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. 

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).

How Cecil B. DeMille brought the Bible to American moviegoers.

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! 

Robin Sloan:

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? ⚽️

The current location of Penguin Random House:  Where Random House’s offices were located before a simple publishing house became a vast conglomerate: 

Daring Fireball: It’s one thing for Apple to force all of its own app icons into the same identical shape. That would be bad enough, because Apple’s own Mac apps are numerous and popular, and as the platform owner Apple necessarily sets the direction that many third-party a...

WSJ:

American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.

I’m not sure Europe/Canada/etc. have the determination required to become a third nexus of technological power, but I am hoping that they get there. It will be better for all concerned. 

Currently reading: Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built by Gayle Feldman. Gonna be working on this one for a while. 📚

I asked for a latte from Starbucks but when I got home discovered that they had given me a mocha. So with every sip I taste not the sweetness of chocolate syrup but the bitterness of thwarted desire.

(it is funny, and telling, that in the current media environment a book published in 2011 may as well have been published in 1611.)

Here’s an interview about renewing the pleasure of reading in an age of distraction. Someone ought to write a book about that. Oh wait.

Currently listening: the Vince Guaraldi Trio, Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus. Righteous. 🎵

“I am 100% sure I am not a genius, but at the same time, I am 100% sure I am not a fool.” — Carlo Ancelotti. I’m thinking of adopting this as my motto. 

Still slightly vibrating from that 🇦🇷 - 🇨🇻 match last night — one of the best I’ve ever seen. Cape Verde were magnificent: organized, disciplined, and utterly fearless. They came not to cower in a low block but to defend aggressively and take their chances. Winderful stuff. ⚽️ 

To the tune of “Gilligan’s Island”:

Now sit right down and you’ll hear a tale
A tale of a rampant seal
Who’s damaging this coastal town
A hooligan named Neil

(via Adam Roberts)

In which I make a mighty vow: I pledge my blogging, my linking, and my sacred honour to the open web.

A few years ago I decided to stop intervening in intra-Christian debates. I am not sure whether I regret having been involved in them, but certainly nothing I wrote had any effect whatever on the course of events, so the only good my writing ever did was to clarify my own th...

BTW, the two CBC documentaries on Gould that I mention in that essay are available on YouTube: Glenn Gould: Off the Record and Glenn Gould: On the Record. They’re fascinating.

The Fading Promise of Higher Education is the theme of this excellent new issue of the Hedgehog Review. I don’t have anything in the issue on that important theme, but I did write a reflection on hearing Glenn Gould — on the 70th anniversary of his breakthrough recording of the Goldberg Variations.

The Economist’s obituary for Alan Greenspan is a small masterpiece.

Confluence

I think, given his recent discovery of the possibilities of Casual Fashion, Poch’s personal theme song should be “Sharp Dressed Man.”

I have been assuming all along that he will leave the USMNT at the end of this tournament, and I still think that’s the way to bet, but the fanbase has fallen in love with him and he’s obviously reciprocating. I laughed out loud watching him sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” after the match. It wouldn’t shock me now if he stayed on — and that would be great, because he has these guys playing assertive, confident, tactically imaginative football. I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had watching the USMNT.

🇺🇸⚽️