There’s a great meme that’s gone around in different forms for the last few years:

Jesse Case’s observation is one that many middle-aged adults can relate to, including myself. I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but there was definitely a moment a few years back when I went from rolling my eyes at the bird pictures I’d get from both my mom and mother-in-law, to being genuinely interested and, dare I say, even excited about that goldfinch or Western tanager. Before long, my wife was making a sport of taking pictures of me taking pictures of birds:

Getting acquainted with a pileated woodpecker, North America’s largest woodpecker, in Duluth, Minnesota.

Reader, you may poke fun at birding now, but I’m guessing it’s because you haven’t tried it yourself. Birds are incredibly intelligent wild animals that you see multiple varieties of on a daily basis. (Even cooler, birds are literally in the dinosaur family.)

Birding is a fantastic pursuit because it’s remarkably easy to get into and your hobby can go with you anywhere — whether you’re visiting family, going on vacation, or even just going about the course of your daily life. Birds are everywhere. And as with plenty of other pastimes, you can level it up or down according to your available time, budget, and lifestyle.

In this article, I’m going to give you the low down on dipping your toes into this satisfying hobby and hopefully convince you to give it a shot.

Tools to Get Started Birding

One of the things that’s great about birding is how low the barrier of entry is. You really don’t need much in order to start watching and identifying birds, no matter where you are. At the most essential level, there are two things I use most regularly: a quality pair of binoculars and the Merlin app from Cornell Lab of Ornithology (a world-renowned institution).

There are definitely ways to invest more — cameras, dedicated journals and guidebooks, high-end binocs, and more. For the few years that I’ve been casually birding, though, I’ve gotten by just fine with my Nocs and iPhone (for both IDing and taking pics).

Binoculars

Binoculars are your one truly essential physical piece of gear to get started birding. This 200-year-old technology allows you to scan the ground, the greenery, and the open air with the eyesight of an eagle.

While you can go cheap, I highly recommend not skimping on binoculars. My first couple pairs were real cheapos from Walmart and REI, and they just weren’t comfortable or very easy to use. When my wife finally got me a pair of Nocs as a Christmas gift, I could immediately tell the difference — somewhat to my surprise, honestly. Not only were they more comfortable, but the field of view and zoom capacity were noticeably better.

Be sure you know how to dial in those binoculars once you get them:

Merlin App  

The Merlin app is one of the coolest pieces of software I’ve ever played with and is by far the most popular app in the birding community, with over 10 million active users. Whether you’re in the forest or your own backyard, you can open the Merlin app to help you ID birds in a few different ways, all of which I’ve had great luck with.

1. Take a picture of the bird. Even with a blurry photo, Merlin will analyze the photo in question using cues about size, color, shape, and your location to provide its best guess. If you can see the bird, I’ve found this to be very effective, as you can compare the results with what’s right in front of you.
2. Record the birdsong. If you can hear a bird, but can’t get a good picture or can’t see it at all, you can record a short audio clip and the app will ID the most likely bird(s) in real-time. I’m not kidding when I say it’s quite a thrill when you open the app at a local park and see way more species pop up than you would have thought. I think my record is 9 species from a single 60-second audio clip.
3. Answer a short questionnaire. If the photo or audio aren’t working for whatever reason, you can answer a few questions about the size, color, and behavior of the bird; Merlin will then provide a short list of the best-matched birds.

It’s truly a game changer for the hobby. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you learn to identify birdsong and get to know the common species of your area. I defy you to use the app for a couple weeks and not come away totally hooked.

One way to take it up a notch is to also get the eBird app from Cornell, which acts as more of a birding log. For any birding session, whether on a hiking trail or in your own neighborhood, it allows you to track the species and number of birds spotted, which gets added to their database and will then be viewable by other folks using the app. This can be fun to check out because you’re able to see, for example, if folks recently spotted uncommon or rare birds at a local pond or park. If Merlin is a Birding 101 tool, I would call eBird a 201 tool.  

Where to Look for Birds

A great blue heron taking off from a small neighborhood lake in Arvada, Colorado.

Part of the low barrier to entry for birding is simply that you can do it just about anywhere. No matter where you live, even in big cities, there are birds all around you once you start paying attention. Birds are such a part of our visual and auditory experience of the world that we hardly notice them anymore — but when you stop and look around, you’ll be surprised at what you find.

That said, there are definitely birding hotspots where you can reliably find more species than others. A good rule of thumb is that anywhere there’s water, you’ll find birds. And it doesn’t take much — in addition to lakes and rivers, smaller ponds and streams will attract avian friends too. Any park or greenspace you find on a map is also a sure bet for good birding.  

When you bring your kid to a park (many of which also have water nearby in some form), break out the binocs. When you’re out on a hike, open the Merlin app and see what birdsong you can catch. If there’s any greenery in your backyard, have a sit on your porch and just look around for 15 minutes.

You can get more nuanced when you factor in seasonality (spring and fall offer big migrations across numerous species), time of day (it’s not always dawn), and where things are in the breeding cycle — grab a guidebook if you’re interested in digging deeper.  

The reality is that birds are everywhere, at nearly all times, when you simply start looking for them.

An American redstart, found in Gooseberry State Park, Minnesota. 

Okay, Great, But What Do You Do?

One of the things that I initially couldn’t figure out about birding is that there’s no real outcome as a result — you’re not creating anything, you’re not in competition (not in a real way, at least) with other birders, you don’t even really have an end goal. You may keep a “life list” (simply a list of species you’ve spotted in your lifetime) or a journal/log of some kind, but that’s about it.

You’re just out there, enjoying the thing for itself.

And that’s actually the beauty of birding. In a world that’s goal-oriented and focused on results, it’s a rare activity that’s simply about the process. Birding forces you to be present — to slow down and observe the landscape around you. Birding gives you a sense of wonder at the natural world, whether you’re in some far-flung locale or just watching a chickadee at the feeder in your yard.

Grab a pair of binoculars, download the Merlin app, and do some bird watching.  

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Sundays can sometimes be a little lonely, gloomy, and boring; they drag on and spur melancholic rumination. This is especially true when the weather is cold and dreary. And even more true when you’re in college; you’re far from home and there’s not a lot going on. Scrolling your phone to pass the time is always an option, but it gets old; you come to a point where you feel like you’ve reached the end of the internet. It doesn’t do anything for your mood, either.

Below you’ll find 17 alternative activities that’ll help you escape the Sunday doldrums and put you in a great frame of mind for the week to come.

Make a stack of perfect pancakes, a killer breakfast taco, a hearty breakfast casserole, the best fried eggs of your life, or James Bond’s scrambled eggs.

There’s still something satisfying about the tactile experience of reading a real paper publication.

No matter what’s bugging you, solvitur ambulando — it is solved by walking. 

There are a whole bunch of benefits to going to a Sunday service — even if you’re not the pious type.

You’ll feel better when your house is spick and span, and you can get it that way in just 30 minutes.

Here are some ideas as to the different kinds of entries you might make. 

Naps always feel the best on Sundays — and offer numerous benefits beyond the pleasure of simply sacking out. If you want to mix things up, try napping like Salvador Dali.

Make her day; you know she wants to hear from you. 

Take a cruise in the countryside; turn on some good tunes; feel those relaxed vibes.

Here are 7 you should write before you turn 70.

Life-lesson-imparting, fun-competition-stirring, flow-inducing, generation-bridging, social-interaction-facilitating, and tech-diet-diverting, analog games are awesome. Break out a board game or deal for one of the six card games every man should know.

Stumped as to which to crack open? Check out our list of the 100 books every man should read.

Should you own shoes capable of it.

Need to get inspired to make the effort? Here are 9 reasons dinner parties are awesome.

Don’t have one yet? We’ve got a list of more than 75 hobby ideas here.

Here’s the system I’ve used to plan my week for almost 20 years now.

It will warm someone’s heart, and yours as well. 

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in February 2015.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Roasting a whole chicken has an undeserved reputation for being difficult — dry breasts and underdone thighs can make it feel like you’re wrestling with the poultry rather than just cooking it for consumption. The preparation method of spatchcocking — which can be done with any bird you want to roast — solves most of those problems in one decisive move. By removing the backbone and flattening the bird, you expose more surface area to heat, which means faster and much more even cooking.

Thankfully, spatchcocking isn’t complicated, specialized, or reserved for professionals. It requires just a couple tools you likely already have and a willingness to make a few confident cuts. There’s no delicate knife work, no anatomical expertise, and no need to worry about perfection. Chickens are tougher than they look and the process is far more forgiving than it appears at first glance.

Once you’ve done it a single time, spatchcocking becomes less of a stressful technique and more of a default three-minute job. It shortens cook times, improves consistency whether you’re roasting or grilling, and even makes carving easier. Use the guide above to dramatically improve your chicken roasting confidence.  

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

There are some foods that lend themselves especially well to snacking on while watching football. You want foods that are shareable, easy to serve and eat, and indulgently worthy of a cheat day, but not overly filling — after all, you want to be able to graze over the course of a few hours rather than fill yourself up too quickly. Worthy entries in this category include wings, sliders, pigs in a blanket, any number of dips, and, of course, nachos.

Nachos are great, but that tried and true combo of chips and cheese (and maybe some ground meat) can get a little stale — literally and figuratively. In the name of science, I recently tested out a few different flavor combos and preparation methods that take the standard nacho up a notch or two. Below are my three favorite recipes.    

This year, elevate your Super Bowl nachos by trying out something new and memorable that will impress your own taste buds and those of the folks you’re sharing with.

Taco Frito Pie 

Half casserole, half nachos, this walking taco-inspired dish is guaranteed to get rave reviews. Theoretically, you could try any kind of chip you want, but Fritos work especially well because they are thick enough to remain sturdy during the cooking and eating process. While traditional nachos are a finger food, you’ll want to eat these with a fork.

If you don’t get through it all on game day, the leftovers reheat quite well in an air fryer.  

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground beef (you could go leaner with turkey or chicken)
• 1 yellow onion, diced
• 1 packet taco seasoning
• 1 15-oz can pinto beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 19-oz can red enchilada sauce
• 2 9-oz packages Fritos (use the regular variety; the jumbo scoops are too big)
• 8 oz shredded cheese (colby jack or Mexican blend works well)

Directions 

1. Heat oven 400° F. Coat a 9×13” baking dish with cooking spray. 
2. In a large skillet or Dutch oven, heat some oil over medium-high heat, then add the beef and diced onion. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the meat is browned and the onion is translucent — 8-10 minutes. Drain grease, if needed.
3. Once cooked, reduce heat to a simmer. Add 1/2 cup water and the taco seasoning, stirring until it’s completely mixed in. (The taco packet likely says to add 3/4 cup water; I’ve found that to be too much.)
4. Add the beans and enchilada sauce, stirring until combined, and simmer for 5 minutes.
5. Time to assemble the “pie.” Pour your first package of Fritos into the baking dish and sprinkle half the cheese atop the chips. Next, evenly spread the entirety of the meat and bean mixture across the chips and cheese. Add the second package of Fritos and the remaining cheese.
6. Bake until the chips are browned and the cheese is melted and bubbly, 8-10 minutes. Serve with sour cream, guacamole, lettuce, or any other preferred taco toppings.

