That story reminds me that my old friend Ken Myers, who has interviewed thousands of people in his time, started out in radio as a student at the University of Maryland, where the very first person he ever interviewed was Johnny Cash.ย 

TIL that when, in 1935, Gertrude Stein did a book tour in support of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she visited the University of Texas and was interviewed by a student journalist named Walter Cronkite. ย 

Nikolai Ge, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1882)ย 

The first book published by Random House was a fine-art edition of Voltaireโ€™s Candide, illustrated by Rockwell Kent (who also designed the companyโ€™s famous logo).

I hate VAR so, so much. โšฝ๏ธ

The value of a papal encyclical โ€” certainly for non-Catholics and maybe even for Catholics โ€” stems not from the quality of the arguments it makes but rather from the quality of the responses it provokes. Leah Libresco Sargeantโ€™s new piece is an excellent example.

I continue to be bemused by the sheer number of these AI-generated book-promotion scams โ€” I get them every day. Most of them never make it to my inbox, which speaks well for current spam-filtering software, because they look more legit than spam typically does. This too shall pass, and I will be glad when it does.ย 

Dorothy L. Sayers: Works and Days is now available for pre-order at Amazon as well as the OUP website. (Itโ€™s not yet on bookshop.org.) And the pub date has been moved up to September 28!ย 

Robin Sloan:

Basically, this is one of those designs that might not totally โ€œworkโ€, but the attempt is so vital and so valiant that it punches through the dimension of merely โ€œworkingโ€ or โ€œnot workingโ€ into some other space. Weโ€™re never going to bust out of the prison of the mobile-optimized, single-column scroll if we donโ€™t try stuff like this.ย 

Iโ€™m so glad Robin linked to this site, which seems to have been made by people who never noticed that the World Wide Web has been taken over by malicious greedy parasite-platforms, but instead just kept experimenting with HTML and CSS in much the same spirit that drove people to customize their MySpace pages back in the day. Maybe in my retirement Iโ€™ll become a CSS ninja and obsess over the designs of the ayjay.org world, the way some dudes my age obsessively build scale models of World War 2 fighter planes.ย