Alan Jacobs


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Wes Anderson: “If you work with people at different ages and you’re giving them a lot to do, you can see how it really is so much easier when you’re young: On ‘Moonrise Kingdom,’ we had a lot of people who were 12 and they knew every word of the whole script. It was like we had 11 script supervisors on set.”

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Today Angus took his first selfie (with my son). We’re all so proud.

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If you’re a Chicagoan, and probably only if you’re a Chicagoan, you’ll appreciate Anders Erickson’s video on Malört — a liqueur that John Hodgman quite accurately describes as tasting like “pencil shavings and heartbreak.”

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A little slice of the typographical history of New York City

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SO GLAD to see that Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz is out in the UK. I had the privilege of reading drafts, one chapter at a time, and even in that form found it utterly thrilling. Everyone should read it!

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I posted a small piece of autobiography from a book I wrote 15 years ago.

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If I could make one rule change

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This is gonna take a while. Currently reading: Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann 📚

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Good to see this warning from Barney Ronay. A prediction: If Arteta doesn’t significantly reduce Saka’s workload, he’ll be finished as a top player by age 25. It’ll be Jack Wilshere all over again.

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A report from Swedish schools: “As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills.”

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Jesus is “the lens in the dark box.”

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Charlie Warzel: “Using Google once felt like magic, and now it’s more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers.”

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My iPhone: updated, but the new StandBy feature doesn’t work. My Apple Watch: won’t update, which is especially unfortunate because it has ceased to connect to cellular networks. My Mac: since installing Ventura last year, dark mode doesn’t work. Photos: takes somewhere between 2 and 5 days to sync my library across devices. So I’m feeling real good about Apple software quality these days.

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Legitimate WHOA: Archeologists discover a wooden structure that’s half a million years old.

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Note to makers of Spelling Bee: INANITION, MONITION, and TITIVATION are all English words and ought to be on your list. Thank you for attending to this urgent matter.

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I don’t understand how Eric Hoel can say that Substack isn’t a walled garden when large chunks of it are behind a paywall. That’s kinda the definition of an online walled garden, isn’t it?

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Freddie deBoer: “Sometimes I think the great American rite of passage is when you go from a youth full of Ritalin to an adulthood full of Xanax. All that yoga and relaxation tea and time spent grinding on a meditation app, it all looks transparently like an aftershock from a culture that makes aspiration itself that which is most aspired to, a class of strivers striving to strive, clawing up the hill of achievement with bloody elbows. It ain’t healthy. Maybe it’s time to kill the thing off at the root?”

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I wrote about Truffaut’s The Wild Child.

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Angus does love cleaning the faces of his family. Also any other faces.

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Terry Halliday: “In 2008 or 2009, at an early stage of an extensive research program on criminal defense lawyers in China, I was asked a surprising question. Fu Hualing, an academic authority on China’s rights advocacy and defense lawyers, asked: Did I know that a disproportionate number of China’s leading rights lawyers were Christians? He guessed about 40 percent.”

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The Urban Sketchers website is really cool. This drawing is by Ilaria Petrussa.