I've been enjoying The Brontës and will read it intermittently until I finish it. At the moment, biographies are my favorite reading, with a few scientific books added to the mix. In the real world, I've found that people don't generally have detailed discussions about other people. This is partly because that can be construed as gossiping, and I also think that in real time there is a noumenal quality to living people, because there may be many unknown elements while they are still alive. That is why I prefer biographies about people who have been dead for one hundred years or more. There are several advantages to this:
1. If anyone thinks about them after one hundred years, they are more likely to be significant.
2. The longer timespan allows more information to accrue.
3. There is a better chance that a future biographer will write a more competent description of a person than a current journalist.
4. Despite some of the advantages that we have living now rather than in the past, there were aspects of earlier lives that, to me, were qualitatively superior to modern life.
Regarding the modern world, practically anyone could provide a list of unpleasant situations that exist now and were not as evident earlier. I tend to break these down into two categories. One is biological. Especially now, many people are living in transient situations where they and their families have moved many times in recent years, which may cause them to live in heterogeneous towns and cities that are constantly undergoing cultural erosion. The existence of a place no longer implies that its residents have a unified culture. Then there are the effects of social media, which I think has mainly been a commercial operation that has been specifically designed to extract money from unsuspecting participants. In general, people are now thoughtlessly supporting organizations that mislead them about the usefulness of their products and may be causing them to go into cognitive decline without knowing it. The other main category for me pertains more to aesthetic conditions. Though there can always be exceptions, it is clear to me that the music, film, fiction and paintings produced now are of considerably lower quality than what was produced in the past. So, to me, while people may not have lived as long in the old days, they may still have had qualitatively better lives than many have now.
As far as my activities are concerned, I'm still living my simplified rural life. The eastern phoebe eggs above the front porch have hatched and the mother has been frantically feeding them insects. It looks as if there are three chicks. They are now very large and should leave the nest soon. There will probably be a second clutch later in the summer. After I planted my tomatoes, there were several cold days when the temperature fell to the low forties. Since tomatoes require at least 50º, I covered them with a tarp at night and put in an old 200W incandescent bulb that gets very hot. It kept the temperature above 50º. The plants are doing very well. I usually planted them later in the past. Since squirrels had been chewing on the top step to the front porch, I tried turning it over. Then they immediately started chewing that side. So, yesterday I bought a new step and installed it. One of the things I like about living here is the small-town atmosphere. The lumber yard also includes an Ace Hardware and a UPS pickup. Since I've been there several times, I know the owner. She is very friendly, in a way that city people aren't. When I arrived there, I was the only customer, and she was the only other person in the store. I went to the lumber yard first, and there were two men working. They had what I wanted and cut it in half. I now have an extra five-foot stair in case I need it later.
I'm getting really tired of the news and would rather not discuss it. On a positive note, Trump seems to be well into the bottom half of his death spiral. I would have preferred a nice, quick flush.