Stupidly Easy Buffalo Chicken Dip

Every time I make this I’m surprised again at just how easy and foolproof it is. It’s technically a dip, but rather easy to turn into a nacho dish. You can get a mild buffalo sauce to appease milder palates; and if bleu cheese isn’t your thing, it works just as well without it. One final tip: this recipe is just the right size for a rice cooker, an appliance which many folks don’t realize doubles as a small slow cooker. Whether you use that or a traditional crockpot, this is an especially good dish for the big game due to its portability.    

Ingredients 

• 1 12.5-oz can chunk chicken, drained
• 8 oz cream cheese
• 2.5 oz bleu cheese crumbles
• 1/2 cup buffalo wing sauce
• 1/2 cup ranch dressing
• 4 oz shredded cheese (cheddar or colby jack work well)  

Directions 

1. Combine all ingredients in a small slow cooker; heat on low for about an hour, stirring occasionally. Serve as a dip with chips, celery/carrots, or crackers. For nachos, serve the warmed dip over a plated layer of tortilla chips.

BBQ Nachos

For how few ingredients are in these nachos, you’ll be surprised at how much flavor they have. You can, of course, smoke a brisket at home, or you can take the easy route by buying something like Famous Dave’s burnt ends at the store — that’s what I did, and it was surprisingly tasty. Turns out that the somewhat simple combination of meat, sauce, and a good shredded cheese layered over some chips works incredibly well.

Ingredients

• 1 lb prepared BBQ meat of choice (brisket, shredded pork/chicken, burnt ends — truly anything works!)
• 6 oz shredded cheese (cheddar works especially well for BBQ)
• 1 13-oz bag bag tortilla chips
• BBQ sauce of choice

Directions 

1. Grease a baking sheet with cooking spray. Place a single layer of tortilla chips on the sheet.
2. Add half the cheese and half the meat evenly across the chips. Drizzle BBQ sauce over the whole thing.  
3. Add another layer of tortilla chips, as well as the rest of the meat and cheese spread evenly across it. Drizzle more BBQ sauce over the whole thing.
4. Set oven to broil and cook it on a low setting for ~10 minutes. (If your broil mode only has one setting, put the baking sheet on a lower rack.) Keep a close eye on it; the chips can quickly turn from perfectly done to totally charred.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Polar exploration stories have a way of both terrifying and inspiring the soul. The combination of physical discomfort and psychological strain strips life, and leadership, down to its utter essentials: resilience, skill, competence, and determination.

What’s especially striking about these stories is that most of them emerged from a relatively short, concentrated period, from the late 19th century through the early decades of the 20th, when large portions of the Arctic and Antarctic remained unmapped and poorly understood. In that brief golden age of polar exploration, men ventured to the ends of the earth, relying on human muscle and crude equipment, with little margin for error and no real assurance of success.

Ice-locked ships, months of total darkness, failed hypotheses, stubborn leaders, and men pushed far beyond what they thought possible — polar exploration books offer some of the most gripping narratives in the adventure genre, while also serving as indelible case studies in leadership, resilience, and the limits of human endurance. If you’re looking for page-turners that are both bracing and deeply instructive, look no further. Below I highlight the eight best polar exploration books.

Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World by Andrea Pitzer

Andrea Pitzer’s Icebound tells the story of William Barents, a 16th-century Dutch explorer whose Arctic expeditions laid the groundwork for all the journeys that followed. At the time, polar travel was motivated by economics (finding a faster trade route to Asia) and clouded by wildly incorrect theories, including the idea that a warm, open sea might exist near the North Pole. Barents’ third expedition ended with his crew trapped in the ice and forced to overwinter in a driftwood hut while fending off polar bears, scurvy, and starvation. What makes Icebound especially compelling isn’t just the suffering, but the shift it represents: Barents was celebrated not for conquest or profit, but for his endurance and leadership. This book is both a riveting survival tale and a polar adventure origin story.

In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides

Hampton Sides’ In the Kingdom of Ice recounts the doomed 1879 USS Jeannette expedition, which attempted to reach the North Pole via that theorized warm sea channel. Trapped in the ice for nearly two years before the ship was crushed, the crew was forced into an epic, thousand-mile trek across the Arctic via both land and sea. Sides excels at combining cinematic storytelling with meticulous research, bringing to life not only the expedition’s leader, George Washington De Long, but also the men who followed him and those at home who were waiting on his return. The result is a powerful reminder that courage and determination are not always enough, especially when leadership is guided more by theory and pride than by reality. It’s a gripping, tragic tale that underscores how unforgiving the polar world can be.

Alone on the Ice by David Roberts

Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition should have been remembered as a triumph of scientific exploration. Instead, it became one of the most harrowing solo survival stories ever recorded. In Alone on the Ice, David Roberts recounts how Mawson lost both of his companions during a sledging journey — one who perished instantly into a hidden crevasse (with most of their supplies) and one who slowly succumbed to madness.

What followed was a nearly unimaginable solo trek across Antarctica, as Mawson battled starvation, frostbite, and harrowing ice fields. His survival defies belief. Roberts’ account captures the sheer brutality of the environment and the extraordinary resilience required to survive it, making this one of the most intense and unforgettable polar narratives ever written.

Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton

Trapped in ice, the Belgica expedition of 1897 unexpectedly became the first to spend an entire winter in Antarctica, and Julian Sancton’s Madhouse at the End of the Earth makes clear just how unprepared its crew was for that ordeal. Plunged into months of grinding cold and total darkness, the men suffered severe physical and psychological deterioration. Among the crew were two figures who would become legendary for very different reasons: Roald Amundsen, who thrived amidst the hardship and would go on to conquer both poles, and Frederick Cook, a brilliant man whose later claims of polar conquest would make him a deeply controversial figure. With the expedition’s commander, Adrien de Gerlache, paralyzed by illness and indecision, Amundsen and Cook stepped into the breach and pushed their crewmates to near-impossible feats of endurance. Part survival narrative, part leadership cautionary tale, Madhouse shows how quickly morale and sanity can collapse, and how essential decisive leadership becomes when retreat isn’t an option.

Realm of Ice and Sky by Buddy Levy

Most polar exploration books focus on ships and sledges, but Buddy Levy’s Realm of Ice and Sky captures a brief, daring period when explorers took to the air in their attempts to conquer the North Pole. In the early 20th century, shifting sea ice made surface travel dangerously slow and unreliable, prompting figures like Walter Wellman, Roald Amundsen, and Umberto Nobile to experiment with airplanes and dirigibles instead.

Levy weaves together these semi-connected journeys into a cohesive narrative, chronicling both the promise and peril of aerial exploration in the Arctic. Amundsen, in particular, looms large — his austere competence and Nordic stoicism make him one of the most compelling figures in exploration history. Distinct from most polar narratives yet firmly rooted in the same themes of risk, ingenuity, and endurance, Realm of Ice and Sky shows how even technological advances couldn’t eliminate the dangers of pushing into the world’s most unforgiving environments. It’s worth noting that all of Buddy Levy’s polar histories make for excellent, captivating reads.  

Alone by Richard E. Byrd

Unlike most polar tales that center on the exploration of physical space and involve a multi-man crew, Alone chronicles the exploration of one man’s psyche and soul. In 1934, Admiral Richard Byrd voluntarily spent five months alone at a weather station in Antarctica, becoming the first man in history to experience the polar night in complete solitude. Alone is his riveting account of that experiment — a psychological and physical trial by cold, isolation, and eventually, carbon-monoxide-induced madness.

What makes Alone stand out isn’t just the hardships Byrd endured, but his reflective, often poetic writing. He contemplates the strange beauty of the aurora, the rhythms of solitude, and the battle between discipline and despair. Alone is less a tale of action than of endurance in stillness, and it offers a singular contribution to the polar canon: a portrait of man not just versus nature, but versus himself.

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Often cited as one of the most harrowing exploration books ever written, The Worst Journey in the World is Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s firsthand account of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica from 1910 to 1913. Cherry-Garrard was part of a smaller team given a nerve-racking task: a midwinter journey to retrieve emperor penguin eggs (in the name of science), undertaken in total darkness, with temperatures plunging far below zero and winds so fierce they made travel barely possible.

The title of this book is no exaggeration — their years on the ice tested the limits of human endurance more than perhaps any other polar trek. Unlike the triumphant survival narrative of the next book on this list, The Worst Journey in the World is marked not just by suffering, but by miscalculation and regret. Unchecked ambition and flawed leadership can exact a cost no matter the environment, but its consequences are magnified tenfold in a place like Antarctica. Written years later with painful clarity, it’s less a celebration of heroism than a meditation on failure, responsibility, and that thin line between bravery and folly. Cherry-Garrard’s book is an essential entry in the polar canon.

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

If there is a single book that defines the polar exploration genre, it’s Alfred Lansing’s Endurance. Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition went catastrophically wrong almost from the start; when his ship became trapped and eventually crushed by ice, its 28-man crew was left stranded at the bottom of the world. What followed was a two-year ordeal of drifting ice floes, open-boat voyages through some of the roughest seas on earth, and an almost unbelievable rescue mission. Most incredible, every man survived.

Lansing tells the story with a restrained, journalistic style that lets the facts speak for themselves, making the courage and sheer resolve of the men — especially Shackleton — all the more striking. More than a survival story, Endurance is a masterclass in leadership under pressure and the gold standard against which all other polar books are measured.

If you read only one book about exploration at the ends of the earth, make it this one.

For more polar-related content, check out these Art of Manliness articles and podcast episodes:

• Podcast #872: Leadership Lessons From a Disastrous Arctic Expedition
• What the Race to the South Pole Can Teach You About How to Achieve Your Goals
• Alone: Lessons on Solitude From an Antarctic Explorer
• What They Left and What They Kept: What an Antarctic Expedition Can Teach You About What’s Truly Valuable
• Podcast #966: Chasing Shackleton — Re-creating the World’s Greatest Journey of Survival

Keep up with all of my book reviews and reading lists by subscribing to my newsletter at readmorebooks.co.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Teddy Roosevelt, the patron saint of the Art of Manliness, had an exuberant love of life. 

A friend of T.R.’s described his joie de vivre as the “unpacking of endless Christmas stockings.” 

If Teddy Roosevelt approached all of life as if he were unpacking Christmas stockings, what was he like when it was actually Christmas?

According to the man himself, he derived “literally delirious joy” from the holiday.  

Below we unpack how T.R. approached Christmastime with strenuous festivity and how you too can enjoy the warmth and cheer of the season just like the Bull Moose himself. 

Connect With Your Inner Child 

It’s been said that Teddy Roosevelt never entirely grew up; there was still a bit of boy in him even when he was in the prime of manhood. He wasn’t childish but retained a childlike capacity for boundless enthusiasm. That connection to the boyish part of himself is one of the reasons he had so much zest for life and why Christmas was always magical in the Roosevelt home.

In his autobiography, Teddy describes Christmases when he was a boy and how he tried his best to recreate the same magic when he became a father himself:

In the evening, we hung up our stockings — or rather the biggest stockings we could borrow from the grown-ups — and before dawn we trooped in to open them while sitting on father’s and mother’s bed; and the bigger presents were arranged, those for each child on its own table, in the drawing-room, the doors to which were thrown open after breakfast. I never knew any one else have what seemed to me such attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce them exactly for my own children.

So the first step to celebrating Christmas like T.R. is reconnecting with your childhood sense of wonder and fun. Think about your favorite holiday memories growing up. What traditions do you remember enjoying the most? Is there a way to recreate them, in perhaps new form, now that you’re an adult?

