Learn to play the fool

10 things worth sharing: the secret to lifelong learning and more...

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week: 

1. Want to be a lifelong learner? Learn to play the fool.
    

2. I try to make the case for searching outside the algorithm and blogging as a forgiving medium.
    

3. How showing your work can change your life.
    

4. Drawn and Quarterly is reissuing collections from one of my cartoonist heroes, John Porcellino: King-Cat Classix, Map of My Heart, and Perfect Example. Nothing beats getting a new King-Cat in the mail, so you might want to subscribe.
    

5. I like The Last Interview series of books and I’m looking forward to the Fred Rogers volume.
    

6. Eye candy: I wrote about Nathaniel Russell’s fake fliers and I’m diving into the work of David Driskell and Faith Ringgold after watching the documentary, Black Art: In the Absence of Light.
    

7. Ear candy: Wendy Carlos making electronic music in 1970 and Philip Glass on Saturday Night Live in 1986.
    

8. Escapism: we’ve been loving The Durrells in Corfu, and I even picked up the source material, Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, the first book in the Corfu trilogy. I also re-watched Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans with a couple of my buddies online, the source material of which I will not be reading, though I did enjoy this 1992 NYTimes profile of Daniel Day-Lewis.   
    

9. RIP actor Christopher Plummer. (Watch him play piano!) RIP musician Mary Wilson. RIP songwriter Jim Weatherly. (Don’t miss the story of how “Midnight Plane To Houston” became a hit.) RIP jazz legend Chick Corea. (Watch him play piano!) RIP Laura Helen Wilson Davis, my grandma.
    

10. Nobody should have to hustle. 

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Call the people you love and tell them you love them.

I’ll see you next week.

xoxo, 

Austin

PS. Thanks again to everyone for the kind words about the audio trilogy.