Jamie Todd Rubin (@jamietoddrubin)

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New Post: The New Typewriter

https://jamierubin.net/2026/01/08/the-new-typewriter/

08.01.2026 13:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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New Post: Shelf-Life #11: Macmillan Dictionary for Children

https://jamierubin.net/2026/01/06/shelf-life-11-macmillan-dictionary-for-children/

06.01.2026 15:27 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

My Best Reads of 2025 I read 84 books in 2025, including my 1,500th book since I started keeping my list in 1996. I aim to read 100 books this year, but longer books, and a busier life kept me from that goal this time around. As usual, my reading was all over the map, from the fantasy of Brandon Sanderson and J. R. R. Tolkien to the life of James Madison and Jesus to a Great Depression diary and Emerson’s notebooks to the dictionary, and the history of the Golden Age of science fiction.

New Post: My Best Reads of 2025

01.01.2026 13:14 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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New Post: 1,500 Books in 30 Years

https://jamierubin.net/2025/12/31/1500-books-in-30-years/

31.12.2025 13:39 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Screen Weary to Screen Wary I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. They seem, at my age, arbitrary. Things that a person can start at any time, they put off to the first day of the year, along with many other people. For me, the question is: why wait? That said, I do look at personal trends and things always with an eye toward improvement. As 2025 draws to a close, one trend stands out among all others.

New Post: Screen Weary to Screen Wary

28.12.2025 15:29 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Breakfast in the Ruins, Dinner in the Stars The losses accrue and reminders are daily this time of year. Barry N. Malzberg died a year ago yesterday. We lost Carl Sagan twenty-nine years ago today. Both writers had an outsized influence on me. One, as a mentor, and writer whose subject matter and style resonated with me as no other writer before. The other, as a scientist and writer whose clear, rational thinking deeply influenced my worldview.

New Post: Breakfast in the Ruins, Dinner in the Stars

20.12.2025 14:09 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

A Mass Bibliocide In the end it was primarily Robert Silverberg who took the hit. I’d gone to pull a copy of Dying Inside off the shelf to check the publication date. The book seemed stuck to the bottom of the shelf and when I pulled it off, I saw the bottom was black with some kind of page-eating alien mold from Antares. I checked the other books on that bottom shelf.

New Post: A Mass Bibliocide

17.12.2025 23:46 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Coming Attractions for 2026? As I hurtle toward the new year, I tend to think of this blog. Something over 70 posts this year, which ain’t nothin’ kids, it’s 55,000 words, a short novel if you were to gather it together in a 1970s style original paperback, the kind with the cigarette ads in the middle. Compare that on the one hand to the measly 16 posts I wrote in 2024, a total that would barely fill a short novella.

New Post: Coming Attraction for 2026?

17.12.2025 01:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

A Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It Folks, I’m on a mission. I sat down today to jot down a list of books to read the last two weeks of the year. We abandon the cold and gray of winter in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area for the warmth and sunshine of gulf coast Florida for the last few weeks of the year, a transition I always look forward to as we drive across St.

New Post: A Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It

11.12.2025 22:15 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Refresh We recently replaced the “old” 55” flat-screen TV we have mounted above the fireplace in the living room with a brand new 65” flat-screen TV. Ordinarily a TV would last us a decade or more, but for…

New Post: Refresh! jamierubin.net/2025/12/09/r...

09.12.2025 16:32 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Seeking the Sense of Wonder: A Re-Discovery in Five Acts I. The Nine Planets The first time I experienced a sense of wonder was upon arriving home from the Franklin Township Public Library and tearing into the book I’d just checked out: a nonfiction astr…

New Post: Seeking the Sense of Wonder: A Re-Discovery in Five Acts jamierubin.net/2025/11/13/s...

13.11.2025 15:05 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

My 20th Blog Anniversary This is just a quick note to recognize that today, October 26, 2025 is the official 20th anniversary of this blog. My first post (a list of driving music) appeared on October 26, 2005. Back then, t…

New Post: My 20th Blog Anniversary jamierubin.net/2025/10/26/m...

26.10.2025 12:51 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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New Post: Reading and Travel

https://jamierubin.net/2025/10/06/reading-and-travel/

06.10.2025 18:57 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Emerson and His Notebooks I have been reading Robert D. Richardson’s 1995 biography Emerson: The Mind On Fire. I find myself more fascinated by Emerson’s use of notebooks than by his actual writing or transcendentalism. Halfway through the biography, it seems to me that Emerson thought through his notebooks. By the end of his life, he’d filled hundreds of them. It was Emerson who asked a young Henry David Thoreau, “Do you keep a journal?” setting Thoreau down a path that would lead to…

New Post: Emerson and His Notebooks

25.09.2025 14:31 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

My Ideal Library I am currently in the process of taking inventory of the books in my library. I’ve started with the physical books and so far I’d put the estimate somewhere between 1,200-1,400. I know that I have more than 1,700 audiobooks on top of that. And another 500 or so e-books. Call it 3,600 books all told. The physical books are dearest to me.

