Franklin Farms Five: November 13, 2026

Live

How Not to Waste Your Life

Hawthorne reportedly ducked behind trees and rocks to avoid chatting with townspeople, which makes him my kind of life coach. The real find is his diagnosis of a day lost to magazines and ‘light miscellany’: no difficulty, no excitement, and the spirits ‘evaporated insensibly.’ He wrote that a century and a half before the infinite scroll, and it still describes my Tuesday nights with uncomfortable precision.

🌱 Try this: Notice the next time an hour of scrolling leaves you oddly tired, and name what exactly evaporated.

Love

How One Mother’s Love for Her Gay Son Started a Revolution

Dr. Spock had sold more than ten million books, and the crowd screamed instead for the schoolteacher in the plaid skirt walking in front of him. Jeanne Manford didn’t know the cheering was for her until strangers asked if she’d talk to their parents. The most radical thing on Sixth Avenue that day was a mother with an orange poster board saying the obvious out loud.

🌱 Try this: Say the supportive thing out loud this week to someone who has only ever heard it implied.

Learn

What Makes You Yourself: Earth’s Largest Living Organism and the Paradox of Personhood

South of Australia, a seagrass bigger than Manhattan has been cloning itself since before the pyramids, untroubled by the identity crisis the rest of us schedule for middle age. The best bit is Pando, 47,000 genetically identical aspens weighing about thirty-five blue whales, cast as biology’s Ship of Theseus. You are, it turns out, less a tree than a forest arguing with itself.

🌱 Try this: Dig out an old journal, email or photo and see whether you can stay on nodding terms with that person.

Laugh

My Great-Grandparents Immigrated The Right Way By Killing 2 Americans  And Assuming Their Identity

The Onion takes ‘my family did it the right way’ and follows the logic off a cliff, then keeps walking. The genius is the bureaucratic tone: memorize the Social Security numbers, set up the alibi, drown the Klucas boy if procedure demands. My favorite detail is that they convinced almost everyone Dorothy had always had blue eyes.

🌱 Try this: Notice the next time someone says their ancestors ‘did it the right way,’ and ask what the way actually was.

Labor

Albert Camus on Stubbornness and Creativity

Short enough to finish before your coffee cools, which suits a piece about showing up. Camus quotes Newton explaining how he built his theory: ‘By thinking about it all the time.’ Not a eureka, a habit. Also: ‘One must be two persons when one writes,’ which explains every draft I’ve reread and disowned.

🌱 Try this: Pick one stalled project and give it fifteen unglamorous minutes a day, mood or no mood.

Leave

The Wholehearted Life

A Zen teacher with more than 50 years at the bedsides of the dying wakes from heart surgery, can’t speak, and writes ‘glottis’ to tell the staff the tube is wrong. No incense, all grit. At 84, she adds her own hospital stay to a list of charnel grounds that already included prisons and war zones, and her verdict on the edge of death is ‘It’s fine.’

🌱 Try this: Learn the correct word for one thing about your own body, in case you ever have to write it on a whiteboard.

Legacy

New Updates on the Arc of the Moral Universe

MLK’s arc gets the anxious-friend treatment: it eats leftover Halloween candy for breakfast, repaints its kitchen in a manic spatter of blue and misses spots, brings the coffee but forgets the donuts. Funny until the cemetery, where it whispers that it didn’t make it in time. The last line quietly hands the bending to you, which is either the most hopeful thing in this post or a chore list.

🌱 Try this: Find one small thing that bends an inch under your hands this week. Then push it again.