Wow. My weekend reading was Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. I can’t remember who recommended it to me but it was on my Kindle and my random next-book-to-read selection process brought it up. When I finished it a few minutes ago, I only had one word for it – “wow.” I knew a little about Thurgood Marshall, such as he was instrumental in the NAACP, desegregation, and was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. But that’s about it.

Yesterday I talked briefly about taking a break from media. However, I wasn’t precise, as the one thing I read each week is the New York Times Sunday paper. When Amy and I lived in Boston we started reading it every Sunday morning and continued whenever we travelled. Several years ago I started having it delivered to our house on Sunday morning and it is a delightful Sunday morning ritual for us.

After the election, I took a break from social media. Prior to this election cycle I rarely read online news and almost never watched news on TV, so that was easy to stop as well. I needed some emotional distance from the election and decided I wanted some intellectual distance as well. So, I went back to writing and reading books during all the time that I had previously occupied myself with what passes in 2016 for real time news and current events.

Today’s #GivingThanks is to David Cohen, one of the founders and co-CEO of Techstars. If David has done something that has touched your life is a positive way and you want to give thanks to him, make a donation online to the Techstars Foundation. I met David on one of my random days in 2006. I can’t remember who introduced us, but David reminds me that it took him four months to get a meeting with me. He knew he had 15 minutes so he got right down to it as is his nature. We were in my old Superior office (the one about the liquor store where I met Lucy Sanders and so many other great people for the first time.) We said hello, David introduced himself to me, and we sat down. David then slid something across the table and sat silently while I read it.

Today’s #GivingThanks post is for my dear friend Jerry Colonna. When I make a list of non-family members and non-partners who I would want to be stranded on a desert island with, Jerry is at the top of the list. Before I tell a story, if you want to participate in #GivingThanks to Jerry, please make a donation to Naropa University where Jerry is the chair of the board. I was going to try to create some kind of complicated matching donation scheme since I hadn’t made a gift to Naropa yet this year but I decided to just gift them $10,000 (which I just did now through the website) so I encourage you to support at any level if you want to participate in my not-so-complicated match.

Next up in my #GivingThanks series – in appreciation for people during Thanksgiving who have had a profound impact on me – is Lucy Sanders, the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). Unlike the last post about the Jason Mendelson Entrepreneurial Award Fund, I’m not going to bury the lede – go here if you’d like to make a financial gift to NCWIT as part of #GivingThanks.

Thanksgiving is a pensive time for me. The world slows down a little as it gets ready for the mad dash to the end of the year. Four day weekends are rare in the United States and even though the retail world is extremely busy on Friday, my Thanksgiving has a very different tempo as the email slows to a crawl, the calendar becomes empty, and Amy and I generally have a lot of hanging out time.

Amazon is setting up Kindle bookshelves for some people, including me. If you want to see some of my favorite books from 2016 that I read on my Kindle, take a look at my Feld Thoughts 2016 Books. I log all the books I read (Kindle or physical) on my Goodreads page. Interestingly, Goodreads is also owned by Amazon. It’ll be fun to see if / how they ultimately integrate all this stuff.

Greg Avery recently wrote a detailed story in the Denver Business Journal of the origin story of Techstars a decade ago. It’s unfortunately paywalled but comes with a video. For all of you who have participated in or supported Techstars to date, thank you!