New Post: My Ideal Library

23.09.2025 12:00 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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New Post: A Saturday To-Do List

https://jamierubin.net/2025/09/20/a-saturday-to-do-list/

20.09.2025 11:27 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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New Post: My Favorite Field Notes Notebook

https://jamierubin.net/2025/09/19/my-favorite-field-notes-notebook/

19.09.2025 11:51 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Cormac McCarthy’s Library The September / October issue of Smithsonian Magazine has a fantastic article by Richard Grant1 on Cormac McCarthy's library. Over the years, I've read just three of McCarthy's books: No Country for Old Men in 2018, and more recently the dual novel / novella The Passenger and Stella Maris, both of which were among my best reads of 2023…

New Post: Cormac McCarthy's Library

17.09.2025 12:04 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Inimitable David McCullough Sometimes, I need a breath of fresh air. Back in February, I discovered that one of my favorite writers, the late David McCullough, was coming out with a new book, edited by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson. The book, History Matters, came out today and I began listening to it with delight on my morning walk. The book is a collection of unpublished essays, speeches, and miscellany from McCullough's paper.

New Post: The Inimitable David McCullough

16.09.2025 12:38 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Orbital Mechanics of Reading There are, from time to time, books I attempt to read that I am simply not ready for. They seem interesting, I start them, but I don’t make it very far. Years later I might come back to them, and find that I am ready, and I read the book with joy and delight that wasn’t evident on that early attempt.

New Post: The Orbital Mechanics of Reading

15.09.2025 12:42 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Science in the Shadow of Virginia Studies At a recent back-to-school night, I was astonished to learn that science education takes a back seat to Virginia Studies in 4th grade. Part of the reason seems to be that 4th grade students take a standardized test on Virginia Studies, and there is much to pack in to prepare students for the test. I can't understand why this is a priority over science…

New Post: Science in the Shadow of Virginia Studies

13.09.2025 11:58 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Thrill of a Tall Stack of Books to Read There is something both exciting and comforting about having a large stack of books you are eager to read. Here is the "stack" in no particular order: The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini by Joe Posnanski This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality…

New Post: The Thrill of a Tall Stack of Books to Read

11.09.2025 11:45 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

A Few More Minor Blog Updates Just a quick note to say I have made a few minor updates to the new minimalist theme here. When I introduced the theme last week, I knew it wasn't 100% complete, and I also knew I would be making tweaks along the way as I road-tested it, so to speak. The comment section was one area I neglected. That has now been fixed.

New Post: A Few More Minor Blog Updates

10.09.2025 12:07 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Joy of Ex-Lib Books Among my favorite types of books in my collection are ex-lib books—or as I like to think of them, retired library books. I received one in the mail recently, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling by Thomas Hager, and handling it reminded me of why I love this form of book. For one thing, they are generally hefty…

New Post: The Joy of Ex-Lib Books

09.09.2025 11:51 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Book Ratings, Revisited I'm terrible when it comes to book ratings. I used to use them, but these days I've given up on them completely. I think of a 0-to-5 star rating as a bell curve where 3 stars fall right in the middle of the curve. If you get 3 stars, you are meeting expectations. Zero- and 5-star ratings are outliers, several standard deviations from the mean, and thus should be more rare than a 3-star rating.

New Post: Book Ratings, Revisited

08.09.2025 11:59 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Commodore VIC-20 on the Bike Path On a recent walk, I saw in the distance a Commodore Vic-20, perched on a rock at the side of the bike path. I was first introduced to the VIC-20 in my 5th grade math class (ca. 1982). Our math teacher rolled it into the classroom along with a television set and we used it to play Hangman1…

New Post: The Commodore VIC-20 on the Bike Path

05.09.2025 14:51 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

A New Minimalist Blog Theme Sometimes, when I am close to finishing an old notebook, I get eager to start scribbling in a new one. There is something so encouraging about a blank notebook, so many possibilities. It is a fresh start. So it is for blog themes. I've been using the same theme on my blog now for over a decade. I felt it was time for a change.

New Post: A New Minimalist Blog Theme

02.09.2025 00:04 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Upcoming Site Changes Just a heads-up for folks--I'm working on a new custom theme for the blog. I've been using the same theme for years now and I've gotten a little tired of it. I'm aiming for something more simple, minimalist, that emphasizes the text--pretty much the opposite of what many sites these days are doing, but it makes me happy. One side-effect of this change: if you run a search on the blog…

New Post: Upcoming Site Changes

01.09.2025 13:45 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Ozzy I spent a lot of time in 5th grade drawing pictures of Ozzy Osbourne concerts: two dimensional pencil sketches looking at the stage with stick-figure band members. The most careful, detailed part is the sketches was the big OZZY that hung over the stage with connected Z’s. Blizzard of Ozz was my entry into a genre of music that I have enjoyed ever since and which has served has the background to AP physics homework in high school and marathon coding sessions ever since R.I.P. Ozzy

New Post: Ozzy

23.07.2025 15:05 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Los Angeles, No Times When I used to come to Santa Monica for work, I’d stop in at a local AM/PM to pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Times. I read that paper growing up and particularly enjoyed Al Martinez columns. It was always nice to come back and read the paper early in the morning. This morning, while the family still slept, I walked over to the same AM/PM to pick up a copy of the…

New Post: Los Angeles, No Times

10.07.2025 14:43 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Jamie Todd Rubin

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