Leafy Intro

Welcome to the 284th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal ("NLJ") and its short-form writing sister publication, The Emu Café Social ("ECS"). This newsletter comes to you as always from the administrator, editor, and writer of both publications, Nicholas A. Ferrell.

Despite having had a busy week, I managed to publish several new NLJ articles while starting a June project on ECS. Without further ado, let us get to my new posts and links from around the web.

Leaves from around the web

I published three new NLJ articles since mailing Newsletter 282.

I have published a number of New Leaf Journal reports on fallen street signs in Brooklyn, but I had not published one in several years. That changed last Monday when I reported on a Fallen Double Arrow Sign in Columbia Street Waterfront District. How often do you find fallen Double Arrow signs? I have another article planned following this one that does not concern a fallen sign, but you will have to stay tuned for that one.

A few months ago, I became aware that there was a site that previously had thenewleafjournal.com domain as recently as the end of 2015. I set that as an article idea for my to-do list, but was reminded of it by a post I shared on ECS (more on that shortly). Deciding to strike while the iron was hot, I drafted and published Discovering the Former “The New Leaf Journal”. Not only did I cover the former thenewleafjournal.com, but I also learned about the former newleafjournal.com and came up with an article topic for New Year's 2027.

Finally, I published Finding Backlinks to Your Articles and Blog Posts, which had been sitting in my drafts folder for some time. Here, you can learn about the various tools I use to discover backlinks to NLJ and ECS.

Thus, I covered the previous thenewleafjournal.com and newleafjournal.com websites with a preview for an article I will work on for late December.

Over on ECS, I published two new editions of Pook-Emu Bee links for June 1 and June 4.

I published 18 posts on ECS since mailing Newsletter 283. A big part of the reason for my output was because I started a new project. A blogger named Robert Birming, whose post helped inspire the second part of last month's blogging wisdom series, runs an annual project called "Junited" where bloggers can join and share posts from around the web in June. I decided to join this year. You can see my Junited 2026 Archive and Mr. Birming's Junited 2026 page. What did I share to kick off Junited an ECS?

I decided to make Junited more challenging by limiting myself to posts published in June 2026, even though that limitation is not part of the original Junited project. You can see the links I shared in the right column and my article-commentary on the left. Mr. Birming's own Where do blogs go when they die? reminded me to work on the former thenewleafjournal.com article on NLJ.

Outside of Junited, I published daily Pook-Emu Bee Links for the seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, and twelfth (each one comes with an original photograph).

Outside of those larger ECS projects, I published Missing Brand Music Video Ads and Great Falls, Montana, and Cascade County.

Finally, on Pixelfed, I shared three photos, including the one I used in last week's newsletter, a baseball field in Texas, and a goose and its shadow. All three come with commentary and links to where they appeared in NLJ.

Leaves from around the web

I typically send 21 links from around the web. However, I will provide just 15 this week -- not least because I included a good number of external links above, and also because adding full quotes from linked articles, which I started doing a few weeks ago, adds length to the links section.

How far they've come

1 ~ The 27 Most Knicks Moments Since Their Last NBA Finals (Katie Baker and Howard Beck for The Ringer. June 1, 2026.)

And [Isiah Thomas] acted accordingly, trading for every high-priced, marquee name he could get his hands on, turning MSG into a way station for flawed stars and bloated contracts: Stephon Marbury. Penny Hardaway. Tim Thomas. Jamal Crawford. Maurice Taylor. Quentin Richardson. Eddy Curry. Jalen Rose. Steve Francis. Zach Randolph. When Thomas wasn’t chasing stars, he was overpaying role guys (hello, Jared Jeffries and Jerome James).

They glossed over the Eddy Curry/Jerome James thing. First, Isiah Thomas gave Jerome James, a career backup center who had played the playoff series of his life in a contract year (RED FLAG), a fairly substantial contract. Mr. Thomas, having just overpaid (in an objective sense given the NBA's salary cap) for Jerome James to be the Knicks' starting center, then almost immediately traded two future first round draft picks for Eddy Curry, a young center with decent scoring ability to go with conditioning, defensive, and rebounding issues, also with a large contract. These moves were mocked at the time, and they worked out about as well as anyone should have expected.

2 ~ Why Is a Basketball Team Named After Pants? (Dan Lewis for Now I Know. June 11, 2026.)

But when it comes to the New York Knicks, there’s more confusion than typical. “Knicks” is short for “Knickerbocker,” which was a style of baggy, rolled up pants worn in New York and elsewhere...

The halcyon days when you could name a New York City sports franchise after pants.

Musical history

3 ~ Alan Lomax Spent Years Traveling the Country to Record the Sounds of America. The Legacy of His Obsession Will Live Forever (Chris Heath for Smithsonian Magazine. Summer 2026.)

That was the kind of thing Alan Lomax did. In August 1941, Lomax was traveling across northern Mississippi with some companions, busy doing the work that would make him the 20th century’s most famous musical folklorist—searching out and capturing for posterity the rich, wild, undiscovered diversity of expression through music and song to be found across this country.

A long article on the musical journeys of Alan Lomax. See related: Victor V. Gurbo's The Quarantine Sessions: “Goodnight, Irene”.

4 ~ The Harpsichord in Early Music: History, Legacy & Revival (Nicole Garrison for Serenade Magazine. May 6, 2025.)

Despite its eventual eclipse by the fortepiano and the modern piano, the harpsichord’s contribution to the evolution of musical language and performance practice remains profound.

We once had culture.

5 ~ What Music Ownership Means to Me (Flamed Fury. December 17, 2025.)

"Streaming as a way of playing music is fine. Streaming as a replacement for owning is what I don’t trust."

I appreciate the pro-ownership take.