Put Up a Christmas Tree

There’s a famous story that Theodore Roosevelt banned Christmas trees from the White House because of his commitment to conservation. In 1902, the story goes, his 8-year-old son Archie snuck a contraband Christmas tree into a closet and decorated it with the help of a White House carpenter. On Christmas morning, he surprised his father with the Christmas tree, and, just like the Grinch who has a change of heart, Teddy Roosevelt lifted his ban on tannenbaums. 

There’s only one problem with this story: it’s largely humbug. 

Roosevelt was never anti-Christmas tree. The Roosevelts put a tree up in their Oyster Bay home, and T.R. gave a tree to the local school there each year.

It is true that the family didn’t put a tree up in the White House the first Christmas they spent there in 1901. But it wasn’t because Teddy was against the idea. The practice of putting up a tree hadn’t taken such hold in the country that it was considered a sacrosanct tradition (it wasn’t until the 1920s that Christmas trees became a regular fixture in Americans’ homes), and it seems the Roosevelts just decided not to have a tree that year. 

It’s also true that Archie snuck a Christmas tree into the White House in 1902. On Christmas Day, he threw open the closet door it was hidden behind to the surprise and delight of his family. Upon the tree, he’d placed a gift for each of his parents and siblings, as well as the Roosevelts’ pets, “Jack the dog, Tom Quartz the kitten, and Algonquin the pony, whom,” T.R. said, “Archie would no more think of neglecting than I would neglect his brothers and sisters.”

After Archie’s caper, Christmas trees became a regular thing in the Roosevelt White House.

So if you want to celebrate Christmas like T.R., don’t hesitate to put up a tree (a real one — always a real one!) and enjoy the evergreen smell and twinkling lights of one of the very best parts of the season.

Do Good, Maybe While Dressed Up Like Santa

While he was growing up, Roosevelt’s father would donate money and volunteer his time to provide Christmas dinner at the local newsboys’ lodging house. As a young man, Roosevelt followed in his father’s footsteps by doing the same. 

As an adult, Teddy continued the tradition of doing good at Christmas by handing out presents to children at the local school in Oyster Bay. First, he would give a speech. Roosevelt said his speeches “[were] always mercifully short, my own children having impressed upon me with frank sincerity the attitude of other children to addresses of this kind on such occasions.” He’d then pass out presents to the kids, slap folks on the back, and say, “Bully Christmas!” 

Some historians suggest that Roosevelt would dress up like Santa while passing out the gifts. This has never been confirmed, but I’d like to imagine T.R. dressed up like Old Saint Nick. 

Go Big on the Presents for the Kids

When Roosevelt was a boy, his parents gave him more practical presents for Christmas. But he liked to get his own kids a spread of gifts that were designed for their imaginative play and sheer delight. He loved watching the looks on their faces when they caught sight of their holiday haul.

In a letter, Roosevelt described the excitement of Christmas mornings in his home:

At seven all the children came in to open the big, bulgy stockings in our bed; Kermit’s terrier, Allan, a most friendly little dog, adding to the children’s delight by occupying the middle of the bed. From Alice to Quentin, each child was absorbed in his or her stocking, and Edith certainly managed to get the most wonderful stocking toys. Bob was in looking on, and Aunt Emily, of course. Then, after breakfast, we all formed up and went into the library, where bigger toys were on separate tables for the children.

I wonder whether there ever can come in life a thrill of greater exaltation and rapture than that which comes to one between the ages of say six and fourteen, when the library door is thrown open and you walk in to see all the gifts, like a materialized fairy land, arrayed on your special table?

Roosevelt was, of course, well-off and could afford to get his kids a nice array of presents, and one shouldn’t go into debt to make Christmas morning a big extravaganza. But within reason, and within one’s budget, it can be enjoyable to lay out an impressive assortment of goodies. After all, Christmas comes but once a year! (And your kids will be out of the house before you know it. Have you seen this chart? Boy, that chart). You don’t need to give your kids cool gifts to spend quality time with them, naturally. But it does make for a memorable bit of annual fun.

A historical side note here: According to the book Christmas Past, it wasn’t until the 1950s and 60s that wrapping Christmas presents became a thing. Most families just put the toys unwrapped in stockings or on a table like the Roosevelts. Growing up, my siblings and I each had our own couch where Santa placed our presents unwrapped, Rooseveltian style. Kate grew up with Santa putting wrapped gifts under the tree. To each their own.

Go for a Christmas Eve Sleigh Ride

Sleigh-riding was a big thing in the late 19th century, and it developed its own culture that was all about drinking, having a good time, and even a bit of male bravado (really getting that sleigh chugging along and taking the downhills with gusto!). “Jingle Bells” is a song that arose from this sleigh-riding culture. 

On Christmas Eve, Roosevelt would get his family all bundled up and go for a more domesticated sleigh ride to church.

Unfortunately, we don’t get enough snow here in Oklahoma to go for a sleigh ride. But one day, we’d love to spend a Christmas in a cold climate, partly to check taking a yuletide sleigh ride off the bucket list.

Go to Church

Teddy Roosevelt was a regular churchgoer and always attended Christmas Eve service with his family. He’d typically attend Christ Church while residing in Oyster Bay and Grace Reformed Church when he lived at the White House.

Roosevelt had fond memories of singing Christmas songs with his congregation in Oyster Bay:

One of the hymns always sung at this Christmas eve festival begins, ‘It’s Christmas eve on the river, it’s Christmas eve on the bay.’ All good natives of the village [Oyster Bay] firmly believe that this hymn was written here.

Our family goes to Catholic Mass on Christmas Eve. The sights, sounds, smells, and chance to belt out Christmas hymns help get us in the spirit.

Now that you know how to celebrate this most wonderful time of year like Teddy Roosevelt, have yourself a very Bully Christmas!

__________________

Sources:

Theodore Roosevelt for the Holidays: Christmas and Thanksgiving with the Bull Moose by Joshua Hodge

Christmas Past: The Fascinating Stories Behind Our Favorite Holiday’s Traditions by Brian Earl

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in December 2022.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Books are everywhere. They’re so common, they’re easy to take for granted. But my guest argues that they’re worth fully appreciating — because the book isn’t just a container for content; it’s a revolutionary technology for shaping culture and thought.

Joel Miller is a former publishing executive, an editor, a book reviewer, and the author of The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future. Today on the show, Joel argues that to appreciate the power of the book, you have to look at its design: how it’s constructed, how we interact with it, and how its evolution transformed the way we think, learn, and communicate. He walks us through a fascinating history of the book as a physical object, from Augustine reading under a fig tree, to medieval monks introducing word spacing and punctuation, to the printing press’s world-altering explosion of information. We also explore how novels changed our emotional and social intelligence, how silent reading birthed individual interpretation, and why, even in an age of video and AI, books still matter.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM book-related archives
• Dying Breed Article: Why I Hate Making (and Watching) Online Videos
• AoM Article: Why Men Should Read More Fiction
• AoM Article: Fiction for Men as Suggested by Art of Manliness Readers
• AoM Podcast #1,057: The Power of the Notebook — The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper

Connect With Joel Miller

• Miller’s Book Review

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Books are everywhere. They’re so common, they’re easy to take for granted, but my guest argues that they’re worth fully appreciating because the book isn’t just a container for content. It’s a revolutionary technology for shaping culture and thought. Joel Miller’s a former publishing executive and editor, a book reviewer and the author of The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future. 

Today on the show, Joel argues that to appreciate the power of the book, you have to look at its design, how it’s constructed, how we interact with it, and how its evolution transformed the way we think, learn, and communicate. He walks us through a fascinating history of the book as a physical object from Augustine reading under a fig tree to medieval monks, introducing word spacing and punctuation to the printing press’s world, altering the explosion of information. We also explore how novels changed our emotional and social intelligence, how silent reading, birthed individual interpretation, and why even in an age of video and AI books still matter. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/books.

All right, Joel Miller, welcome to the show.

Joel Miller:

Yes, thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay:

So you got a new book out called The Idea Machine, and this is a book about books, and you argue that books are idea machines, and that to truly appreciate them and think about how amazing they are, you have to understand books as hardware. What do you mean by that?

Joel Miller:

Well, I think we tend to think about books like the content in them. We think about the information in them. So we tend to think about books as software, but in reality, books are both software and hardware. And the reality is that the physical format of the book, the way that you interact with the book, has a very important impact on what we get out of it, what it enables us to do and how it’s used. And you can kind of trace that all the way back to the very earliest days of books all the way until the present.

Brett McKay:

And we’re going to do a history of the development of the book as the format, the hardware that we have now today, because it’s a really interesting history. But what are some of those benefits? What’s the benefit of having this thing that you hold in this rectangle that has pages? What’s the benefit of consuming content in that way?

Joel Miller:

Well, I start the book with the story of Augustine in the garden. There’s this classic story out of the confessions where Augustine is distraught and he walks off to a garden. He’s got a copy of St. Paul’s letters with him and his friend Olympia is also with him and he doesn’t want Olympia to see that he’s crying. He’s just kind of completely wrecked. And he wanders off to another corner of this garden. He sits down under a fig tree and he just begins to weep. And while he is in that state, he hears over the wall of an adjoining villa, the Latin phrase for take and read. And he remembers his copy of his book. So he runs back to the bench where he dropped it off and picks it up and he opens the page at random, opens the book at random, and he lands on a page, lands on a passage that completely upends his life.

It salves his troubled spirit. It solves the kind of quandary that he’s in. And there’s a very interesting detail in that passage of the confessions where he says, after that I put my finger or some other marker in the place to hold what he found. And that’s like a completely throw off line that you wouldn’t necessarily think about until you recognize that the book is also hardware as well as software. Because what that enabled him to do was then go back to that line, it enabled him to share it with Oly, his friend. And you can imagine just the benefit of being able to do that, not just with one book, which of course he did at that moment, but with an entire library to be able to mark the finding within a book enables you to do it across the book, multiple citations within a book.

It enables, in other words, a kind of critical engagement with that text that would otherwise be unavailable to you. It also enables you then to take all of these different marks that you have and compare them with other books, which enables an even deeper level of critical engagement and now a new level of synthesis where you’re able to take ideas from one place and ideas from another place and put them together. And if you couldn’t go back and find them, you’d never be able to do that. So that’s like a really simple example of how the format itself, the function of the book, enables you to do more with it than merely interact with content.

Brett McKay:

And you contrast that to say scrolls. Before we had the codis, we’ll talk about this, the book format that we had today. There was some organization in scrolls, but it was a lot harder. They were just cumbersome and you couldn’t do that sort of marking the way that Augustine did.

Joel Miller:

Correct. Augustine was able to open a book with essentially random access. So with a Codex, that’s the style of book that we have today, which is basically a bunch of pages bound within two covers. And with that format, you’re able to open a book at random. You can’t do that with a scroll if you’re a Gen Xer like me. The nearest comparison would be when you went to Blockbuster and some fool didn’t rewind the VHS and you were stuck having to rewind the thing to go back to the beginning. You just started wherever the thing was left. And that’s how a scroll worked. There wasn’t the ability to sort of navigate the text anywhere near as easily as with a codex.

