Hey y’all,

It’s late July, so of course, I’m fantasizing about of Halloween and Christmas. Your comments on my post about happiness blew me away. To quote reader Pamela B., “What a fantastic group of people.”

Go paid and join the fun

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

1. “It feels like you’re grabbing something that’s already there, rather than creating something in your mind.” This profile of June Huh, a high school dropout who just won the Field Medal, reads like an extra chapter of two of my favorite books: David Epstein’s Range and Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary.
   
   

2. With each page I read, Julie Phillips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem is inching up to the top of my list of great books about art and motherhood. Good structure and great sentences. Recommended!
   
   

3. “Some surprising good news: Bookstores are booming and becoming more diverse.” This is certainly true in Austin, TX. In addition to Bookpeople and my new hyperlocal store, Black Pearl Books, I can get to at least a half dozen good indie bookstores on my bike within 20 or 30 minutes. (That’s not even counting the cool stores popping up in the small towns outside of Austin, like my friend Ryan Holiday’s The Painted Porch Bookshop in Bastrop.)
   
   

4. “I’d write something and think, This is really good. Wake up, read it, it’s [expletive]. Start again.” A profile of director Michael Mann. (His pilot for Tokyo Vice was one of my favorite things I saw on TV this year. Heck, just writing this makes me want to throw on Heat right now.)
   
   

5. Instagram: I love seeing the vintage scrapbooks on @paperofthepast and I’m enjoying the work of Betsy Streeter and the “Bicycle Sentences” she’s doing with Grant Petersen on the Rivendell Instagram. (She has prints for sale here.)
   
   

6. Podcast: I haven’t listened to it yet, but Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery have started a podcast about movies to recreate the days they worked in a video store together. (First episode is up on Apple.)
   
   

7. Two poems recommended by poet Hanif Abdurraqib to cover two moods: June Jordan’s “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” and Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love.”
   
   

8. Music: my pal James sent me this wonderful Frank Ocean performance of “Pyramids” after I said I’d been playing Channel ORANGE, an album that somehow just turned 10 years old. (I never got into the followup, Blonde, until I lived up north for a while and got depressed and put it on while walking around a frozen lake.) Other music of note: surf-rock covers of Kraftwerk and a “new” Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru album.
   
   

9. RIP William Hart, lead singer of The Delfonics. In Show Your Work! I told a story about how a single tweet led to his last album. (As entry to The Delfonics, you can’t go wrong with this compilation and if you’d like to see them do their thing in a rich context, I recommend this vintage episode of Soul!)
   
   

10. RIP artist Claes Oldenburg. I quoted part of his 1961 manifesto in Keep Going: “I’m for an art that helps old ladies across the street.”
    

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xoxo,

Austin