Hello!

It’s a laying-down-foundations week for this here newsletter, taking some time to do some research for a future issue. Also working on switching over the, um, “backend” of my publishing setup, to describe it generously—I won’t bore you with the details and you likely won’t see any changes. Mostly it will make the structure of the source files better-defined, which warms my obsessive heart and gives me more flexibility in the future.

There’s a lot I like about the structure of a weekly publishing schedule as a way to practice finishing things and letting go, but I’ve realized sometimes it’s important to work on a slightly longer timeline.

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What are those interstitial symbols for a section break called anyway? Apparently, “asterism”, “dinkus”, and “zareba” are all options, possibly with somewhat different connotations. And the use of the last seems very possibly to originate from Wodehouse (“The novelist blocks his reader’s path with a zareba of stars”), who seemed to keep the word in his back pocket as a humorous circumlocution describing all sorts of minor fortifications (a beard as “a dense zareba of hair”, spectacles as “a zareba of glass”).

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Reading list

Two long reads I finally got around to:

• a breathtakingly awful 1970s chemical disaster in Michigan as an unintentional test of epigenetic theories, and the resulting thorny questions of multigenerational liability;
• a long Mavis Gallant nonfiction piece from the New Yorker archives chronicling the Gabrielle Russier case in France, including a striking opening.

And, in a recent New Yorker, Rachel Aviv deftly navigates a minefield of a story involving brain death, religion, the law, race, neuroscience, and organ donation, and emerges with what feels, to me, like a nuanced, accurate depiction of a deeply knotty situation.

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So I was listening to this podcast…

The Onion skewers the prestige true crime podcast with the highly snackable “A Very Fatal Murder”, poking at all of the tics and biases. (h/t chompchomp)

Sometimes I fall into the trap of regarding Jesse Thorn as solely the bailiff of the premiere fake Internet courtroom, but recently I listened to some reminders that he conducts a mean interview: Rian Johnson, Errol Morris. (Also absorbing: the shadow podcast constructed out of evocative asides about his personal history. I need the Jesse Thorn memoir!)

The comforts of listening to two British men reviewing Chips Ahoy! with regards to taste, texture (including dunkability), biscuitness.

Returning to Scene on Radio‘s “Seeing White” series: Part 10, about Asian immigrants suing for US citizenship in the 1920s with arguments hinging on a legal definition of “white”. (Spoiler: whiteness will be defined as whatever is convenient.)

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Is it possible to feel too much kinship with some Radiotopia sticker swag? Asking for a friend.

Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.

—Adam

P.S. Sorry it's coming out late this week! Tinyletter flagged this issue for unknown reasons when I tried to send it Thursday morning. The bright side is SCALES now has a new blurb: "[T]he letter is fine"—Keith, Tinyletter.