Brett McKay:

Well, you mentioned video. That’s one reason why I’m not a big fan of even online video. You can’t jump to different parts. I mean, YouTube has done stuff where they kind of add these chapter things, but it’s still hard to get to this one specific thing and this one part of this video. Same thing with podcasts. I mean, I like podcasts more because at least I can do other things while I’m listening, but I feel like video just holds you hostage. But if you’re looking for something specifically, you can’t beat a book.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, a hundred percent. Like podcast apps and YouTube and others, they take these linear formats like that and they are introducing essentially index features or content finding features. Those are necessary. The truth is, you can’t sit through a two hour long video or even a 30 minute video and get what you want and then go back to it easily. And so the need to do that is inherent in the format. If you’re going to consume content, you have to be able to go back and identify parts of that to reassess and to use again. And so those kind of linear formats like video, audio, they limit that. And these developers are going to have to, because the typical consumer is going to want to have ways of overcoming that limitation. The book already has it built into it,

Brett McKay:

So they’re trying to make podcasts and video more like books essentially. So books are the OG best way to organize information. The other thing I like about books too is that, and this is about writing in general. We’ll talk about writing here in a bit, but Socrates has beef with writing. But something I’ve noticed with books and reading and writing is that I feel like it helps you think better when you read something. You’re able to really see someone’s completed thoughts about something in a linear argument and synthesize it, then you can go back to it and analyze it again. I mean, it’s something about the format of the book. Even a physical book. Totally improves my thinking.

Joel Miller:

Yeah. Well, one of the things that I emphasize in The Idea Machine, which is kind of my metaphor for what a book is, and then of course the adjacent things around it, like libraries are also part of the idea machine. But one of the things that an idea machine allows you to do is think new thoughts. And the way that you have the ability to do that is one of the ways is the book makes ideas like objects. You can see them and you can manipulate them, you can play with them, you can move them around, you can analyze them such that you can see the components of an argument when you are reading a book, for instance, and you can write in the margin point #1, point #2, point #3, it enables you to go back to that page and quickly reassess the argument or quickly go back and see how it holds together.

If something is made objective like that, it’s much easier to dissect it, to be critical with it. Whereas if you’re listening to an orator or a speech or whatever, you can’t really do that. It’s very difficult to go back and analyze “How was that? How did he make that argument? Was that a specious argument? Was that totally bogus?” The answer is probably yes. And you have no way of actually going back and doing anything other than using your memory to get the gist of what he said. Whereas with a book, you have quotable objective data that you can look back at.

Brett McKay:

At the beginning of the book, you developed this grid that shows how the format of the book can allow its content or the software to not only persist over time, but how its meaning can change over time as well. So how are books kind of like these weird time machines?

Joel Miller:

Yeah. Well, I talk about basically a three dimensional grid. Imagine you have an X axis, which is the expression of an idea. The Y axis going up is the specificity of that idea, the clarity of that idea. And then the Z axis is time itself. And time goes as far as it can run. And because the format of the book freezes content in a place in a time, you are actually able, we do it all the time without thinking what a wonder this is, we’re able to access the thoughts of people like Augustine or Paul or Socrates or whoever, as those ideas were formulated originally. And we’re able to go interact with those ideas. And sometimes those ideas are super clear to us. Other times they’re not. We are able to impose new interpretive criteria on those messages. We’re able to use those messages in ways the original people had no intent. They never would’ve imagined the way we’ve gone off and used them. But those are all capabilities of the book because of the particular form that it takes.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, this past year I’ve been rereading books that I read in high school, like the Great Books. So I reread Moby Dick, I reread Ralph Ellison’s, Invisible Man. I reread Catch 22. And it was interesting to see how the meaning of those books changed compared to when I initially read them when I was in high school, because the thing is that you have more experience, you learn more. I have more of an education for Ralph Ellison’s, Invisible Man. He was making all these references to Marxism and Hagel, some of the sociopolitical stuff that’s going on in the 1950s, 1940s in America. And when I was in 12th grade, when I read that, that went completely over my head. But then when I read it again as a 42-year-old man, I was like, oh, okay, I can see what he’s doing here. This is an interesting kind of critique of what was going on there.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, I think that’s one of the great things about revisiting books is the book says exactly the same thing as it did when it was first published. However, we’re not the same people from one reading to the next. And so we bring different things to it every time we open it.

Brett McKay:

So before we could have books, we needed to have writing. But you highlight the fact, and I’m sure a lot of people know this, the most famous philosopher in the west had a beef with writing. Why didn’t Socrates like writing or reading?

Joel Miller:

This is actually such a funny story. Yeah, Socrates kind of hated, well, lemme say it differently. Socrates is his most popular voice. The person that gave him his voice, Plato, who wrote the dialogues, he has Socrates make this very robust case against books. And Socrates thought that it degraded memory. It’s kind of a complicated case because the way he tells it is through a myth. But essentially this Greek God comes to this Egyptian Pharaoh, and he says, “Hey, I’ve invented this amazing thing called reading. It’s going to be great.” And the pharoah is like, wait a minute, unpack this for me because all I see are downsides. And he starts reciting all these downsides and they include things like reading will give people the appearance of knowing stuff when in reality they don’t really know anything. They can just pair it what they’ve read. And we know people like that. If you spend any time on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it, we run into those people all day long, folks that claim to know things that know nothing.

And that was kind of like the beginning part of what he was saying. But what’s interesting is everybody has read him. Everybody has read Socrates ever since then as being critical of writing. And there are other aspects to it. For instance, he says like a book can only say what it says. Therefore, if you have an objection, the book can never deal with the objection. A book can be read by anybody. So a book that’s meant for one audience can be read by any other audience, and therefore it can fall into the wrong hands. So he levels all these objections to it. And I think as a result of this persuasive case that he makes, a lot of people have walked away with the assumption that Socrates was against writing and against books. And on its surface, I think that’s true. But Plato’s very dialogues and then Xenophon, another disciple of Socrates, his memorabilia clearly show him interacting with books in a way that violates his own objections. So I call him a hypocrite out of a little bit of fun and recommend that we don’t follow what he teaches, but instead follow what he did.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, I think I see what he’s getting at for Socrates or the way that Plato presents him to know something. It was all about knowing the forms, and that’s how you knew what the right thing to do was. I imagine Socrates would think, well, if you sort of outsource that knowledge to an external book, you really can’t say the forms, and therefore you can’t make wise good decisions. So you don’t want, I can get where he is going from, but it’s not very useful to try to memorize everything that you come across.

Joel Miller:

Well, there was this concept that everything that could be even taught in education, anything that an educated person would ever know, they already know that they have access to that through essentially the divine, and it needs to be awakened within them. And then they would simply know the things that they needed to know. There wasn’t a sense that education was informing people. Education was more about forming people who could then have access to these truths, to the verities. And I don’t think there’s any objective way of demonstrating that that’s remotely true, but books violate that model of the world and Socrates theoretically held to that model of the world.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Socrates, he does read, I mean, there’s a dialogue where he says, I got to go back to this book to look up a reference. So he must’ve been reading. And then even Plato in the Republic, he makes this kind of a critique against poetry. I mean, how it can corrupt the mind. But Plato himself, he’s a fantastic writer. I mean, his writing is not only philosophically dense and thorough, but it’s beautiful. I mean, it’s really nice to read. So clearly he values the written word.

Joel Miller:

Well, there’s a great funny example. This again kind of goes to the hypocrisy point. There is a story told about Plato that after he died, his writing tablet, which would’ve been a wooden board that had a recess on the top and wax would’ve been poured into that, so you could incise letters with a stylus. This was before paper. So this is kind of what people used to use in the old days to jot down ideas or rework ideas. So this is kind of like where your first draft would’ve been kept. And when he died, people went back and looked at his tablet and it showed the first line of the republic written out in multiple ways. He was sitting there editing the text in order to get the right phrase, to get the right formulation of it, which shows how dependent he was on the technology of writing and the technique of writing the technology of the writing tablet in order to convey his own ideas.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so writing, even though some ancient philosophers had a beef against it, they knew that writing had its benefits, reading had its benefits. You pick up this section about writing and you shift over to the Romans. The Romans relied on slaves to dictate the writing and copy books out and even read books out loud to them. And you really highlight the fact that the Romans really started to use reading and writing as a form of thinking.

Joel Miller:

I think you get this actually in that story of Plato also where you see him editing the text. One of the arguments I make in the book is that writing leads to editing and editing is evidence of thinking you cannot critique your own work without having engaged cognitively and critically with it. And you see that actually in that example of Plato, he is re-engaging his own text. But the same thing is true for now in a refined sense in the Roman context because you have examples of Virgil talking about, or rather pious, his biographer talking about how Virgil worked. And the way Virgil worked on his Geox or the Inid was to basically dictate all morning and then ju and edit all afternoon until he had what he wanted to keep from the morning’s work all solidified. So he dictates, and his scribe is busy keeping track of all these notes writing, and then in the afternoon he goes back and he cleans it up until he has a draft that he likes.

And then on top of that, whenever he has new ideas pop in like, oh, I need to remember this, or I need to remember that, or whatever, he basically works with an outline. He goes ahead and he jots down these ideas in rough shape. He calls them wooden pillars that are placed in a building while we’re awaiting the marble pillars to come the final product. This is like a prop for his own thinking, in other words. And so there’s this clear sense in the way Virgil worked that he is using writing as a prop to his own thinking as a support to his own thinking. And he structures even the work itself to facilitate that. And then in Quintillions instructions on oration, he talks about the same basic thing and including the idea that whatever we first write out in our first draft, we like it.

We love it. It’s our first go at it, we feel great about it. It’s probably bad. You got to go back and edit it. You got to go back and clean up the flow. You got to go back and tidy up these phrases. You got to go back and kill your darlings. He said almost the very same thing that Arthur Quiller Cooch said 2000 years later, Quintilian said it way back when because what he recognized is is that the writing process itself and then especially the editorial process, is part of formulating the ideas. And so the actual page, or in their case, the actual tablet on which they’re writing is a reflection of the thought process itself. In fact, it is part of the thought process itself. So when we write today on a word processor or a notebook or whatever, we’re doing the same thing. We’re literally thinking on the screen, thinking on the page, the device, whether it’s a notebook or a tablet or whatever, it’s an externalized part of our own brain at that point. It is a part of our own mind. We’re using it to scaffold our own creative processes.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve noticed that with my own writing. If I can’t write it clearly and succinctly and where it makes sense, I realized I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay:

I mean, I had this problem, there was an article I was working on a couple weeks ago and I thought it sounded good. Technically it was good, but I wasn’t hitting the idea. And my wife, I was getting some feedback from her and she’s like, what are you trying to say? And I’d be like, I don’t know.

Joel Miller:

Totally.

Brett McKay:

I don’t know. So I had to just dump it and I had like, I got to think about this some more because I couldn’t articulate what I was trying to say. I didn’t know what I wanted to say. So you can think you have a good idea when it’s all amorphous in your head, but if you can’t write it out, you really don’t know what you think.

Joel Miller:

That goes back to that idea grid that we talked about earlier. The X axis represents that expression, and the Y axis represents specificity or clarity of thought, and what you have there is the ability to express a lot. So you’re high on that x axis, but you’re low on the Y, like the clarity isn’t there, and we experience that all the time, and it’s like writing enables us to move it up into that other quadrant, that far quadrant where it’s both fully expressed and also very clear.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So when did the book appear, as we note today? So pages that are sandwiched together, bound together, when did that come onto the scene?

Joel Miller:

It’s kind of a first century Roman invention. You could find it going back like pre-advent of Christ kind of time, but it would’ve been very new at that point, and it wasn’t used the way we think of it, it was kind of like a notebook, basically tradespeople use them to just jot down notes. These would’ve been usually on parchment or possibly papyrus, and they basically would’ve just taken sheets of papyrus or sheets of parchment and folded ’em together and stitched them down the back, and that was what a codex was in those days. The use of that was primarily for work a day purposes, keeping notes on business or maybe rough drafting something or jotting down the draft of a contract or something like that, keeping tallies if you’re a merchant and so on. Those were the workaday purposes to which the codex was put.

It was not a literary format. The first rule reference to it as a literary format comes from the Roman poet Marshall who talked about this amazing innovation that you could basically, instead of having a big bulky scroll, because Codex could be, COEs, could be a slightly more compact, you could end up with, in his case, he was bragging about some of his own work, but he talked about other people’s work also that you could find in a codex and it would be smaller, you could carry it around. He talked about someone being able to carry him in one hand and being able to thumb through his work everywhere, but that didn’t really take off. I guess he mentioned that in some very public poems that were designed as kind of gift suggestions for Saturnalia. And it was like, if you think about it as an early marketing effort, like a lot of book marketing, it didn’t work.

Nobody took his advice but didn’t take off. The group that actually did embrace the codex weirdly enough, were Christians. And so first century Christians began using the codex the same way everyone else did, but they began using it for other things too, including recording their scripture. And that was a novelty. No one else did that. And that eventually took off. And as Christians became a larger and larger percentage of the population in the Roman Empire and then beyond, they kept that format and kept using it. They never went back and sort of adopted the older version, and as a result, the codex took off wherever Christians went.

Brett McKay:

Why do you think Christians glommed on to the Codex?

Joel Miller:

There is so much speculation on this and there’s no real solid answers, but here are a couple sketchy ones that I think are generally agreed upon. One was that a codex allowed you to gather together different texts and present them in a way that you could have all of it in one bundle. So ancient codices have, for instance, you may have a letter of Paul and a letter of James and a poem and a Psalm, and somebody may have all that stitched into one codex. That would be odd in a scroll. The way that would work in a scroll would be a little strange. And so that just didn’t happen that way, but it did happen with codices. The other thing that was interesting is that if you wanted to collect all of a thing like all of Paul in one document, that would’ve been a codex.

That would’ve been kind of like the preferred way to do that. If you took all of Paul’s letters and put them into one scroll, it would be a massive, massive, massive scroll. But you could do it all in a codex by basically taking many of these individual codices, these choirs they were called, stacking them up on top of each other and binding them together. So the end result is what we think of as a book with a book spine with a big thick spine. You can’t do that in a scroll, but you can do it with a codex. And so as Christians in their bookish ness begin to collect these letters of their early founding voices, that’s how they found the best and most efficient way to do it. That’s one particular kind of argument for it. Another argument for it is that the Christians were using kind of the technology of the codex to capture extracts out of the Jewish scriptures that kind of tended to confirm their claims about Christ.

These were called testimonial, and Paul actually might be speaking to one of these when he tells Timothy in one of his letters to bring his cloak and a few other things when he comes, I think, what is it to Troas, and he says, bring the books, especially the notebooks or the Latin. There is Menani, which is a parchment notebook, and so that could have been his collection of his own letters. When he sent a letter out, he probably kept the original and that was copied down in his notebook when he had his own insights and his own arguments and his own interaction with the Jewish scripture. He was probably writing that down in a notebook so he could refer to it later. That would’ve been the kind of thing he was asking Timothy to collect for him. And so Christians just tended to glom onto it and hold onto it. And the end result was a lot of Christian documents ended up in Codices almost to the complete exclusion of scrolls. It’s just not very many scrolls of Christians from that time. It’s almost all codices. And as Christians spread, that preference just took off. There are maybe other reasons, but those are the primary ones.

Brett McKay:

Maybe there’s another speculation of mine, but I wonder if it was also because the early Christians, they were outsiders in Roman culture, so maybe they were scrolls, oh, that’s for rich guys. That’s what the elites use. Were not that, so we’re going to use these kind of humble workaday notebooks to take care of our writing.

Joel Miller:

That’s an interesting speculation, and I think a good one because it actually parallels another one like that, which is why monks became copyists. So if slaves were the infrastructure of the book trade, as Rex Wesbury said, the reason for that is that copying manuscripts was laborious, difficult, mostly unappreciated work. And Christian monks adopted it in part because of its aesthetical value. It was a way of mortifying the flesh to copy manuscripts. And so they took that up with relative gusto. And as the sort of Roman model began to disintegrate, the Christian model began to emerge. Monks became the new infrastructure of the trade, but they did it because they were rejecting the assumptions around that work that the Romans had.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, if you were in first grade and he had to copy stuff out for punishment in school, the monks did that on purpose. They were like, that’s how they wore their hair shirt.

Joel Miller:

It was just like fasting long bouts of prayer, like keeping vigil. I mean, it’s just like that. 

Brett McKay:

But you talk about how monks, these early Christian monks, how they changed reading and writing with the help of the book the Codex. How did Christian monks change reading and writing so that it looks more like what we do today?

Joel Miller:

Well, this is one of those examples that, again, unless you’re looking at how it worked in the ancient world, you would never even assume it was anything other than this. But monks did something as simple as put spaces between words. In the Greco-Roman method of producing literature, of producing text, they did not put spaces between words, and they didn’t really need to because students were trained to read by basically memorizing syllable combinations, and then they would pick out the words from this river of letters or this monolith of characters as a couple of scholars have called it. And so if you go back and you look at very ancient copies of Greek manuscripts, they don’t have punctuation, they don’t have spaces between words. They don’t have any of that stuff. Those were all innovations by Christian monks.

Brett McKay:

And they also introduced because they put in these spaces and commas and punctuation, they also introduced silent reading. Yeah, tell us about that.

Joel Miller:

So this is kind of contested, but in the ancient world, it was more common for people to read aloud, and that has to do with that script continua text. In other words, all those words just jammed together all the letters in a constant stream with no breaks. The way you did that was you picked out the syllables, and the way you did that was you at least mouth them, if not verbalize them. And so you can find various indications of this in books like Cyril of Alexandria, he has to direct, or it might’ve been Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Jerusalem directs the women in his congregation in this catechetical setting to read while moving their lips, but without letting other people hear your voice. So here’s direct evidence that people were reading aloud. That’s just kind of how they did it. And in the confessions, Augustine talks about seeing Bishop Ambrose reading quietly to himself without doing that, and that was an oddity, which warranted being mentioned, like this guy didn’t even need to mouth these syllables in order to read. It was kind of like a freak of nature sort of thing. So people could read silently, but the tendency was to read aloud because the format itself encouraged you to read aloud.

Brett McKay:

And I think that change from reading aloud to silent or inner reading, that opened up some new possibilities with how you approach the text. I think.

Joel Miller:

Oh, absolutely. First off, it enabled private reading on a level that really wasn’t accessible before. And I think this is a highly underrated aspect of our understanding of how books transformed us as people, but we mostly read in private now, either we listen to audio books which are contained within earbuds in our own, just our own headspace or a book in front of our eyes. We rarely read aloud anymore unless it’s to children or something like that. And so our consumption of texts is almost entirely individualistic. In those days, it was not. The way that you heard a book when it was first published or thereafter, was mostly to go listen to the writer, read it aloud at a public presentation. You didn’t just go to the store and buy a copy. They didn’t have copies. You went to a store perhaps to have a copy made for you, but that was expensive. And so people went to what were called CIOs to have a book read that you would listen to. That was how it was published in those days. But as these technologies of presenting text enabled the text to be more easily discernible, spaces between words, standardized, punctuation, that kind of thing, it enabled people to read more easily on their own. And when that could happen, then you could have private reading. And private reading really frankly changes the landscape of the world.

Brett McKay:

How does private reading change the landscape of the world?

Joel Miller:

Suddenly you can have your own opinions about what you’re reading. You can challenge things. You can read things on the slide that you’re not supposed to be reading. You can have interpretations of those things that are not acceptable. You can wrestle with received expectations on how to interpret something by holding your own interpretation. And what that does fundamentally is it ultimately tends to erode community interpretations and help elevate individual interpretations where that matters on big scale stuff would be like religions, but it also matters in small scale stuff. Imagine you are reading, for instance, a book I talk about a dedicated chapter, not exactly to Uncle Toms Cabin, but it’s a primary example within this chapter, reading about the horrors of slavery. You’re reading that on your own. You could read that anywhere. You could read that in the north where abolitionist attitudes were already rife or you could read it in the south where they were not. And there were literal laws passed against reading that book as a result because they were worried that people would come to alternative interpretations of how society should be structured.

Brett McKay:

Well, going back to this idea of how individual reading can cause big changes, you mentioned religion. We see this in the Renaissance after the printing press, like the printing press skyrocketed, the number of books available during the Renaissance. Can you give us some numbers so we can really see how rapidly the book proliferated during this time?

Joel Miller:

Yeah, this is nuts, but if you look at, say the ninth Centuries between the sixth and the 15th centuries, European scribes produced about 11 million books, 11 million individual copies. This is based on the best analysis of the available data, but about 11 million copies in just the 148 years between 1452 with the invention of the printing press and 1600 printers produced about 212 million individual units. So that is basically an 1800% increase. It’s unbelievable. And that was just getting started. That’s just 148 years. Those numbers go into the beyond that they go into the billions eventually.

Brett McKay:

And as you said, people were reading these books on their own. So a lot of those books that were printed were Bibles, and so people were reading the Bible on their own and figuring out what does this mean to me? And then that gave rise to the Reformation and all these different Protestant break offs. And then, I mean, people argued the printing press is actually what caused all that war fair that happened during the, it was very violent, and then they attributed to the printing press.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, there’s the arguments that say that that was an instrumental part of it. There’s the arguments that say that’s way overstated and all of that stuff is all interesting, and it’s very difficult to suss out the ultimate story. Of course, history is mostly an argument we just talk about in retrospect. We don’t actually know a lot of stuff for certain, but I do think one thing is very clear, and that is the reformation could not have happened without the printing press. There would’ve been no way, for instance, for Martin Luther to do what he did, which was swamp all of Europe in text presenting his particular view. Other people held views that were similar before, and they had nowhere near the impact. They had zero impact. Luther blew up Christendom, and that was in part because of the printing press.

Brett McKay:

So the number of new books started posing a problem for people. It was organizing and finding information. They were having a problem with information to overload thousands way back, way back when. Today we think of, this is really interesting. I thought this is really interesting. Today we think of organizing books. The way you do is you put it on a shelf with the spine facing out, so you can read the title and then you can organize those based on subject or however else you want to organize them. But that’s not how people kept their books during the Renaissance. How did people store their books and how did that make finding information a big chore?

Joel Miller:

I think it’s Duncan Watts as a writer who has a book called Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer. But this is one of those examples. We all have bookcases, we all have books sitting on our bookcases. They all mostly sit upright with their spines facing out and a lot of words on the spine. So it is like, of course, that’s how you organize books, right? It seems so obvious. Well, that’s not how they did it in the old days. They didn’t have words on the spine, or if they did, they might not have even been things as simple as a title. They regularly kept them inside of chests. So imagine just a big box full of books. They might be kept in a wall niche in a window or something like that if you just had a dozen or so books and monastic libraries are a great example of this.

