petrichor: pleasant smell frequently accompanies first rain after warm, dry weather (9/13/16)
sillage: trail of scent that lingers behind from a perfume (4/23/18)
ARTICLES
The Man With the $13 Billion Checkbook 7/12/19
“Henry Ford never imagined that a black gay man would be president of this foundation,” Mr. Walker said, “but that’s what’s great about American philanthropy, that it continues to evolve.”
James Baldwin’s Archive, Long Hidden, Comes (Mostly) Into View from NYT 12 April 2017
Depressed About the Future of Democracy? Study History
On my first day as United States
ambassador in Prague in 2011, I found, branded beneath the surface of an
antique table in my official residence, a small black swastika. It was
one of many swastikas hidden throughout the palace, relics of the days
when it was occupied by the Nazis.
My
reaction was not one of horror or dismay, but of triumph. The swastikas
were not only a reminder of the evil they represented — they were also a
reminder of the Allies’ destruction of that bestial regime.
Hoaxers slip Breastaurants and Dog-Park sex into journals 10/4/18
a British expat’s tower in Tangier 10/9/18
School districts banning homework WSJ, 12/12/2018
The Paris Review
On Jackie Robinson’s 100th Birthday, 100 Photos of an Icon
Elwood, Illinois (Pop. 2,200), Has Become a Vital Hub of America’s Consumer Economy. 1/9/19
What ‘Anna Karenina’ taught me about living with depression - 2/6/19
Skyscrapers made of wood are making a comeback 2/8/19
For a Black Mathematician, What It’s Like to Be the ‘Only One’ 2/18/19
Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco 3/11/19: very nice travel piece about the beatnik and SF
Cholly Atkins taught Motown to dance. His moves get an update in ‘Ain’t Too Proud.’ (3/13/19)
Epic hunt for USS Wasp (3/13/19)
Mass migration of painted ladies (3/17/19)
Mattis returning to research role at Stanford think tank 3/19/19
Duty done, the general returns to thinking about public policy. Even if at the conservative citadel, our country will be better for his return to public policy.
From Dresden on the 50th anniversary of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five (3/21/19)
An elusive whale is found all around the world (3/22/19)
Rick Steves wants to set you free (3/22/19)
In Florence we had lunch in a little ristorante we might never have found otherwise, following his advice; as he suggested I ordered minestrone soup, and it was superb. I like Rick.
Zuzana Caputova Is Elected Slovakia’s First Female President (3/30/19)
In a stunning rebuke of Slovakia’s populist governing party, Zuzana Caputova — a 45-year-old lawyer, activist and political newcomer — was elected Saturday as the nation’s first female president. Riding a wave of popular discontent over widespread corruption but refusing to engage in personal attacks on her opponents, she vowed to return a sense of decency to Slovakia’s often toxic political climate. Her sweeping victory in a runoff election gave hope to opposition parties across the region that the tide might be turning against the ethnic nationalist and populist movements that have swept to power in recent years.
Postcards from Brexit-on-Sea (4/4/19)
Tacos in Kenya (4/18/19)
not even including Lupita Nyong’o, the daughter of Kenyans who was born in Mexico City). Nairobians can drink tequila and dance to Mexican-Kenyan fusion music at Blend Lounge on a Saturday night, then worship with Mexican Catholic priests at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish the next morning. Decent Mexican food is notoriously hard to find throughout Africa, but in Nairobi, hungry travelers don’t even have to leave the airport: at Java House, East Africa’s answer to Starbucks, they can feast on quesadillas, guacamole, and even huevos rancheros.
Robert Caro
Robert A. Caro, private eye (4/16/19)
Caro and Conan (4/17/19)
What soldiers left behind.
A New Lincoln Bible, From a Mantel to a Presidential Library (6/19/19)
Now, more than 150 years later, historians have discovered the Bible for the first time, a unique artifact of the 16th president’s life that they did not even know existed.
