Hello Thursday!

This is issue number 8, which means I’ve been doing this for two months now! I hope you’re enjoying this newsletter — if you know someone who you think would enjoy it, please send it on to them as well. For all I know, you might have been doing this already — after spending the first few weeks of Thursday obsessively checking my readership statistics and then getting discouraged when there were no readership statistics to check, I’ve given myself a stern talking to and forced myself to stop doing that. Now I trust that if there’s anything I need to know about, I’ll get an email notifying me of it, and otherwise I just send out the newsletters and let the readers take care of themselves.

Today’s daily affirmation

Every day I start the day’s bullet journal entry with the appointments for the day — since my wife and both my daughters have disabilities, plus we’re helping a medically fragile neighbor, we usually have at least one doctor’s appointment every day — followed by a daily affirmation (something I want to try to think about and work on that day). One day this week we miraculously had no appointments, so I had to start the day with the affirmation. As I was sitting there, pen in hand, trying to figure out what I wanted to write, I glanced at the date and noticed that it was exactly three months to my next birthday — another year 75% gone. This, coupled with the passing of my aunt earlier this week, got me to thinking about mortality and the limitation of time (even more than usual), so my affirmation for that day ended up being “The things you do on the days you don’t have to do anything could very well be the things that matter most.” And I’m still really feeling that — so much of our time is tied up in things we have to do, and moreover things that we have to do at certain times, that we’re left with little time to truly choose what we do. So when you do have those times, notice them and use them consciously. This doesn’t mean there’s no time for goofing off or wasting time, but if you are, make sure you’re choosing to goof off and that you’re wasting time in the best possible way. 

Things to check out online:

• Princess Anne Meets K-pop Band NMIXX During Her Royal Visit to South Korea — As someone with an interest in both K-pop and European royalty, I just love the cultural collision here. I’d love to be able to hear their thoughts, to know what each side of the encounter thinks of the other. I imagine that Princess Anne has someone on her staff who briefs her on the people she’s about to meet, so she’s never taken by surprise. Plus, she meets so many different people during the course of her royal duties (according to her Wikipedia entry she’s attended more than 20,000 events since she started doing this sort of thing back in 1968). I’m also really curious about how it was decided that NMIXX would be the K-pop group she’d meet. 

• Louvre Jewel Heist Suspects Claim ‘Mysterious Sponsor’ Recruited Them — Interesting new revelations in the Louvre heist case. But “interesting” of the sort that raise as many questions as they answer, because on one hand the thieves won’t name the sponsor, fearing reprisals against their families, while on the other hand the authorities aren’t sure the sponsor even exists. Personally, I believe the sponsor exists and that authorities’ fears that the stolen pieces have been broken down and sold piecemeal are unfounded. The thieves’ statements that they were shown a video of the gallery and told “take the pieces in these cases” fits with my theory that the pieces had been pre-sold before they were ever stolen, which also fits with the fact that any of these pieces intact is worth far more than the sum of its parts.

• High Museum of Art’s Former COO Pleads Guilty to Embezzling More Than $600,000 — What really struck me about this one was the pettiness of it. I mean, yes, $600,000 is a lot of money, but it’s not “insanely rich” money. It’s not “never have to work again” money. It took him six years to embezzle $600,000, and over the course of those six years he had to falsify over 700 transactions to hide the theft, which means creating a false transaction an average of every other workday. Plus, over those six years he was already making about $300,000 per year in salary, plus who knows how much more in perks and benefits. That’s what I mean by referring to the pettiness of the crime. This isn’t a crime that you look at and feel like he’s striking back against an unfair system or that he’s pulled off some sort of feat of criminal genius. This is just a guy who already had quite a lot running a banal scam so he could have a little bit more.

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

• Inkpot Gods (Seanan McGuire) — Wow! What an ending! I really can’t say much more than that without spoiling it. Suffice to say, the book had an impactful ending that left one hungry for the next book in the series. Unfortunately, the next book in the series isn’t out yet, so if you’re the type who can’t or won’t wait, maybe don’t read this one quite yet.

