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.
Nikolai Ge, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1882)
The first book published by Random House was a fine-art edition of Voltaire’s Candide, illustrated by Rockwell Kent (who also designed the company’s famous logo).
I hate VAR so, so much. ⚽️
The value of a papal encyclical — certainly for non-Catholics and maybe even for Catholics — stems not from the quality of the arguments it makes but rather from the quality of the responses it provokes. Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new piece is an excellent example.
I continue to be bemused by the sheer number of these AI-generated book-promotion scams — 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.
Dorothy L. Sayers: Works and Days is now available for pre-order at Amazon as well as the OUP website. (It’s not yet on bookshop.org.) And the pub date has been moved up to September 28!
Basically, this is one of those designs that might not totally “work”, but the attempt is so vital and so valiant that it punches through the dimension of merely “working” or “not working” into some other space. We’re never going to bust out of the prison of the mobile-optimized, single-column scroll if we don’t try stuff like this.
I’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 I’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.
The USMNT completely unready for this game. I haven’t seen them like this the whole tournament. They are lethargic and confused. How is this possible?
Second half update: I could understand nerves, but this listlessness is inexplicable to me. I’m not sure these guys are even breaking a sweat. Belgium came ready to play, the USMNT came unready to do anything. It’s been a shocker. ⚽️