Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Eventually, oxygen, the byproduct of that muck, accumulated in the atmosphere. Oxygen was a strong electron acceptor. As new muck evolved to consume oxygen, it attracted and exchanged many more electrons than older, anaerobic life. With this surplus of energy, early life evolved relatively quickly into plants, insects, and everything else. “The living state is such an electronically desaturated state,” wrote Szent-Györgyi. “Nature is simple but subtle.” This premise can be applied to life on the planet today. The more oxygen life can consume, the more electron excitability it gains, the more animated it becomes. When living matter is bristling and able to absorb and transfer electrons in a controlled way, it remains healthy. When cells lose the ability to offload and absorb electrons, they begin to break down. “Taking out electrons irreversibly means killing,” wrote Szent-Györgyi. This breakdown of electron excitability is what causes metal to rust and leaves to turn brown and die. Humans “rust” as well. As the cells in our bodies lose the ability to attract oxygen, Szent-Györgyi wrote, electrons within them will slow and stop freely interchanging with other cells, resulting in unregulated and abnormal growth. Tissues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as other materials. But we don’t call this “tissue rust.” We call it cancer. And this helps explain why cancers develop and thrive in environments of low oxygen. The best way to keep tissues in the body healthy was to mimic the reactions that evolved in early aerobic life on Earth—specifically, to flood our bodies with a constant presence of that “strong electron acceptor”: oxygen. Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity. “In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy,” said Szent-Györgyi. The moving energy of electrons allows living things to stay alive and healthy for as long as possible. The names may have changed—prana, orenda, ch’i, ruah—but the principle has remained the same. Szent-Györgyi apparently took that advice. He died in 1986, at the age of 93.
You don’t master your recordings to a water-damaged Panasonic boom box if you’re looking to follow up The River. But not only did Springsteen use the Panasonic for mixdown; he also, in the mix process, put all the recordings through a Gibson Echoplex, which put a layer of early Sun Records–style slap echo on, well, everything: vocals, guitars, harmonica, percussion, glockenspiel. As decisions go, to mix every recorded track on a multitrack recording through a single effect is certainly not the kind of choice professional engineers tended to make when they were creating recordings for commercial release. But Springsteen wasn’t thinking like a professional engineer. He just wanted a reference for the “real” recording process, something the band could listen to before they made a final version. “Yeah, everything went through the Echoplex,” he told me, laughing. “Guitar, voice, everything. It all has that weird echo.” When I said to Springsteen that I felt it ended up being a crucial part of the recording’s character, he stopped laughing and nodded, agreeing that it was exactly right for the recordings, even if it was foolhardy.
Deliver Me From Nowhere
Warren Zanes
The simple act of creating something with intention first, before consuming the work of others, alters the dynamic. This is a small-but-mighty behavior I learned from a podcast interview with my friend Marie Forleo, and I’m grateful for that wisdom every day.
Creative Calling
Chase Jarvis
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise