Welcome to the Working Week
John Baeder I always have time for another story about why Stradivari violins sound so good. Tree of the year! And if you don’t know my coffee-table website...
Truthier Truthiness
The abandoned village of Craco. Re: my entry last week on “forest bathing,” the Economist weighs in on a certain linguistic habit: When TED, a conference,...
Yo!
The American Kestrel, AKA Sparrowhawk. The English calligrapher Irene Wellington giving thanks for the gift of a turkey: One of the participants in my recent...
Illuminations and Retreats
More here. An illustration by Sam Weber from a Folio Society edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune: See this 2017 story about the Folio Society’s design process....
Long-haulers and Loafers
French signage The bean man brought his beans to market every weekend -- week after week, year after year, decade after decade -- until one morning he was...
Patient, Skilled, Peaceful, Goal-Oriented
Odd monuments of Westminster Abbey: The abbey held writers to a higher moral standard than the rich. Stanley cheered that Aphra Behn, writer and all-round...
Eccentricity
Two weeks ago, I failed in my duty to my readers: I forgot to remind you all of the coming of an Ember Week. I am sorry. But you may remember them in the...
Of Dust and Disks and Music for Animals
Etching by John Sloan from a 1938 edition of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. This amazes me: The customers that are the easiest to provide for are the...
Revisiting, Restoring, Recomposing
David Frum’s long report on the past, present, and future of the Benin Bronzes is fascinating, though I have some serious doubts about his arguments. All of...
Storyboards
A storyboard by Wiard B. Ihnen for Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941). Also: storyboards from Hitchcock’s The Birds. I love storyboards, and wish they were easier...
Hoarded Links
Our Native Birds of Song and Beauty Jon Day on Hoardiculture: My father has always denied that he’s a hoarder, but that’s what all hoarders say. When I...
A Brief Message from the Sickbed
The headline says, “How medieval carpenters are rebuilding Notre Dame”, which is dumb, because no medieval carpenters are alive today – people don’t live 700...
The Countryside and the City
Michael Heizer’s megasculpture, “City” – about which I am immensely skeptical … but I think I have to see it, if only because of this: “The whole gestalt...
Miracles and Tears
I’m scheduling this for the usual Monday morning time, but – and here I’m quoting from a recent blog post – I’m off for a brief writing retreat, to see if I...
Conservation
A lovely page describing the conservation by the Getty Museum of a Roman sarcophagus. An essay by a photographer explaining why his most faked-looking...
Hearses at Daybreak
A 17th-century woman’s will. Richard Seal – seen here with candidates for Salisbury Cathedral’s girls’ choir, the first such choir in an English cathedral,...
Color
An illuminated manuscript from eighteenth-century Pennsylvania -- beautiful full-sized image here. How Guernica flopped: “By nearly every measure, Picasso’s...
Gophers and Beatles
Kazumasa Nagai The Atlantic makes its entire 165-year archive available online – quite a big deal for those interested in American history. A lovely brief...
A Bustle in your Hedgerow
Art by Kit Boyd Are we from the savannah or from the forest? The history of replica food displays A terrific XKCD explainer on hailstones. In Great Britain,...
Roadrunning
A genius for our moment: “For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as ‘Zhemao’ created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of...