … Craft is the nuts and bolts of how you do The Thing. For a writer, it’s stuff like grammar and spelling and reading. For a glass artist, it’s not mixing different COEs or—at the highest levels—how to mix different COEs. Painters need to understand that light and pigments blend colors very differently, how to prep and clean a canvas, and so on. ...

April 13, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

On Moveable Feasts and Memory

This post was first sent to my newsletter on April 4th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) A tiny bit of houskeeping before we begin. I used to track how many people read the newsletter, partly out of morbit curiosity and partly because Sendy, the software I use to write and schedule these letters, did not have an option to turn it off globally. I would have to turn it it off every single time, I wrote a letter and well, my life is too short to be doing all that. However with the latest version of Sendy all that has changed. And I have turned off all tracking! Yippee! Talk about the importance of sane defaults!) And now, on to the letter … ...

April 11, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

A Love Letter to Books

Despite financial troubles there’s a sense in which my childhood was immensely privileged — a pauper in the material world, I was a sultan in the world of ideas. — Erik Hoel I started by wanting to share that quote and link on my microblog and then my thoughts turned into a blog post sized comment. I decided to post it here too, then. ...

April 8, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

Books That Underlie and Gird Cal Newport’s Philosophy of a Deep Life

This post was first sent to my newsletter on March 7th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Before we get into this weeks newsletter, I’d like to take a moment and recognise the loss of my grandmother, who passed away on the 24th, last month. She was a simple, thoughtful and kind woman, who raised a village. I miss her dearly. This was my eulogy to her. ...

March 15, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

What to Read, How to Read. Recommendations from Folks, I Admire and Follow (2021 Edition)

*Image, courtesy [Tom Gauld][tgt]* This post was first sent to my newsletter on February 1st, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Welcome to the first, “serious” newsletter of 2021. This was supposed to be my year end post, but life, as usual got in the way. Now that I’ve jammed both the blogs together, most of the personal stuff is going to stay focussed on stuff about books and reading and writing and a few photos thrown in once in a while for good measure. Seems like that is what I was doing most of last year, anyway. ...

February 1, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza