Year: 2021
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The long and winding genius of the Pauls (McCartney and Simon)
While trolling for something to read on Hoopla, I came upon Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. It’s only available as an audiobook (or “audio biography”), and wisely so since so much of it depends on hearing Simon play his songs amidst his conversations with Gladwell. In that way it’s…
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Typewriters are better than Bitcoin
Last week I visited a Salvation Army I’d never tried before for some quick typewriter hunting. Between two late-period electric Smith Coronas I spotted a silver fiberglass case that screamed Olympia. And sure enough, I popped it open and beheld this 1959 SM3 (photo taken post-cleanup): The combo of gray body and brown keys was…
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Literacy as a religious act
From the remarkable book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill: “Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act. In a land where literacy had previously been unknown, in a world where the old literate civilizations were sinking fast beneath successive waves of barbarism, the white Gospel page,…
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Tales from a two year old
The following is a short story my almost-3 year old told me while we sat in bed resting between wrestling bouts. I dictated it into my phone as he told it to preserve for posterity: The gasoline pulled up to the ghost in the starry nighttime sky. The ghost pulled up to a very big…
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Gangsters for children
Magazine mashups from Entertainment Weekly, November 2019. More here.
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Media of the moment
An ongoing series Everything my son consumes. Obvs. Love on the Spectrum. Just finished the second season of this heart-warming and instructive Australian reality dating show on Netflix featuring people on the autism spectrum. The delightful dynamic between Michael and his mom should be its own show. Abbey Road. I previously wrote about encountering the…
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Introducing ‘One Typed Quote’
Here’s a new fun thing from me: One Typed Quote, an online catalog of short, share-worthy quotes typewritten onto paper and lovingly flung onto the internet. This new venture was inspired by the blog One Typed Page, created last year by Typewriter Review purveyor Daniel Marleau. I pitched OTQ to Daniel as an offshoot of…
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Moon moon moon, shining bright
I was playing soccer on the front lawn this evening with Mr. Two Years Old when the moon, waxing crescent, caught his curious eye in the encroaching darkness. I asked him if he knew why the moon glowed. We’ve read books about it before, but he said he didn’t. I explained in the simplest language…
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Tools of the moment
It’s been a minute since the last time I took stock of my notetaking/productivity apps, so here’s where I stand currently: I still use paper. The reporter’s notebook I got last Christmas is good for my occasional work-based bullet journaling. Feedly has been my RSS reader of choice for years now. To further declutter my…
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The art of ‘90s photo envelopes
While going through my library’s bevy of old staff and event photos, I encountered lots of what used to be commonplace but are now practically ancient artifacts: photo envelopes. Most of them were from the 1990s and early 2000s, which you can probably guess from the designs. (See also: groovy ’70s library brochures.)