They tended to be small. Even big ones may have only several hundred books in them. The biggest might’ve had a thousand. There’s a few that had even more than that, but we’re not talking about massive tons of books. However, they were all kept in boxes or maybe with some sitting out on top of the box or some sitting on a table often chained to that table so that they wouldn’t wander off. Book theft was a real thing. And so the end result was finding books was a chore. You had to kind of know what was in that box, and the only way to do that was to lift up the lid and go digging through it to see what was in it.

Brett McKay:

When did they start figuring out like, oh, hey, we don’t have to stack books in boxes or keep them in trunks. We can put them on shells and organize them by subject. When did that start happening?

Joel Miller:

Well, that was really a product of the Renaissance, and that was the late Renaissance or the early modern era. Hernando Colon, who was Christopher Columbus’s bastard son, was one of the very first to do this. He realized that books could be much more efficiently stored on open air shelves standing upright. Even the idea that we think of the book as upright that way tells you how we’re now so wired to thinking, but standing upright. And then he basically created collections of indices, like a massive catalog and indices that enabled him to find anything in his library. And he was trying at his time to develop the biggest library in the world. Basically, that was his mission, was to create a library of everything ever printed, including things that nobody thought were valuable at the time, all this print ephemera, posters and things like that. He had all that too.

And he created essentially an internet browser out of a paper that had this massive printed catalog of everything in his library where you could go into that library catalog and you could find the entry that you were looking for and then go find it on the shelf. But more than that, he also then digested a lot of what were in those books in this catalog setup that he had, so that you could, without even having to go pull the book off the shelf, you could decide if you needed it or not. So he was basically coming up with a way of digesting texts so that it could be searchable in essentially like a proto Google, an analog Google. And it’s a pretty phenomenal feat that he accomplished, but it’s like he was one of the first to ever think to even do that.

Brett McKay:

And then I imagine other people thought, oh, that’s a good idea. I’ll try that too.

Joel Miller:

Yes, exactly. Every age, if you look at the production of books going all the way back to the ancient Near East when books were really first invented and they were written on clay tablets, every society that has ever had to deal with information has had to come up with ways of doing what I’m just describing. But in the age of print, when instead of having thousands of tablets, for instance, now you have tens of thousands of books that are all far more information dense than those clay tablets could be. The work has suddenly become infinitely harder. And so what colon invented and innovated on at that time, and then others around him and after him enabled a much more immediate access to those ideas.

Brett McKay:

So we’ve been talking about books as a hardware, right? Its format allows you to do things with ideas that you couldn’t do if it were in another format, but they also have a software that’s the form of the content of the book. And starting in the 18th century and really picking up speed in the 19th century, a new type of book software started showing up, and that’s the novel. Why did it take so long for the novel to develop after the Codex was invented?

Joel Miller:

That’s a great question. I mean, there are examples of proto novels that go back much further. You can find things that kind of qualify as novels in ancient Roman literature, there’s Christian Hagiographies where they’re writing about saints and the saint’s lives, and there’s full of imaginative, almost fantasy like elements within those. All of that though, kind of is pushing towards the modern novel. And Don Quixote is kind of the first example of that. Miguel Cervantes’s massive novel in which he warns about novels, which is hilarious. He gives us this massive novel to warn us about the dangers of novels. But that was kind of like the first, but as a cultural thing, I think it required mass literacy in order for that to take off. Because for a novel to really work, it can’t just be that the upper 20% of a society has access to it and they can read it.

It has to be where you’ve got a lot of people with some expendable time, like either in between jobs or waiting for this or waiting for that or whatever, where they’re able to take this portable thing, pull it out of their pocket and start reading it. And it wasn’t really until the 18th century, the 19th century where that was possible. And then on top of that, you really needed what happened in the 19th century, which was industrialized printing, because what that did was as incredible as the original printing press. And that original revolution was, it was really industrial printing that created the scale that we think of today as the ubiquity of books. Because before that, every book that was printed was printed one sheet at a time, and that one sheet might have eight pages on it, but still we’re talking about somebody manually feeding a sheet into a printing press and the machine having to come down and press it onto the paper and so on. By the 19th century, steam power had been invented and they figured out how to basically create rotary presses that could take paper off of a roll, so not sheets any longer, take it off a roll, feed it through a rotary press, and within an hour they could produce what had formally taken two weeks to produce. So that created a massive ubiquity of books, which then drove the price down, and that suddenly meant that middle class and even poor people could afford to pick up a novel and be entertained by it.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. So some, and I think often men think of fiction reading or novel reading as just entertaining fluff, but you make the case that the novel is a powerful tool for individual and societal change. So what does reading fiction do to us?

Joel Miller:

Man, reading fiction does so many things for us. Let me just, this is kind of a personal perspective, personal story here, but I grew up reading a little fiction. I’ve always read a little fiction over the course of my whole life, but as a young man, I mostly read nonfiction. I wanted serious stuff. I wanted to read economics and politics and history. And I mean, that’s literally all that in theology. That was all I ever read except for the occasional novel that would come across my path that interested me. For whatever reason, now that I’m almost 50, I almost only read novels. And I think what I’m getting ready to describe is available to anybody at any age, but we don’t quite appreciate it usually when we’re younger, at least I think at least I didn’t. So maybe the world’s blame on this one rests on my shoulders.

But the way to think about it is this. When you pick up a book and you’re reading about a character, whether that’s in a first person narrative or it’s a third person narrative, we impose our own cognitive faculties on this character. We loan our own emotions to the character we loan, our goal setting ability to the character we loan, our problem solving ability to the character in ways that other kinds of literature don’t allow us to do or don’t invite us to do. So when a character is stuck, we are busy problem solving with them. We’re like, well, you should really do X. You should really do Y. And then that happens, and then we feel either grief or joy at how it happened or whatever. That emotive connection is also powerful all by itself because it is formative. It is the kind of thing that actually shapes our own emotional intelligence. So as we’re reading fiction, we are learning about the world in a way, and other people, more importantly in a way that we couldn’t, outside of books that were so directly related to that kind of experience.

Brett McKay:

A while back ago, I wrote an article for the site Why Men Should Read More Fiction, because I was like, when I read, it was like I was going to read nonfiction history books, whatever. But yeah, I mean, studies show that reading fiction increases your theory of mind, which is this cognitive ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of other people. Basically, you need theory of mind to socialize, right?

Joel Miller:

Totally. You’ve got to guess what so-and-so thinks, and then you’re going to guess what they think based on what this other person might or might not think.

Brett McKay:

Right? And reading fiction allows you to do that. Seeing theory of mind and action. You’re seeing the thoughts of all these different characters, and you got to keep ’em in place. I mean, as you said, it makes you more empathetic. The character’s emotions become your emotions and your emotions become the character emotions.

Joel Miller:

Exactly.

Brett McKay:

And you were talking about that’s why Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so powerful, because it really affected people. And I mean, even Abraham Lincoln when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe is like, oh, so here’s the little lady that started this war that we’re fighting because everyone read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brett McKay:

Let’s say there’s some guys out there who are listening, they want to start reading more fiction. Are there three novels you’d recommend they start with?

Joel Miller:

Oh man, they’re so freaking many great novels for men that don’t regularly read, I would have them read something like Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men.

Brett McKay:

Oh, yeah, that’s a great one.

Joel Miller:

That would be such a great book to start with. Kurt Vonnegut is a blast. I can’t imagine a better starting place than Slaughterhouse-Five. That’s a funny, very satirical snide, but very wise, fascinating book. That’s a great one. And then personally, one that I’d love, it’s a little bit more speculative in the way that it’s written, but it’s a beautiful, wonderful book by the Russian novelist, Eugene Onegin. Don’t let Russian novelist be a phrase that scares you away. It’s very contemporary and it’s translated very ablely by the wonderful Lisa Hayden, but it’s called The Aviator, and it’s a book about a guy who is frozen during the Russian revolution and some cryogenic experiment and wakes up in the modern era and has to kind of understand what happened to him. And it’s really great.

Brett McKay:

I haven’t heard of The Aviator. That sounds awesome. So what do you think the state of reading is today? So we’ve talked about the book, how it’s this amazing thing, it’s this idea machine. We have the book to think for the spread of religion, the rise of the scientific method, the rise of different institutions, governments, democratic governments, constitutional governments. What’s reading look like right now? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about it?

Joel Miller:

I’m both. One of the reasons I wrote the book, I just wanted people to appreciate the book. I wanted people to appreciate this amazing technology, especially as we are so technologically fixated these days. I say at the very beginning of The Idea Machine that books basically suffer from their ubiquity. They’re everywhere, and most things don’t like ubiquity. And all of that doesn’t really breed contempt so much as neglect, familiarity. We just tend to ignore it. And yet this has been demonstrably instrumental in making our modern world. We wouldn’t live in the world we live in today without the book, without the invention of the book. And so I wanted people to be inspired by that history, which is part of the reason I wrote the book. But in terms of what I actually think on a day-to-day basis, I kind of ping pong between discouragement and encouragement.

On the discouraging side, fewer people today seem to be reading than they have in the past. Now on a historical scale, we’re still reading it much, much higher than they were in the Middle Ages say. So these things are all relative, but those numbers that you see on how much people engage in books these days, there’s studies published every couple years, every several months, you can find this or that study. And none of them have encouraging news hardly ever however I say that. And yet at the same time, I also go to a platform substack where I keep my newsletter, millersbookreview.com, and there are loads of people celebrating classical literature there. There’s loads of people talking about what they’re reading. It is phenomenal, and that’s very substantive in its depth and breadth in terms of the quality of the discussion there. At the same time, there’s places like TikTok where I don’t think the discussion is anywhere near as robust, but it’s very plentiful. Like BookTok is a thing where there’s scads of people talking about this or that romantic author that they’re reading or whatever. I don’t want to denigrate any of that. People reading should just be reading and enjoy what they’re reading. So whatever you want to read, rock on, do it. But I see those kind of anecdotal examples and I think, ah, maybe there’s a lot to actually still be enthusiastic about. So I kind of vacillate between the two.

Brett McKay:

I’ve heard people say that books, at least nonfiction books are going to become outmoded in the age of LLMs like chat GPT, because instead of having to read through a whole book to find the information answers you want, you can essentially generate a text entirely tailored to your interest in questions from the LLM. So what role do you think books will play in a world with large language models?

Joel Miller:

I end the book with Sam Bankman-Fried the disgraced founder of that massive cryptocurrency exchange. He very prominently said near his downfall, in fact, very closely to that, that if you wrote a book, you effed up. He had no appreciation for a book. He literally said, I don’t say that no book has any value, but I almost say that that’s almost a direct quote from him. And I think what he’s missing, what he missed, he became like a reverse poster boy for the benefit of a humanities degree, basically, is that there is some deep soul and mind formation that happens when we read. That does not happen when we simply glean extracts from say, an LLM report any more than from the headlines pulled out of a Google search. You have to go deeper and you have to engage at a more robust level in order to be shaped by the content that you’re reading. And that requires books like you can’t get that from an LLM. You can get great stuff out of an LLM. And let me just say right out, I think large language models are astonishing. They are, in fact, in my mind, they’re an extension of what the book has done for us. They’re a part of that whole trend. But the way people use them is often to misuse them and to miss the benefit that a book would provide in comparison.

