Wouldn’t it be nice if book reviewers wrote what they really thought instead of what they decided they’d better say after figuring out which way the wind is blowing?

My son and I are sorting through the Big Issues

I’m a huge fan of Leuchtturm notebooks, but I’m a little concerned about their pricing.

I really despise doing self-promotion but this from @robinsloan is so kind it brings tears to my eyes.

Things could change, of course, but right now Baylor’s coronavirus dashboard is looking pretty good. This is completely due to our students acting intelligently and responsibly. I am really proud of them.

Arsenal: top of table. Spurs: bottom of table.* ⚽️

* close enough

Attica Locke: “My books often start with a small crime that is masking a much larger, more dangerous one in terms of politics and money. This, in my opinion, is how we ought to consider a great deal of crime. George Floyd loses his life over allegedly passing a counterfeit bill. Eric Garner for ‘illegally’ selling cigarettes. And all the while, there are any number of larger moral crimes that set either one of them on a petty crime path. That never should have cost them their lives. Almost certainly, some of those moral or literal crimes turn on land use and property – whether it is using property taxes to fund schools, so that poor neighbourhoods have schools with fewer resources, or how police funding gets apportioned by neighbourhood and the history of redlining and banks not offering business or home loans in African American areas, thus suppressing economic growth. We are often quick to bring down the hammer on street crimes – men and women trying to survive – while larger corporate and political criminals get away with murder, figuratively and literally. At the heart of it, this is why I write the books I write: I am looking for the crime behind the crime.”

John Warner: “It is distressing to see the relationship between institutions and students being reduced to one centered on surveillance, control and punishment. These are not values we should associate with learning.”

David Brooks: “This is not an intellectual stupidity. I imagine Trump’s I.Q. is fine. It is a moral and emotional stupidity. He blunders so often and so badly because he has a narcissist’s inability to get inside the hearts and minds of other people. It’s a stupidity that in almost pure clinical form, flows out of his inability to feel, a stupidity of the heart.”

I have written several times in praise of Ed Yong’s work on the coronavirus crisis, and I’ll keep doing it, because he is a hero and titan among science journalists. Here’s the latest evidence.

Note to self: never use “Sign In with Apple” again.

Fascinating: “Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists at Georgetown University.”

Just a reminder: we live in a world in which a summary of recent news can reasonably include the phrase “an explosive gender-reveal device.”

You know what’s wrong with this country? Boban is not eligible to run for President.

This is so cool from my buddy Austin Kleon.

It’s pub day!

Yet more evidence that when Big Sur arrives it’s probably gonna be a mess.

Chris Arnade: “Our elites misunderstand work, and how most people deal with work, so they assume something must be wrong with the people who want to live a life without being dedicated to building a resume, and then writing a poem, or singing a song, or whatever, about their job or the dignity of work. Or something is wrong with our public policy when it doesn’t turn everyone into the happiest most efficient worker they could be.”

Tomorrow!

Talking for 90 minutes at a time through a mask is absolutely exhausting, for me at least. I don’t feel light-headed, as some people claim to do, and maybe there’s no diminishment of oxygen uptake – studies seem to vary about that – but I just get worn out from the extra effort of breathing through the damn thing. At the end of a class I’m sweating like mad (even in Texas A/C!) and feel like I’ve just run a 5K.

There is absolutely no reason why a review of a biography of John F Kennedy should mention Donald Trump at all, let alone make him the co-subject of the review.

I turned off autocorrect on iOS and I recommend that to you all. My own errors are never as egregious as the errors that autocorrect forces upon me.

I just want to say, for the record, that NBA referees are genuinely terrible at their job. Can anything be done to improve this situation? 🏀