Joan Jett has a Lincoln letter (6/14/19)
Unlikely as it might seem.
SW
Now, more than 150 years later, historians have discovered the Bible for the first time, a unique artifact of the 16th president’s life that they did not even know existed.
Joan Jett has a Lincoln letter (6/14/19)
Unlikely as it might seem.
SW
BOOKS
Box, C.J. Vicious circle. (January 2019)
Figuring I'd enjoy a different mystery writer, one recommended by Novelist, I tried it. Stopped on p.189; bah!
Fermor, Patrick Leigh. (2005). A time of gifts : on foot to Constantinople : from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN: 9781590171653
(January 2019)
Saw it mentioned in Knife Fights; decided to look at it: a treasure. Travelogues are on my top-three
list of favorite books. This is a fabulous book.
- the innocent accumulation of years, not stage props of forced conviviality (p.65)
- Except for the panorama of the lights of Stuttgart through the plate glass, the house was hideous—prosperous, brand new, shiny, and dispiriting. Pale woods and plastics were juggled together with stale and pretentious vorticism, and the chairs resembled satin boxing-gloves and nickel plumbing. Carved dwarfs with red noses stoppered all the bottles on the oval bar and glass ballerinas pirouetted on ashtrays of agate that rose from the beige carpets on chromium stalks. There were paintings—or tinted photographs—of the Alps at sunset and of naked babies astride Great Danes. Everything looked better, however, after I’d swallowed two White Ladies taken from a tray that was carried about by a white-gloved butler. I helped myself to cigarettes from a seventeenth-century
- There is nothing more absorbing than maps of tribal wanderings. How vaguely and slowly nations float about! Lonely as clouds, overlapping and changing places, they waltz and reverse round each other at a pace so slow as to be almost stationary or work their expanding way across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew. What a relief it is when some outside event, with an actual date attached to it, jerks the whole sluggishly creeping osmotic complex into action! P.178
- His pencil leaped feverishly into action. The buns put forth their own arrows of migration and began coiling sinuously about the paper till Mitteleuropa and the Balkans were alive with demons’ tails. “Chaos! The Visigoths take shelter south of the lower Danube, and defeat the Emperor Valens at Adrianople, here!,” he twisted the lead on the paper—“in 476. Then—in only a couple of decades”—a great loop of pencil swept round the tip of the Adriatic and descended a swiftly-outlined Italy “—we get Alaric! Rome is captured! The Empire splits in two—” the pace of his delivery reminded me of a sports commentator “—and the West totters on for half a century or so. But the Visigoths are heading westwards,” an arrow curved to the left and looped into France, which rapidly took shape, followed by the Iberian peninsula. “Go West, young Goth!,” he murmured as his pencil threw off Visigothic kingdoms across France and Spain at a dizzy speed. “There we are!” he said; then, as an afterthought, he absentmindedly pencilled in an oval across northern Portugal and Galicia, and I asked him what it was. “The Suevi, same as the Swabians, more or less: part of the whole movement. But now,” he went on, “here go the Vandals!”
Nagl, J. (2014). Knife fights : a memoir of modern war in theory and practice. New York: Penguin Press. ISBN: 9780143127765
(January 2019) Read his op-ed in the NY Times, decided to read this book. Overly detailed to the point of tedium, yet Nagl exemplifies the concert of the warrior-intellectual. If wars need be fought, our nation would be well served to have intellectuals in the military ranks. War is hell, but it doesn't have to be endless or chaotic.
Packer, George (2019). Richard Holbrooke, the last great freewheeling diplomat
Peterson, Carla L. (2011). Black Gotham: a family history of African-Americans in 19th century NYC. New Haven Conn: Yale University Press. ISBN: 9780300162554
Sandford, Jon. Twisted Prey. (December 2018)
Author recommended by someone whose taste I trust; stopped on p. 350, yeah, 350; bah!
+
*