Posts tagged “authors”
- Shrinking (Apple TV+) is probably the best show on TV right now. Jason Segal and Jessica Williams are phenomenal in it and — as impossible as it is to believe — it might be the best work Harrison Ford has ever done on screen. The show was co-created by Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) and the theme song is Frightening Fishes by Tom Howe & Benjamin Gibbard.
- Engineers found a bottle with a 132-year-old message deep inside the walls of a lighthouse in the south of Scotland. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
- Is there anything better than college football bowl season?
- ProPublica has an online tool that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial, which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases. – via @broingerm (threads / bluesky)
Rare baseball stats are my jam. When I was an early teen I watched Roger Clemens mow down sixteen Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park and was bored out of my mind. I wish I’d appreciated the feat as much as I did the mini batting helmet ice cream. (I still have the helmet.) It’s wild that there have been fewer 20-K games than perfect games.- On Sunday, December 8, 2024 — in a loss to the Los Angeles Rams — Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills had the best fantasy football performance ever by a QB. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
- Over 21 months, Taylor Swift‘s culture-dominating Eras Tour brought in $2B, more than double the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
- Staffers at roughly 600 booksellers are receiving $500 holiday bonuses from James Patterson, the bestselling novelist who has been awarding independent store employees since 2015. – via @abcnews
- You can find something for everyone in The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide.
- A man in Canada’s far north leapt on to a polar bear to protect his wife from being mauled, police say. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
- I love this quote: “[Software bugs] are a lot like prime numbers. There are always more, but after you find the first couple billion they do thin out quite a bit.” – via @philcrissman (threads / bluesky)
- It’s a good idea to occasionally revisit the story of Roger and Elaine.
- Mark Ruffalo sounds like the name a dog would give if he was pretending to be a man. – via @the.yael
- Need to buy something for someone you can’t stand? Check out My Heinous Gift Guide for Sworn Enemies. And note that you don’t actually have to stay on Twitter. – both via Laura Olin (threads / bluesky)
Jonathan Edward Durham is a good follow on threads and/or bluesky.- Your Local Epidemiologist is a super informative newsletter that translates complicated health news, especially about viruses and colds.
- 19 Useful Mac Startup Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know
- What do you call a pig that does karate? A pork chop! – via 172 Corny Jokes To Tell To Kids You Love
Today is the birthday of T.S. Eliot, born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888. At the age of 27, he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), and at 34, wrote “The Waste Land” (1922). At the height of his career, when he was writing poetry, plays, and literary criticism, and serving as director of the British publisher Faber & Faber, he was the 20th century’s single most influential writer. He was dry and enigmatic, and he spoke very, very slowly. Yet, he loved the Marx Brothers and was said to harbor a weakness for squirting buttonholes and exploding cigars. Somebody once said to Eliot that most editors are failed writers. Eliot said: “Yes. So are most writers.”
via The Writer’s Almanac
Would You Eat Them in a Boat?
Happy birthday, Theodor Geisel!
On Loving Sports
“Almost winning is almost the best. But you’ve got to win once in a while.”
1984
The future is always closer than you think.
We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif — books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined — to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can’t imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you’d longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is.
Louise Erdrich
On Pride and Prejudice
On the anniversary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice