Month: October 2017
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I heard them on the radio
How often do you listen to honest-to-goodness radio anymore? Usually I go to it only if I’m not in the mood for podcasts, audiobooks, or my own music collection. I’ll spin through my station presets to see if I get lucky, though most often I get bad songs and ads. But not the other day. I…
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Raising Kings, pt. 1
Loved the first episode of “Raising Kings”, a three-part series from NPR’s Code Switch podcast on a new boys-only public school in Washington, D.C., filled only with freshmen students of color: All are determined to change the narrative. In Washington, and the rest of the country, that narrative says too many young black men are below-average…
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Inherit the Words
I was helping my parents clear out their bookshelves in advance of their living room being painted and in the process stumbled upon some interesting artifacts. Among the books, family photo albums, and LPs that had stuck around unplayed for decades, I spotted a small University of Wisconsin notebook. I opened it to find in…
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Tom Hanks, Olympia, and Me
I had the pleasure of seeing a photo of mine get the Ken Burns treatment on CBS Sunday Morning’s story this weekend about Tom Hanks, his new book, and his love of typewriters: One of my colleagues got an advance copy of Hanks’ book at a library conference back in June specifically because she knew…
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My Birthday Planets
Thanks to Fourmilab (via kottke), I discovered exactly how the planets were aligned on the day of my birth: You can find your own here.
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The People’s Machine: On ‘California Typewriter’
As was the case with Tom Hanks’s new typewriter-inspired short story collection, I was the easiest mark in the world for the new Doug Nichol documentary California Typewriter, which profiles the titular typewriter repair shop in Berkeley and the wider place of the typewriter in modern culture. Though I’ve been anticipating the film for a while, I…