• Split pea soup with ham — a longtime favorite. Not pictured: the accompanying Monterrey jack & Swiss grilled cheese with Vidalia onion relish, on caraway rye.

  • How did such an ambitious project by one of America’s most innovative architects turn into a punch line?

    And to think the University could have had a building designed by Taliesin Associated Architects instead…

    How the Humanities Building Went Wrong | On Wisconsin

  • FedEx just delivered a rather large brown box labeled “ACME” to my neighbors’ house, and my curiosity is quite piqued.

  • ½

  • Beware the Ides of March, indeed…

  • It’s hard to think of any similarly productive, commercial novelist today who speaks so vigorously against religious and political pieties.

    Those couple adjectives act as pretty strong qualifiers, but point taken.

    Graham Greene Against the World | The New Republic

  • Longform listening tonight: not a single track on Tales is shorter than 11 minutes.

  • [Recognising exile agency] means accepting that they will sometimes speak in a political idiom that doesn’t resonate with us, and that the methods they sometimes employ are politically inconvenient or even incomprehensible.

    Exiles on Main Street | Aeon

  • [A] striking feature of our current political landscape is that we disagree not just over values (which is healthy in a democracy), and not just over facts (which is inevitable), but over our very standards for determining what the facts are.

    The Value of Truth | Boston Review

  • “We call this a century project[.] … To get it to look even somewhat like it did before the blight is going to take centuries. It’s for the next generation—it’s planting a tree you’ll never enjoy the shade of.”

    The Demise and Potential Revival of the American Chestnut | Sierra

  • …Packard and Montgomery had taken pains to author their stories without any assumptions about the reader’s gender, and in Cave of Time neither the text nor artwork betrays this conceit[.]

    Marketing ended that progressive approach.

    1979: The Cave of Time | 50 Years of Text Games

  • My top-of-my head nominations:

    • John Dos Passos’ U.S.A.
    • Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War
    • John Layman’s Chew
    • Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

    Ars’ plea: Someone make this into a series | Ars Technica

  • I’m not one to run my soups through a chinois unless I have company coming.

  • Glad to be returning to this gem again for a week-long immersive listen.

  • You’re not a simple stimulus-response organism. The experiences you have today influence the actions that your brain automatically launches tomorrow.

    That Is Not How Your Brain Works | Nautilus

  • More on bears. Continued human encroachment on wild spaces clashes with conservation & wildlife management.

    [W]hat happened next was violent. And painful. And gruesome. An interaction beset by blood and an anguished cry.

    Close Encounters of the Worst Kind | Sports Illustrated

  • Weather Line’s acquisition is the second time my favorite weather app has been purchased. I loved how it balanced information density & minimalism; I’m not looking forward to replacing it. CARROT seems to be the leading alternative, but I really don’t care for its “personality.”

  • Why eat a frozen pizza when you can make a crispy pie with common kitchen staples? A large flour tortilla, tomato sauce, & cheese are the foundation. Toppings here include red pepper flakes, thinly sliced garlic, shallots, basil, & sea salt.

  • “Once we hit that saturation point where the first tier has all gotten their vaccines, the narrative will shift to blame. It’ll be ‘Why haven’t you taken care of this yet?’”

    How Inequity Gets Built Into America’s Vaccination System | ProPublica

  • My brother surprised me with these two guys, the voices of Twins baseball in my childhood. Herb was the play-by-play man on WCCO 830 AM from 1962–2007. Bob was the ballpark public address announcer from 1961–2005. Spring training games are here, but I still miss Herb & Bob.

  • The full-circle irony of all this is that coyotes and bobcats are annihilating prey, which themselves are wildlife killers.

    Takeaways:

    • Urban wildlife ecology is fascinating.
    • Keep your housepets inside.

    The Cats and Dogs Who Eat Cats and Dogs | Terrain

  • “[Tubman] is a woman who spent her life destroying slavery[.] It’s a reminder about the relationship between history, capitalism and capital in this country. If we put her on the [$20] bill uncritically, that’s a grave disservice to her legacy.”

    Fitting the Bill | L&S News

  • Nearly six decades later, no one has been brought to justice for executing Lewis, thought to be the last elected official murdered in Chicago. Officially, the case is still open, but Ben Lewis has faded from public memory.

    The Murder Chicago Didn’t Want to Solve | ProPublica

  • Meaning, Purpose, and the Mirage of Human Progress

    This really hit home:

    My need for meaning and purpose, and my desire to be part of something bigger than myself, were likely motivators for joining the military. People assume that it’s the bad experiences soldiers have endured that make it difficult to adjust to life after the military. While this is sometimes true, very often it’s the absence of what soldiers valued that makes the transition difficult – the loss of meaning, sense of purpose and belonging. Those who sign up for service are likely more hard-wired than most to seek these things, making the loss all the keener. Under Gray’s influence, I recognise the difficulty of this loss and have found solace in his advice about how one can aspire to move past these innate human needs. I am not yet living in a way that Gray would approve of, hope for progress is more intoxicating than the dry lessons of history, but I am more selective in my choice of distractions today, and aspire one day to just be able to sit still in a room and live in that scented moment, before it’s gone.

    Reading John Gray in war | Aeon

  • The Nation: A Tale of Two Bookcases

    How is it possible that two bookshelves, all but identical in appearance and construction, can exemplify both left-wing critical design and the world’s most successful capitalist furniture-manufacturing strategy?

    The Communist Designer, the Fascist Furniture Dealer, and the Politics of Design | The Nation

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