Brett McKay:

What’s great about books is that you serendipitously discover things you didn’t know you wanted to know. You don’t know the questions to ask without the wider ranging knowledge you get in a book. But I do think LLMs can actually enhance your reading. How are you using large language models in your own reading and writing so that they enhance rather than replace your thinking?

Joel Miller:

Well, for a lot of business work that doesn’t actually require the level of creative thinking that personal writing projects do. For me, I use LLMs to draft early things or to help me brainstorm ideas, to help me take one form of a document and turn it into another form of a document where I might have some derivative uses of a core text that I want to use, but I need to turn it into another thing that might take me 45 minutes to an hour, but it’ll take an LLM seven minutes including me fixing the sloppiness in it or whatever. So I use it as a productivity tool. And for that, it’s fantastic for research. I also use it, I find perplexity and also the deep research functions on several of the different LLMs to be very helpful, especially when it provides me actual links. I can go back and check that can help. I’ve written whole business plans using that, and they’ve been very successful. And I couldn’t have even done the work that I did in the time if I had done that in a traditional way. So the research side of it can be very, very good. And then I also sometimes will load books up into an LLM like notebook. The Google one, which is now suddenly escaping me . . . Notebook.

And then sometimes ChatGPT and then also Claude. I’ve tried it in all three of those and a little bit with Grock where I’ll take a manuscript. I’ve done this with my own book just to query my own book on certain things. But I do it with classic literature where you can get basically free PDFs of these classic novels and other things, and I’ll use it to query the novel. I’ll have a conversation with the book. Basically I’m trying to find something, there’s no index for it. I find it quickly using that. Or I have done some work where I will investigate essentially an angle in a book, and I’ll use the LLM to help me do it where I would have a hard time, I think sussing it out.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve done that reading along with an LLM. I’ll do this fiction books. I’ll just start a chat where as I’m reading and I see something I don’t know what that means or what’s going on. Basically, when there’s a historical novel, I’ll start talking to the LLM, give me some information on what’s going on in this chapter. For example, I did this a lot with The Count of Monte Cristo. There’s a lot of history in that thing, and so I use ChatGPT to help me flesh out some of that stuff a little bit more, so I understood it better, and I thought that was a useful way of using an LLM with your reading.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, totally. I think that’s a great example of that, for sure.

Brett McKay:

Well, Joel, this has been a great conversation. Where could people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Joel Miller:

Millersbookreview.com is probably the best place. That’s where I post book reviews and literary essays there, and you can also find out more about The Idea Machine there.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Joel Miller, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joel Miller:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Joel Miller. He’s the author of the book, The Idea Machine. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, millersbookreview.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/books where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives and make sure to check out our new Substack Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. 

And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you got something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the show, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Winter gets a bad rap.

I know I often treat it like a season to be endured rather than enjoyed, but there’s plenty of fun to be had when the temperature drops. And there are plenty of small winter rituals that make the cold months feel less like a slog and more like a season worth savoring.

To help you make the most of the cold and darkness, here’s a list of 21 things every man should do before the leaves start budding again on the trees.

Complete each one before the spring equinox, and you’ll create a batch of memories that’ll carry you through the rest of the year, but more importantly, make this winter feel a lot more enjoyable.

Let the winter adventures begin!

Hit the Slopes. Even if you’re not a graceful skier, there’s nothing more invigorating than strapping on a pair of skis and hurling yourself down a mountain. You get the pretty alpine views from the top of the lift, the rush of trying to maintain your balance as you zoom over the snow, and that bracing feeling as cold air hits you in the face. Skiing is winter in motion. And the food in the lodge (even if overpriced) always tastes better after a few hours on the slopes.

Read a Long Book. Winter is primetime for reading that really long book you’ve told yourself you’d read one day. The nights are long, and you might not be going out as much. Instead of slumping on the couch to watch Netflix, recline by the fireplace with a big ol’ boy of a book. War and Peace, Moby-Dick, a Ron Chernow biography. Pick up a tome and finish it before winter ends.

Cut Down Your Own Christmas Tree. Instead of grabbing one from the Home Depot parking lot, go to a tree farm and cut your own. The walk through the rows, the sawing, the hauling. It all makes the experience feel more organic and the decorated finished product feel more earned.

Once you set up your hand-cut Christmas tree in your house, check out our guide on how to keep it fresher, longer.

Have a Snowball Fight. Speaking of things you don’t have to abandon in adulthood, a good snowball fight when you’re a grown man reawakens the part of you that used to spend entire afternoons outside in the snow without noticing your fingers were frozen. Follow our guide from Buddy the Elf on how to make the perfect snowball, and remember, NO SOAKERS!

Go Sledding. A plastic sled + a decent hill = guaranteed good time. Sledding isn’t a pastime you have to leave behind in your childhood. Bonus points if you build a small jump to catch some air.

Shovel a Neighbor’s Driveway/Walkway. When the snow piles up, grab a shovel and not only clear your own driveway/walkway, but someone else’s who could use the help. Don’t make a fuss about it or text them afterward to announce your benevolence. Just do it and head back inside feeling warmed by both the exercise and the good deed.

To save some time and your back, check out our guide on the most efficient way to shovel snow.

Go Ice Skating. Ice skating is like skiing in that it requires a little skill to actually enjoy it. But once you get the hang of it, it feels awesome to zoom around the rink or pond. Especially while holding hands with your best gal.

Build a Fireplace Fire. During the winter, there’s nothing like building a cozy fire in your fireplace — a warm, crackling oasis you can sit beside in your man chair while you read thick, leather-bound books and ponder manful thoughts. It makes you feel like Frog and Toad on Christmas Eve. So dang cozy.

Build a Snow Shelter. You probably built snow forts when you were a kid. This winter, try making one that’s genuinely serviceable. There are various models to follow, but the quinzee might be the most efficient and accessible. Just pile up a bunch of snow and hollow out the inside. Then make like outdoor instructor Micah Mortali: bring in a camping mattress, a sleeping bag, and a beeswax candle, and sleep in it on the winter solstice.

Make Homemade Hot Cocoa. Ditch the little paper packet and make the real deal on the stovetop. Milk, cocoa, sugar, a pinch of salt, and a splash of vanilla. Stir until smooth. Add whipped cream or marshmallows as a finishing touch.

Play Card Games. Winter is prime time for indoor pursuits, which makes it prime time for playing cards. Round up the family or a couple buddies, crack open a pack, and play a few hands to wile away the time.

Host a Dinner Party. We can sometimes want to be by ourselves more in the winter, and while leaning into a little reflective solitude is fine, socializing is one of the best ways to keep up your spirits during the dark months. And one of the best ways to socialize is to host a dinner party. It doesn’t have to be fancy: make a simple meal, light a few candles, and invite friends to enjoy some cozy fellowship.

Do a Polar Plunge. There’s been plenty of ink spilt about the health benefits of cold plunges of late, but it’s worth doing for purely ineffable reasons; the bravery points required, the invigoration, and the sheer novelty. Whether it’s a ring-in-the-New-Year’s ritual or just a random dip in February, a polar plunge shocks your system in the best possible way. You’ll feel like you can wrestle a moose afterward. For extra winter points, pair your plunge with a sauna session.

Listen to a Record. Winter is the perfect season for vinyl. Put on a record, sit down, and just listen. No multitasking. The warm crackle of vinyl pairs nicely with the warm crackle of a fire. If you’re looking for albums to listen to, check out our suggestions for jazz albums for beginners; for some reason, jazz pairs especially well with long winter evenings.

Make a Big Pot of Chili. Cold weather calls for soups, stews, and, of course, chili. Big batches of it. Enough leftovers to feed yourself for days. Whether you’re a no-beans purist or a “throw everything in the pot” guy, chili is one of winter’s great comfort foods. Don’t forget the Fritos and cheddar cheese.

Visit a Museum. When the weather outside is frightful, museums make for the perfect indoor recreation spots. Art, history, science — whatever strikes your fancy. Wandering through exhibits is a great way to spend a winter afternoon, and you’ll learn something new to boot.

Check out our guide on how to make the most of a museum visit.

Sit in the Sauna. Cultures that live with real, bone-cold and super dark winters, like Finland and Norway, figured out long ago that the best way to handle months of cold is to get in a sauna on the regular. A sauna session warms you up and offers both physical and psychological benefits. Pair the sauna with a polar plunge or just step out into the cold air and let that contrast hit you.

Start a Winter Project. Winter is ideal for tactile projects that you can work on in the great indoors. Whether it’s a small craft, like whittling a figurine or making a leather belt, or it’s something bigger like making a dining room table, there’s something satisfying about projects you can chip away at, day by day. Slow, steady progress feels good when everything outside is frozen.

Make a Winter Cocktail (or Mocktail). Whether alcoholic or non, winter drinks were invented to make cold nights more pleasant. Mulled cider, hot toddies, wassail — anything warm and/or spiced really hits the spot.

Go on a Night Walk. There’s something magical about walking at night. And that’s especially true in the winter. The atmosphere is stiller. The air is sharper and more bracing (and even smells better!). The stars seem brighter. After a walk in the inky winter dark, you feel more alive.

Dream About the New Year. In winter, trees look dormant, but underground they’re quietly growing roots that will support next spring’s surge. We can take the same approach. Use the seasonal slowdown to think about where you want to head once the weather warms up. Grab a notebook, jot down a few hopes for the coming year, and mull on them a bit. No need to make specific resolutions. You can wait until spring when the sap starts running — an even better time to make goals than January — to do that. For now, just cast a wide vision across the cold landscape.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

While hot chocolate is largely seen in our modern day as a sweet treat for children, the ancient beverage has a surprisingly long and manly lineage. Kids clamor for a cup following a bout of snowman-making and sledding, but even when you’re grown, there’s nothing better than coming inside to a warm mug of this chocolatey elixir after a cold, wintry outing of skiing, snowshoeing, or even just shoveling.

Pre-made cocoa packets do the job fine, and you can’t beat the convenience of simply needing to mix it in a mug with heated milk or water. But once you try the homemade stuff, you’ll be hard-pressed to go back. Plus, it’s not nearly as hard as you might think. With just a few ingredients, which you likely already have on hand, you’ll be enjoying homemade cocoa in 10 minutes or less. 

Notes on Ingredients 

• Milk — All milk options (regular, lactose-free, non-dairy) work equally well for homemade hot cocoa. Use whatever it is that your family usually has on hand. Water also works, but the end product will be thinner and less rich. 
• Unsweetened Cocoa Powder — Dutch process and natural cocoa powder are interchangeable in this recipe (if it’s not labeled “Dutch process,” it’s natural), but I tend to recommend the former since it has lower acidity, giving it a smoother flavor overall. That said, getting your cocoa powder from Costco is a great option, especially in the winter, and they don’t usually have a Dutch process variety.
• Brown Sugar — Regular granulated sugar is also just fine, but brown sugar adds a little depth.  
• Vanilla Extract — Not strictly necessary, but a splash of vanilla makes for a great caramely, even marshmallow-like flavor. 
• Salt — A pinch of salt enhances every other ingredient and makes the whole thing come together.  