• Art in America, Winter 2025 — Since I don’t live in New York City and don’t have the means to travel much, the exhibition reviews in Art in America and ArtForum are how I stay informed of what’s going on at museums around the world, and then I’ll try to get catalogs for exhibitions that particularly interest me (which even at the cost of catalogs is still less than the cost of travel). The review of the Bukhara Biennial in this issue particularly caught my attention — Uzbekistan had never been on my list of “most-go” places, and it still isn’t, but the description of the way the biennial had been set up to include local artists made it sound really interesting, and the description of Bukhara itself made me curious to learn more. The next exhibition that caught my eye was “Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination,” which was at The Art Institute of Chicago. I know a little bit about Symbolism, the artistic movement that occurred chronologically between Impressionism and Cubism (roughly late 1880s to early 1900s), and I’ve always found the artwork from that era interesting⁠, so I welcome the chance to learn more about it. The other exhibition that really captured my interest was “Vaginal Davis: Magnficent Product” at MoMA PS1. I must confess that I had never heard of Vaginal Davis before this, but I intend to remedy that now that I have. The descriptions of the exhibition and the photographs of the art that accompany the review really make me want to see more of her work. Davis is Black, trans, queer, and punk, but not in a way that any of those labels are limiting. She’s not quite Gen-X (she was born in 1961), but she’s close enough that I can instinctively identify with her work. I particularly like this description of Davis’s style from McKenzie Wark’s review of the exhibition:
  

  “[It’s] a world that she wants to share. There’s a generosity to it. She takes from the world of straight life, makes a queer alternate world, and invites you into it.
  It’s not queer as in rainbow-kitties-uwu. It’s queer as in fuck you. But not fuck you in the angry, confrontational style of punk. It’s fuck you as in just not caring what the haters might think about any of it.

• Cells at Work! Baby, vol. 1 (Yasuhiro Fukuda) — I was pleasantly surprised to discover that visual elements of this volume also made it into the Cells at Work! live-action movie, specifically the Staphylococcus aureus in chapter 6 and the young white blood cell at the end of chapter 6.

• Cozy Companion, vol. 25 — Perhaps one of these days I’ll be able to read an issue of Cozy Companion without finding another game that I want to own (never mind that from my desk I can see five board games that I’ve bought but not played yet and one that I got for Christmas and have only played once), but today is not that day. This time the game that grabbed it is Critter Kitchen. Cute animals running a restaurant? Count me in! 

I’ve continued reading

• Blue Rose: The AGE Role-Playing Game of Romantic Fantasy — I’ve just started reading the magic system on this, and I’m really happy with it. It seems to be more effect-based rather than cause-based, by which I mean that you don’t have multiple spells that have the exact same effects but one is for wizards and requires incantations and a wand, one is for clerics and requires communion with their deity, and so forth. The list of “spells” (which has considerable overlap with what would be considered “psionics” in a D&D-based game) is much shorter than what you’d find in a D&D rulebook, but they I think they’d be adaptable enough that you wouldn’t feel the lack of numbers very much.

• Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World (Anne-Laure Le Cunff)

• The Winter Long (Seanan McGuire).

• My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movement (Pernille Ipsen) — The telling of this shifts back and forth in time between the mothers’ experiences in Denmark in the 1960s and ‘70s and Ipsen’s experiences interviewing them in the 2010s in the process of writing this book. While this can be annoying, as too many authors simply use it as a way to insert themselves into their books, in this book in truly works. First of all because Ipsen is already a part of the story, though she has yet to make her debut in the “past” chapters I’ve read so far, but then even more importantly because even when Ipsen is “on-stage” in the “present” chapters, she still keeps the focus firmly on the mothers. She’s talking about the process of interviewing them, and how different ones have different memories of the times, and express those memories in different ways. It’s really quite an interesting book.

• ArtForum, Summer 2026.

• ArtForum, November 2026.

and I’ve started reading

• Cozy Companion, vol. 26.

• Lost in the Moment and Found (Seanan McGuire).

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

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

Jason