I love this kind of thing — I regularly play a version of this game with my students:

The leader of the brass section on All You Need Is Love was a 41 year old Professor at the Royal College of Music called David Mason. In 1958, Mason had played the flugelhorn at the premiere of Vaughan Williams’ 9th Symphony, in the presence of the composer himself. Williams was at that time 85 years old, and died three weeks later. For the first ten years of his life, he had known his great-uncle, Charles Darwin. So we can go from Charles Darwin to John Lennon in just three handshakes. Just as remarkably, Paul McCartney once called in on Bertrand Russell, who lived down the road from him. Russell had enjoyed childhood meetings with William Gladstone, who himself used to breakfast with the elderly William Wordsworth. So it’s “Blackbird’ to “Daffodils” in three encounters.

Though I have automatic updates on and there are no available updates anyway, I am getting these modal prompts every two or three minutes on my iPhone and iPad, which renders both of them nearly unusable. Fun!

From Baylor’s covid tracking page. My students have been amazing: their consistency in doing the right thing, their cheerfulness — I am so proud of them. But the coming weeks will be a challenge. I’ll be praying that we rise to that challenge.

This conversation between Tim DeChristopher and Wendell Berry is absolutely fascinating, in large part because of the meaningful and productive disagreement in it.

So what did I do before I learned to begin most of my sentences with “So”?

Bless their sweet, sweet hearts. And yeah, I’m tearing up a bit.

Currently reading: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚

Texas Monthly on the extraordinary variety of ways the state’s political leaders try to discourage voting.

Something I can never get over: the Beatles went from “Love Me Do” to “Tomorrow Never Knows” in three-and-a-half years.

Very excited to get this little treasure from my dear friend Tim Larsen!

When acorn woodpeckers fight over territory, other acorn woodpeckers leave their own granaries to watch, which means that they’re exactly like human beings on Twitter.

So far, Bielsa in the Premier League has been just as much fun as we had hoped it would be, which is saying quite a lot. ⚽️

“Marcus Rashford appears to have set up an alternative government.”

Currently reading: The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek 📚

Looking at the marvelous photos in this Austin Mann review of the iPhone 12 Pro, I am painfully reminded of how poor a photographer I am. 😞

One of my sacred places, the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore at the University of Chicago, is in real danger of being shut down. They have a GoFundMe page. If you could help — or know someone who might, to whom you could send the link — the Gods of Reading will smile upon you. 📚 📖

Currently reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot 📚

Currently reading: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky 📚