Hello Thursday!

This has been a ridiculously full week, which was then capped off by my feeling vaguely unwell on Wednsday, when I usually finish writing Thursday and schedule it to be sent out the next day. Fortunately, I’d been working on the newsletter progressively throughout the week, so I was still able to get it done in time.  

Things to check out online

• NATURE (네이처) - Allegro Cantabile (너의 곁으로) MV — I’d forgotten about this song until it popped up in my playlist the other day. It’s from 8 years ago, and both the song and the playlist are a lot of fun. There’s also an unintentional Easter egg in the video that shows how things work at small K-pop agencies such as the one that managed Nature: There were nine members of the group when they started filming the video, but only eight by the time they finished. The one who left was Yeolmae; she’s the redhead at the far left at the very beginning of the video. And that’s the Easter egg — the company either couldn’t or wouldn’t pay to reshoot the scenes that Yeolmae was in! They just told the editors to try to minimize her appearance in the final video. The lyrics to this song also include a couple of things that you’ll encounter repeatedly if you listen to more K-pop:

  • “’I love you’ malhago shipeo” = “I want to say ‘I love you.’” By the way, the e in “shipeo” is silent — in my opinion, Romanized Korean is kind of a disaster as far as conveying pronunciation, and you’re much better off investing the really pretty small amount of time necessary to learn hangul. 

  • The Korean onomatopoeia for a heartbeat is “dugeun dugeun” (pronounced “DOO-guhn DOO-guhn”).

• Eight Years After Its Theft, Picasso Etching Discovered Hanging in Milwaukee Apartment — Apparently the etching was stolen from a Milwaukee art dealer, someone had had it hanging in their apartment, then left it behind then they got evicted. Fortunately, the landlord is friends with an antiques dealer, who recognized the etching. It was turned over to the police, who are currently holding on to it while the dealer and the person they were selling it for deal with the insurance company. If you’d like to see the etching, you can see a copy in MoMA’s collection here. If you’d like to own a copy of the etching (I wouldn’t, but there’s no accounting for taste . . .), there’s a copy for sale for 5500 Euro here.

• Trump Threatens to Demolish Kennedy Center if He Can’t Close It for Renovations — And, of course, he only wants to close it for renovations because they won’t let him stick his name on it. 

• Trump Administration Weighs Sale of Kehinde Wiley Painting in Larger Shift Away from ‘Globalist and Woke Ideologies’ — Because of course. The painting in question (you can see it below) was hanging in the US Embassy to the Dominican Republic until just recently. It was commissioned by the US State Department in 2013 specifically to hang in that embassy. It features four Dominican models and was inspired by the works of two Dominican artists, Celeste Woss y Gil and Gilberto Hernández. And yet the current director of Art in Embassies, Erin Scarvino said “We worked very hard to get [it] taken down. It was very woke . . . and it was aesthetically terrifying.” Actually, the ellipsis in that quote covers the part where Scavino said the quiet part out loud. That was where she said “It was by the gentleman who did Obama’s portrait.” Need I say more? Actually, having looked up Scavino to be sure I was using the correct pronoun, I think I do need to say more: Which part of “attorney, former model, reality show contestant and political activist” qualifies her to be director of the Art in Embassies program? [reads some more] Oh! It wasn’t any of those! It was when she appeared on the 2005 season of The Apprentice and then worked on Trump’s 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns! (eyeroll)

  

What I’ve been watching:

On Disney+, Grace and I have just watched Welcome to Earth and Pole to Pole, both National Geographic documentaries starring Will Smith. I highly recommend both of them. Will travels around the world, meeting with both academic experts and local people, and he doesn’t just learn about the people and places he goes, you can see that the experiences really change him. I hope he continues to make this sort of thing — I could see Will Smith becoming the new David Attenborough. 

What I’ve been playing:

After reading an interview with the designer in Cozy Companion, I picked up Cozy Sticker Ville from one of my local game shops. Rose and Lily and I, along with a family friend, have played through the first two chapters of it. The game is based on a really fun idea: You are given a plot of land, where you are responsible for building a village. Each chapter of the represents one year of the life of the village. Based on the choices you make, you put different stickers on the game board, so choices you made in the early years affect what happens to you in later years. There are ten chapters in the story book, the game board is double-sided with a different map on each side, and you get enough stickers for two complete play-throughs. I was a little hesitant about buying a $40 game that could be played a maximum of 20 times, but after reading the interview with the designer, it sounded like it would be worth it, and based on playing it so far I believe that it would be. In fact, given the amount that would be the same from game to game, and given that most of the decisions are binary, I don’t know that I would really want to play it beyond two full play-throughs. I would hope, though, that the designers would develop more games using the same system, because it really is a lot of fun.  

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

• Just Another Summer (Tilly & Susan Bridges) — This was a really sweet story, the kind that leaves you (or me, at any rate) with a smile on your face and tears in your eyes simultaneously. And if you want to come after me about the statistical improbability of these particular characters meeting under these particular circumstances, just save your breath. Life is full of statistically improbable things that happen every day, so there’s absolutely no reason that fiction should be restricted to the plausible.

• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 21 (Yuto Tsukuda) — This series keeps getting better and better. As the series progresses, layers get peeled away, rivals become enemies, enemies become allies. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

• The Cozy Cauldron Cab Company (Nathan C. Ashford) — This is the tale of a young witch trying to find her way in the world after she graduates school, and it ended up being really good, even better than I expected it to be at the beginning. One interesting thing I noticed about it is that it told the story without a romantic subplot, which seems to be quite a rarity nowadays, and the story didn’t really feel weaker for the absence. And I was happen to get to the end and discover that there’s a sequel scheduled for summer of 2027. (Disclosure: I received an ARC of this book, but everything I write about it is my honest opinion.)

I’ve continued reading

• Blue Rose: The AGE Role-Playing Game of Romantic Fantasy 

• Mislaid in Parts Half-Known (Seanan McGuire) 

• Ritual Income, Witch of the Demesne vol. 1 (B.L. Brown) 

• Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, vol. 3 (Shio Usui) 

• ArtForum, December 2025

• A Red-Rose Chain (Seanan McGuire) 

• Cells at Work: Baby!, vol. 3 (Yasuhiro Fukuda) 

and I’ve started reading

• Vogue, 2026/09 — I was amused to see Cindy Crawford’s daughter and Richard Gere’s son together on the cover of a magazine. Grace insisted that this means that she and I are old, while I contended that Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere (especially Richard Gere) are sufficiently older than us that we’re still in the middle. Grace responded that I’m delusional and refusing to age gracefully. (She is, of course, absolutely right.) 

If you missed any past Thursdays, you can access the archives here.

And as always, THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS 100% HUMAN-CREATED WORDS.

Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Thursday,

Jason