A Mongol sighting
In Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky.
Orange Crate Art
Van Dyke Parks and Verónica Valerio
Marco Werman talks with Van Dyke Parks and Verónica Valerio about their new album, Van Dyke Parks Orchestrates Verónica Valerio: Only in America.
Clip art and rocks
A Zippy panel.
Amateurs
From Chaplin’s Limelight: “That’s all any of us are — amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.”
Twelve movies
Two with Carole Lombard and ten more.
Bad news, good news
People are playing bingo at the VFW, indoors, no masks, sitting side by side on both sides of long tables. And “A study finds that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could offer protection for years.”
Orange Crate Art: Now and Then, a podcast
A new podcast, from historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman: Now and Then. As the title suggests, their conversation puts past and present together.
Britney and Brian
An opinion piece by Helaine Olen in The Washington Post: “What Britney Spears has endured would not have happened to a male star.” A glaring counter-example would be Brian Wilson.
Money and time
A college president, staff, and buying back time.
The rest is silence, I hope
No sound on C-SPAN for Donald Trump’s rally in Wellington, Ohio.
Today’s Newsday Saturday
“Rogues on the road.”
Comics intertextuality
Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes.
Sentenced
Two hundred and seventy months, or twenty-two and a half years. That’s Derek Chauvin’s sentence.
“An old picture postcard”
A passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
Recently updated
Chicken bones and turkey joints.
iA Writer
Did I mention that I should have started using Markdown years ago?
“America’s flavourite candy”
Chicken Bones. Really.
Nuts in Illinois
My representative in Congress is hosting another member of Congress, the xenophobic space-laser Q lady, at a July fund-raising event in a nearby city.
No Compromise, a podcast series
No Compromise is a podcast series from NPR, and winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting.
“The oats had vanished at last”
A passage from Adalbert Stifter’s Motley Stones.
Subway map debate
From Gothamist: “The Secret History Of The Great Subway Map Debate Of 1978 Revealed.” The debate is the subject of a new book, The New York Subway Map Debate, edited by Gary Hustwit
“Completely papered over”
Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868) is a master of extended and sometimes exceedingly strange description.
How to improve writing (no. 93)
As I wrote in no. 75, “Every time I look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, I end up rewriting one or more sentences.” And so it is today.
Chart fail
Charts from Axios.
More Robert Walser
Little Snow Landscape collects sixty-nine short prose pieces written between 1905 and 1933. That’s all anyone who already knows Robert Walser’s writing in translation needs to know about this book: more Walser.
Father’s Day
My dad, not yet a dad, in Florida, 1954.
Today’s Newsday Saturday
“Post stuff.”
On Juneteenth
Eugene Robinson, writing in The Washington Post: “Making Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day news of emancipation finally reached enslaved people in Galveston, Tex., a national holiday is a victory. But it is a hollow one at a moment when the political party that won the Civil War and made that freedom a permanent reality is now moving heaven and earth to keep African Americans from voting.”
No mask
I switched back to my older (and younger) sidebar picture this afternoon.
Mac keyboard shortcuts
From David Sparks: twenty-five Mac keyboard shortcuts for greater productivity.