Homemade Hot Cocoa Recipe (Serves 4) 

Ingredients

• 3 cups milk 
• ⅓ cup cocoa powder 
• 2 Tbsp brown sugar 
• 1 tsp vanilla extract 
• Pinch of salt 

It’s worth noting that I talked to multiple moms about this recipe and they all said they “measure with their heart.” This is a very flexible recipe that’s hard to mess up. 

Directions

So easy a 7-year-old can do it.

1. Add 3 cups of milk to a medium saucepan over medium heat. 
2. Stir in cocoa powder, sugar, vanilla extract, and salt with a whisk.  
3. Continue whisking in order to evenly mix all the ingredients and ensure you don’t get clumping. 
4. Serve as soon as it’s heated through, just 5-10 minutes. Pro tip: serve kids first, when it’s just barely hot, then heat it a couple more minutes for the adults.
5. Add desired extras. Mini marshmallows and/or whipped cream always go over well. A splash of Amaretto elevates it even further for those 21+.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Each day, too, acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well. After running over a lot of different thoughts, pick out one to be digested thoroughly that day. —Seneca 

Today, we largely associate daily “devotionals” — short, reflection-spurring texts — with religious scriptures and faith-themed books which feature musings, challenges, and brief bits of inspiration for each day of the year. 

But as Seneca proves above, for millennia, devotional-type exercises have been engaged in not only for religious purposes, but for philosophical ones as well. The devotional habit is really for everyone, and is more important than ever in a time of uncertainty and existential stress.

If you’re part of a faith tradition, you probably already know of some popular devotional books to study. Below, we’ll highlight some spirit-edifying but secular devotional texts that men of every stripe may enjoy and find uplifting. 

First, however, let’s dig into why you should consider making devotional reading part of your daily routine, and how to get the most out of this practice. 

The Benefits of Daily Devotional Reading 

While the effort needed to sustain the devotional habit isn’t onerous — reading just a few pages of text for a few minutes each day — the benefits it will accrue to your life are significant: 

1. Maintains a deeper element in your life. When you were a teenager and in your twenties, perhaps you read religious and philosophical books with some frequency. Maybe you even had a daily devotional practice back then. You thought big thoughts. You pondered big questions. But then you got a real job, and got married, and had kids. And that soulful reading and reflection dropped out of your life. You started living on the surface of things, metaphorically “paycheck to paycheck,” in that your thoughts only extended to taking care of life’s basic necessities from one day to the next.

A daily devotional practice restores a more existentially profound element to your life, so that you don’t lose track of life’s deeper dimensions amidst the more mundane stresses and urgencies of day-to-day living.

2. Keeps your focus on the most important things. While we like to take a kind of “one-and-done” approach to life’s great truths — believing that once you learn and know something, you never have to think about it again — the reality is that we need constant, daily reminders of who we want to be. Daily devotionals keep your most important values at the forefront of your mind, where they can actively influence your decisions. 

3. Injects a bit of ritual into your day. The power of ritual is undeniable, especially in a chaotic world. There are a number of ways to add spirit-centering structure to your routine; a daily devotional reading is one of the most powerful. 

Some Guidelines for Your Daily Devotionals 

1. Morning is best. You can do your devotional time whenever it works for you. But, there’s a case to be made for scheduling it for the a.m.

For a lot of people, the morning starts with a handful of stressful emails or some social media/newsy doomscrolling. But given that how you start the day will influence your mindset during the rest of it, it’s hugely beneficial to kick things off with something that’s more uplifting than such mind-muddling noise.

Reading a devotional doesn’t have to be the very first thing you do after getting out of bed; if you need a shower and a cup of coffee right after rising, that’s just fine. But make it happen before getting into the real meat of your day — whether that’s before anyone is awake and the house is quiet, or in the first few minutes that you sit down to your desk for your workday (if your job allows for that sort of thing). A morning devotional practice gets your whole day off on the right foot, centering your soul before you wade into the weeds of “worldly” cares and providing edifying grist to chew on in the hours to come.

2. Write down something to think about. What’s the benefit of doing intentional morning readings if the thoughts it provokes just leave your head the minute something stressful encroaches on your day? By writing down a note or quote, you’re further cementing these insights into your consciousness, and even more so when you regularly return to your notebook/journal throughout the course of the day (to add additional thoughts/review past musings) or the next morning. 

3. Consider reading it aloud. Much poetry was intentionally written to be read aloud, and prose can benefit from oral recitation as well. Abraham Lincoln preferred this practice, observing: “When I read aloud two senses catch the idea; first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I can remember it better.” In addition to writing it down, this is another way that powerful words can lodge themselves in your memory. 

4. Don’t fret if you miss a day. Don’t beat yourself up about missing days of devotional reading; life’s too short for that crap. Cut yourself some slack and just move on ahead the next day. 

You can find more tips for deeper spiritual study here.

10 Ideas for Daily Devotionals

Some books are specifically structured for devotional reading; that is, they’re made up of short entries, meant to be read one day at a time, often over the course of a year.

But other kinds of books, even if they’re not explicitly designed for devotional reading, can work too. Anything with short chapters or easily digestible sections that move your spirit can be used for the purpose. Essays, poetry, letter collections, even some of the great novels work well. 

Below we offer 10 recommendations of non-religious texts that can serve as worthy reflection-generating fodder for a more edifying daily routine: 

Manvotionals by Brett and Kate McKay

The second Art of Manliness book, published in 2011, is a collection of philosophy, self-improvement, and wisdom texts, ranging from Aristotle to the success books of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the speeches and writings of Theodore Roosevelt. The myriad poems, quotes, and essays contained within — centered around 7 primary virtues — are designed to inspire men in particular to cultivate the highest ideals of character and live a truly flourishing life. You won’t always be familiar with the authors of the ideas, but you’ll always be vigorously renewed in your energy for the day’s tasks. 

Meditations on the Wisdom of Action by Kyle Eschenroeder 

In 116 short, pithy, gut-punchingly inspiring chapters, Kyle Eschenroeder expounds on the meaning of action and what it looks like in our modern world. Kyle possesses the soul of a philosopher in the body of an entrepreneur. If philosophy doesn’t lead to action — to answering the question of how to better live this thing we call life — what good is it, really? In this book, Kyle takes the best action-oriented philosophical nuggets from a wide variety of authors and luminaries and riffs on them to create his own unique set of proverbs and calls to . . . action. Supping daily from this book will continually push you to turn your abstract intentions into concrete realities. 

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

In The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday grabs an inspiring Stoic quote for each day and adds his own ideas and questions to ponder on and use as grist for becoming a better person. It’s a great collection, though I must mention that the original sources also lend themselves quite well to daily reading: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, Epictetus’ writings, etc. Regardless of the source, Stoic philosophy will leave you better prepared to meet the day, and its attendant, inevitable annoyances, with patience and perspective.  

In general, philosophy is a great fount of daily devotional reading. Ancient wisdom is often easier to digest in small chunks than en masse. 

Essays of Montaigne

Brett has called Montaigne the first blogger; it’s an astute observation about a man whose 107 essays from the late 16th century cover a range of topics from the philosophical (“On sadness,” “On the length of life,” “On prayer”) to the more practical and mundane (“On smells,” “On drunkenness”). Even within the essays, Montaigne goes from subject to subject, eventually coming back to the titled topic . . . most of the time. He displays the full range of human feeling, logic, irrationality, and hypocrisy, which is exactly what makes his essays so interesting. He’s clearly processing ideas while writing them, and going back and forth between various conclusions. You’re guaranteed to find something to think about within each chapter. The essays average about 12 pages, making them easily digestible at the pace of one per day.  

A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy 

While Tolstoy is deservedly most well known for his epic, door-stopping novels, his daily reader, A Calendar of Wisdom, should get some love too. Compiled over the course of about 15 years, Tolstoy heavily researched this collection of quotes, proverbs, and sayings which spans religious traditions and schools of philosophy. Though a deeply Christian man, Tolstoy understood that great ideas which resonated within the soul could come from anywhere. Organized by subject and with an entry for each day (using 3-4 quotes/sayings plus a short thought from Tolstoy), the compiler and author himself used it for a good portion of his life.

War and Peace, often listed as the greatest novel ever written, is also particularly well-suited to daily reading over the course of a year, given its 361 short chapters.

The Secrets to Power, Mastery, and Truth: The Best of William George Jordan

This anthology contains the very best personal development essays of Gilded Age writer William George Jordan. All of the chapters are short and certainly devotional in nature; they’re rich in incisive, edifying insights, including vivid metaphors that help the reader see his life through a transformative lens. The real benefit of Jordan’s work is that you can tell he was pushing back against the individualistic, get-rich attitude of his era and fought to instill in folks the less flashy, but more meaningful values of compassion, service, honesty, forgiveness, and the value of a daily fresh start. 

Walt Whitman’s Poems

Poetry, in general, is a great way to consume a bit of daily wisdom and beauty; sometimes the most transformative insights are those that waft through your mind indirectly, rather than being hammered home head-on. It can be an intimidating genre to dive into, though. Admittedly, I don’t really get most poetry, and it often leaves me feeling more confused than inspired. There are a few exceptions, in my opinion, which resonate with just about anyone: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and most powerfully, for me, Walt Whitman. His soul-stirring poems capture the spirit and vigor of the American ideal and experience better than anything I’ve ever read, and each poem finds some line or two worth remembering and chewing on — “I contain multitudes,” “Be curious not judgmental,” “Let your soul stand cool and composed,” etc. 

The Works of Thoreau and Emerson

Thoreau and Emerson, those great American transcendentalists, are in the same vein of thought as Whitman, but with more concrete ideas and nuggets of wisdom than is to be found in the latter’s poems. Self-reliance, nature and the outdoors, self-improvement, philosophy — these themes and more abound in the pages of these great thinkers’ journals, letters, essays, and other written works. Though full of spirit and calls to transcendence, they’re never opaquely mystical nor dogmatic, and have spoken to the deepest cores of human longing and our perpetual search for meaning for the last 150+ years. Nearly all their content is suited for daily reading, but Jim Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, recommends three in particular for this devotional purpose: The Spiritual Emerson, First We Read Then We Write by the late Robert Richardson, and The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. I might also add The Daily Henry David Thoreau, compiled by biographer Laura Dassow Walls.   

Calling It a Day by Robert Larranaga

If you’re someone who struggles with being a workaholic, or perhaps, in our work-from-home era, the delicate task of balancing work time and home/spouse/kid time, Robert Larranaga’s daily meditations draw from both spiritual principles and sound business ideas in order to give readers the permission they need to put down their phone or laptop. As hard as it is for some men to admit, more work does not necessarily equate to better work. This is a book that helps to remind you of that on a daily basis. 

On the Threshold of Transformation by Richard Rohr 

Franciscan friar Richard Rohr has a number of daily meditation works (as well as a great daily email), but by far the best of the bunch is his collection aimed specifically at men. While he admits coming from a Judeo-Christian tradition, he acknowledges that there are other viewpoints and doesn’t lean solely on Christian ideas in this set of daily meditations. The first line of Day 1 really sets the tone: “At some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky journey.” Each day, after a couple paragraphs of a virile main idea, Rohr asks a simple question that’s sure to stir up big questions and honest, if scary, reflections. This book is my favorite title on this list. 

Combine any number of these books, use them alongside a daily journaling practice, read them in communion with loved ones or friends — wherever your devotional practice takes you, may it serve to challenge, enlighten, refreshen, and inspire. 

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in November 2020.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.