I think, given his recent discovery of the possibilities of Casual Fashion, Poch’s personal theme song should be “Sharp Dressed Man.”

I have been assuming all along that he will leave the USMNT at the end of this tournament, and I still think that’s the way to bet, but the fanbase has fallen in love with him and he’s obviously reciprocating. I laughed out loud watching him sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” after the match. It wouldn’t shock me now if he stayed on โ€” and that would be great, because he has these guys playing assertive, confident, tactically imaginative football. I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had watching the USMNT.

๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธโšฝ๏ธ

If I still lived in northern Illinois I would surely cheer for ๐Ÿด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ฅ๓ ฎ๓ ง๓ ฟ against ๐Ÿ‡ฒ๐Ÿ‡ฝ โ€” but here in central Texas I think the power of neighborliness will shift my allegiance. Sunday will tell. Gonna be FUN.

Iโ€™ve updated my home page with a link to OUPโ€™s page for my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, now scheduled for publication on 28 November. Iโ€™ll add other options for pre-order as they become available. I had a lot of fun writing this and I think youโ€™ll enjoy it also. Iโ€™m pleased that, in a series whose books average about sixty bucks each, OUP priced this one for a broader readership.ย 

In which I write about the greatness of Baird Whitlock and the power of the movies.ย 

There will be a series of these in the coming weeks (during which Iโ€™ll have little time to write): posts adapted from a book proposal that neither my agent nor any editor I talked to was interested in. Maybe I should use my big blog exclusively to post rejected book proposals. I have several. It looks like Iโ€™ll be going to my grave not having written any of the books I had most hoped to write โ€” because if I want to do it, the rest of the world is indifferent to it. This is the unbreakable rule.ย 

Here’s a post on why an argument about how humanists’ defenses of the humanities are bad is itself a worse argument than the ones it critiques. I’m gonna have to write a follow-up to this but … not soon.

Substackโ€™s decision to turn itself into a social network has been successful in at least one sense: With a few exceptions (Austin Kleon for instance), Substackers only link and respond to other Substackers. For people deeply invested in that platform, Substack is the internet. Theyโ€™re living in a tightly constrained world that they think is vast and open.ย