No yelling!

10 things worth sharing: alphabetical diaries, digging in archives, the extended mind, ear candy, and more...

Hey y’all,

Yesterday I found this list I wrote to myself at the beginning of the year. Not sure why I’m compelled to share it today. Maybe because I was thinking of how my friend Mark once said, “We expect too much from January and not enough from February.”

Anyways, here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. The best thing I (re-read) this week was Rebecca Solnit on Virginia Woolf, adapted from her book, Men Explain Things to Me. (I’ve heard her new one, Orwell’s Roses, is very good.)
   
   

2. The radical woman behind Goodnight Moon. For those who are new to Margaret Wise Brown, check out this 1946 profile in Life magazine. (I’ve also heard Marcus’s biography is good.)
   
   

3. “A little more than 10 years ago, I began looking back at the diaries I had kept over the previous decade. I wondered if I’d changed. So I loaded all 500,000 words of my journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically.” Sheila Heti’s diary in alphabetical order, from A to Z.
   
   

4. The American Masters digital archive has a whole trove of full interviews with great artists recorded for their specials: Stephen Sondheim, David Bowie, Neil Young, Betty White… heck, there’s even an hour-long interview with John Cale.
   
   

5. The new Marcel Duchamp Research Portal makes available 18,000 documents and 50,000 images related to the revolutionary artist.
   
   

6. There are so many films on UbuWeb that I want to catch up on it’s overwhelming. At the top of my list: Eno and Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New. (There are also a bunch of favorites I want to re-watch like John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Matt Wolf’s I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard.)
   
   

7. This profile of Wee Man by Caity Weaver has me looking forward to the “idiotic delight” of Jackass Forever.
   
   

8. The music recommendation website Shfl is a “a random sampler of album recommendations from musicians and music critics.” (Here’s Sasha Frere-Jones on Warp Records.)
   
   

9. Ear candy: I loved Cate Le Bon’s Reward so much I put it on my list of 31 perfect records. I’ve only spent a week with her new one, Pompeii, but I love it as well. (A recent Pitchfork profile: “Cate Le Bon Chooses Absurdity.”)
   
   

10. I enjoyed this conversation between Ezra Klein and Annie Murphy Paul about her book The Extended Mind so much it inspired Tuesday’s newsletter about thinking on the page.

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See you next week!

xoxo,

Austin