It's not a summer house unless 50 relatives have access to it... rent the best boat in Patmos...

I love to read about Adam Platt’s family life. “When [his father] served as the U.S. ambassador in the kind of challenging posts that big-money political donors tended to avoid (Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto, the Philippines under Cory Aquino, the beautiful southern-African republic of Zambia), he’d….dream about the joys of a proper lobster dinner, with drawn butter and a side of crunchy potatoes, which he ate when he was a young boy during the summers his family spent up at their small vacation house in Maine — assuming a state of beatific calm that he called ‘lobster face.’” And what a family. Prosperity is fascinating to me. (“Aunt Mabel Choate had traveled widely in Asia and was an expert on the intricacies of Chinese gardens, which she re-created, complete with an old ancestral temple, at her house up in the Berkshires.”)

This is actually a very useful WIRED tutorial about turning your iphone into a dumb phone. I know everyone says you can do that with this app or that app, but it’s never worked. But I did this, and you can still check email! Although the type was too large for me personally, I could still see how I would use this if I didn’t have a real job.