Things in video games

6 ~ The Fountain Pens Of Video Games (HT Caroline Crampton) (Nicole Carpetnter for Aftermath. March 30, 2026.)

There are a lot of fountain pens in video games–you just may not have noticed them.

I don't recall any video game fountain pens off the top of my head (some of the diaries in the original GameCube Animal Crossing may have had them). Fun article, but I am too busy with hair color to tackle pens.

7 ~ Bread Baking In Video Games (Wouter Groeneveld at Brain Baking. May 22, 2026.)

In September last year, as part of a series on card games, I wrote about card game mini games in video games. It was fun to conduct a little bit of research related to a specific topic in the world of video games. Since you are reading this on Brain Baking, my interest is always piqued when a game allows me to bake crusty baked goods.

My quotes from articles come with links in the quotes.

Breaking news from year made up of numbers

8 ~ Mobilization Could Lead to More Russian Deserters From Moscow’s War (Kassie Corelli for Jamestown. June 8, 2026.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin likely has only two options ahead of him for his war against Ukraine. He either needs to end the war without achieving its goals or announce a new mobilization of its economy and society.

His decisions affect my day job. Please think of the little people.

9 ~ Russia using Interpol's wanted list to target critics abroad, leak reveals (Cate Brown, Mike Hudson, and Julia Luft for BBC. January 26, 2026.)

Thousands of files provided by a whistleblower at Interpol expose for the first time the extent of Russia's apparent abuse of the international policing agency to target its critics abroad.

This is quite a revelation for -- checks date -- 2026?

Still trying to understand the concept of "influencer"

10 ~ Dubai launches academy for travel influencers to ‘amplify global appeal’ (Ahmed S. Almansoori for The National. April 22, 2025.)

Dubai has launched an academy for travel content creators to boost tourism and support digital storytelling projects.

The dangers of having more money than ways to spend it.

11 ~ Kentucky Cops Arrest Equestrian, 48, For GUI (Galloping Under The Influence) (HT Matthew Ingram) (The Smoking Gun. March 31, 2026.)

According to an arrest report, an officer spotted the sagging Hernandez atop a horse around 6 PM Thursday. When Hernandez began to ride on the sidewalk, the cop performed a traffic stop.

Who among us?

Life on the rocks

12 ~ The Talayots of Menorca: The Mystery of a Lost Mediterranean Stone Civilization (Leman Altuntas for Arkeonews. April 8, 2026.)

What sets this civilization apart is its extraordinary architecture: massive constructions made from enormous stone blocks, carefully stacked without mortar in what experts call 'cyclopean' building techniques.

It is very considerate of civilizations to build with stone before they are "lost."

13 ~ The Navy may revive a forgotten Alaskan base halfway to Russia (Patty Nieberg for Task & Purpose. April 17, 2025.)

Last week, the top commander in the Pacific, Adm. Samuel Paparo, joined other military officials in calling for a revival of a base on Adak Island, a tiny, rocky outpost in Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain.

I dare say that this would be a rocky assignment.

Challenge yourself

14 ~ Opinion: My Daughter Made Me Realise That Mario Wonder's Difficulty Options Need Work (Ollie Reynols for Nintendo Life. June 25, 2025.)

As you might know, however, Super Mario Bros. Wonder essentially locks its lower difficulty setting to specific characters: Nabbit and four Yoshis. So when the character select screen came up, I gently tried to explain this to my daughter, knowing full well how the conversation would go ... In this case, Princess Peach is my daughter’s favourite character from the movie, so of course she’s going to want to play as her. This meant we'd have to do without the perks – including invincibility – that come with Yoshi or Nabbit.

I haven't played Super Mario Wonder, so I was not familiar with this "Nabbit" character. Now I can't look away.

15 ~ New cafe in Japan won’t let you leave until you solve a mystery (Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. April 12, 2025.)

[A]t a new cafe in the city of Yokohama, about 30 minutes south of downtown Tokyo, not only do you not have to leave right away, you’re technically not allowed to leave until you’ve solved a mystery.

Do you become the mystery if you try to leave before solving the mystery?

Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week

I use a privacy-friendly and entirely local tool called Koko Analytics (see my 2025 article) to track page visits. In each issue of the newsletter, I list our five most-visited articles, according to Koko Analytics, for the one-week period beginning with Saturday and ending with Friday. Below, you will find our most-visited articles for the week of June 6-12 with notes on their cumulative ranking statistics going back to 2021.

1. Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine (NAF. Jan. 20, 2026.) 21 appearances and 5 top placements in 2026.

2. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search (NAF. April 17, 2025.) 24 appearances and 19 top placements in 2026; 51 appearances and 40 top placements overall.

3. Amazon “Cargo Bikes” in Brooklyn (NAF. April 9, 2025.) 14 appearances 2026; 49 appearances and 8 top placements overall.

4. How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name (NAF. March 11, 2021.) 14 appearances in 2026; 24 appearances overall.

5. Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow (NAF. October 5, 2022.) 13 appearances in 2026; 32 appearances overall.

Analysis

Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine cruised to its third straight decisive weekly ranking win, although its numbers are beginning to return to normal such that Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search, which had a solid week by its own standards, could be competitive in the coming week. We had a relatively week 3-5 last week. In theory, that could have opened the door for an interesting article to make the top five. Instead, we not only ended up with our overall top-five for 2026, but also in the "correct" order as of the mailing date of this newsletter (my 2021 forget-me-not flower article moving into the yearly top-four in June is not something I had on the ranking bingo card).

Taking leaf

Thank you as always for reading The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed this issue and have not done so already, you can follow this newsletter by signing up for our weekly email, adding our RSS feed to your favorite feed reader, or checking in on our archive page.

Until Summer's Eve,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.