Daniel McGregor

Francis Young: Religions are as significant for what they leave unmapped and open to the imagination in the supernatural world as for what they rule on definitively – and religions are often pretty bad at drawing definitive conclusions beyond their core tenets. So I don’t s...

An elegant snuffbox 

Tom Stafford:

I like to think that the imaginary crowd has a similar salutary effect on more complex thoughts. The audience does more than just make me imagine I might be wrong. It invites me to consider, from the diverse perspective of the audience members, the multiple dimensions along which I might be wrong.

Phenomena like these mean that thinking is never really a solitary activity. It is fundamentally social. Even when we are talking to ourselves we are using the socially orientated mechanisms of language to externalise our thoughts and feed them back “into” our minds. 

Someone should write a book about this idea that thinking is “fundamentally social”! Oh wait. 

I tried to log in to Bluesky the other day and was told that, because I live in Texas, I have to verify my age through some process Bluesky does not explain, though it is clear that the process involves some third-party site that might or might not be a reliable custodian of … well, of whatever information it demands. The page also said that if I don’t want to verify my age I can delete my Bluesky account. In the extremely vague circumstances that seemed the best option. 

What is the very pinnacle of American music? I can answer that question: it’s this. 

• Possibly Richard Rodgers’s most gorgeous melody (which is saying a great deal)
• Lorenz Hart’s masterpiece of a lyric, at once funny and heartbreaking 
• The elegant and tasteful arrangement by Buddy Bregman 
• And a vocal performance to die for by the incomparable Ella  

There’s nothing to match it. 

Here is the first in a series of four essays on the Second World War: Why has it been so central to the American imagination for so long? And how much longer will that centrality last?

Freddie on “Our Poptimist Dystopia":

Aesthetic hierarchy of any kind has become the last obscenity, the one judgment we’re no longer permitted to make, because to say that one thing is better than another is to admit that better exists. And if better exists out there, in the world of songs and books and movies, then it exists out here for us too, in the world of our lives, and that way lies the intolerable thought that we might have gone too easy on ourselves. Anti-elitism is the snobbery of those who have decided that the glory of great art is not worth bearing the thought that someone else might have better taste than we do. So we haven’t democratized taste; we abolished it so no one ever has to come in second, so that no one ever must face the implied judgment of other people’s preferences.

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. ⚽️