Author: Chad
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Tipsy temperance titles
Here’s a Christmas gift idea for the alcoholics in your life: Working at a museum archives dedicated to the temperance and prohibition movements means I see books, pamphlets, posters, and other promotional/educational material like this all the time. I could put together an entire exhibit of temperance titles that are a) trying to be funny…
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Hear Ye! Listening to ‘The New Analog’
“Noise has value.” So goes the thesis statement of The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, a wonderful new book by musician Damon Krukowski. He reckons with how digital media has changed how we consume music and what we’ve come to expect from it. New technologies have begat new ways of listening, but…
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What’s your number?
Not sure when I learned about the Enneagram, but almost immediately after I did I knew I was a Five. However flawed and subjective it is, I’ve found it to be a good model for understanding human nature as an individual and in relationship with others. Plus it’s easier to remember than the Myers-Briggs. Discovering…
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Say hi to Mosul Eye
The AP has an incredible story about an Iraqi man named Omar Mohammed who courageously chronicled the savagery of the Islamic State as an undercover blogger, using the moniker Mosul Eye: For nearly two years, he’d wandered the streets of occupied Mosul, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital,…
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Little Women
I was a good amount into a post celebrating the 1994 film Little Women when I discovered I was basically writing Alissa Wilkinson’s appreciation of the film at Vox from last year. It’s one of many movies I watched a lot with my sisters as a kid, in rotation with other female-focused ’90s films like Ever After, Never…
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Favorite Christmas song lyrics, ranked
I’m terrible at remembering lyrics. Even for favorite songs I’ve heard dozens of times. It’s an annoying deficiency when I try to sing along as so often I end up having to mumble certain lines. But now, my yearly Christmas music binge in progress, I’ve started paying attention to the lyrics that have peaked my…
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In praise of wedding reception air drumming
I didn’t realize I had a reputation. At a wedding recently, the bride and groom told me one of the things they were looking forward to the most was my air drumming. They had seen it in action at a previous wedding and had enjoyed it so much that they decided they would make time…
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Family Video to the rescue
Home for Thanksgiving weekend and in the market for a Christmas movie to watch, my sister suggested Die Hard. A great choice for many reasons, one of which being I hadn’t seen it in a while and was due for a seasonal rewatch. Plus my wife hadn’t seen it. (Perish the thought!) The problem was…
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Great Olin’s Raven!
The first baby in my family has arrived. Behold Olin Charles: I’ve made fun of my wife for all the pictures and video she takes of her sister’s kids. I get it now.
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Move it, McDonald’s
The replica of Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois, where I used to work, will be torn down next month: Kroc, considered by the company to be the founder of the modern chain, built his first restaurant in 1955 after franchising the brand from the original owners, Richard and Maurice McDonald. The…
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My Mount Rushmore of Singers
At this moment, anyway: Sam Cooke, Frank Sinatra, Julie Andrews, Whitney Houston With a runner-up trophy for Marty Robbins.
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Studs Terkel’s ‘Working’
I picked up a copy of Studs Terkels’ Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, a sort of oral history of life and work in and around 1970s Chicago. I’ve kept it on my nightstand and slowly chipped away at it when I was between…
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A Ghost Story
“O’er all there hung the shadow of a fear, A sense of mystery the spirit daunted, And said, as plain as whisper in the ear, The place is haunted.” – Thomas Hood, “The Haunted House” I thought of that poem, used to great effect in Slow West, after seeing A Ghost Story, David Lowery’s breath of a film.…
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Working toward the truth in ‘How to Think’
There goes Alan Jacobs being right again: it would be better for all concerned if we were content to say that our political opponents are merely wrong. But that’s unlikely to happen, at least widely, because once you say someone is wrong you commit yourself to explaining why he’s wrong — to the world of…
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‘Spotlight’ The News
Let me second Rod Dreher’s considerations of Spotlight in light of the Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore sexual harassment scandals: It was even better than I remembered it. One aspect of the movie stood out in sharp relief: the way so very many people in Boston knew for years that there was something horrible going…