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The year is 50% over. Summer has only begun. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“If I'd known I was going to be around this long I would have taken better care of myself. So drive safely and don't abuse alcohol, drugs or candy.” The letter that changed my life. (Huge thanks to everyone who donated to Winston Smith’s GoFundMe. We bumped him over 75% of his goal!)
I’m 65% through War and Peace. [Spoiler alert!] Napoleon is marching to Moscow, so I grabbed my copy of Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and read the section featuring Charles Joseph Minard’s infographic depiction of Napoleon’s march, which E.T. says “may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.”
“Myself, I feel very safe.” My review of The Phoenician Scheme: as long as Wes Anderson makes movies, I will go see them in the theater. (Definitely stick around for the credits, which are as artful as the rest of the movie, and highlight the fact that they borrowed actual paintings for the film’s shooting.)
“A remarkable library of around 9000 books, the vast majority of which have been carefully and systematically defaced.” The Roy Gold Collection.
If you’re in New York, Jillian Hess tipped me off that my book Newspaper Blackout is featured in an exhibition of Mary Ruefle’s Erasures at Poet’s House. (If you like their interview with Ruefle, do read my own typewriter interview with the poet, and check out the whole series while you’re at it. We’ve got some more good ones on the way!)
Recent podcast appearances: I talked about art and theft on the TED How To Be A Better Human podcast and about the cost of making things on 50 Fires.
“It's just not Harry's world out there. It's like we've become an enemy to anything wondrous.” Pizza night shenanigans: After watching the not-exactly-classic 80s flick Harry and The Hendersons with the tweens, we watched a bunch of 80s music videos and drug PSAs, which, if you’d like to experience for yourself, I made into a YouTube playlist. (Trivia: 7 foot 2 inches tall Kevin Peter Hall played both Harry and the alien in Predator.)
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” My 12-year-old read Jurassic Park in a few days, so I was researching which other Michael Crichton books he might like, and my friend Matt Thomas told me this wild fact: “Crichton is the only writer in history to have a #1 book, #1 film, and #1 television series at the same time, and he did it twice.” (Crichton said one of my favorite things about why you need a good editor.)
TV: We loved Dept Q. on Netflix, a dark British crime thriller based on the books by Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen. Matthew Goode is great (it’s funny to me that he wanted to bring James Bond back to his dark roots, because Detective Morck is similarly repugnant yet charming), but the real heart of the show is Alexej Manvelov’s character Akram. Highly recommended!
RIP journalist Bill Moyers. Just a few weeks ago I was thinking about his interview with Toni Morrison on love and writing, when she said: “While it may be true that, you know, people say, ’I didn’t ask to be born,’ I think we did, and that&#
