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.”
Today Angus took his first selfie (with my son). We’re all so proud.
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.”
A little slice of the typographical history of New York City
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!
I posted a small piece of autobiography from a book I wrote 15 years ago.
If I could make one rule change
- to American football, it would be: eliminate kicking (punts & field goals)
- to NBA basketball, it would be: eliminate time outs
- to top-level soccer, it would be: eliminate VAR
This is gonna take a while. Currently reading: Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann 📚
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.
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.”
Jesus is “the lens in the dark box.”
Charlie Warzel: “Using Google once felt like magic, and now it’s more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers.”
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.
Legitimate WHOA: Archeologists discover a wooden structure that’s half a million years old.
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.
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?
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?”
Angus does love cleaning the faces of his family. Also any other faces.
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.”
The Urban Sketchers website is really cool. This drawing is by Ilaria Petrussa.
