Hey y’all,

Loved reading and responding to the hundreds of comments in Tuesday’s open thread. Maybe we’ll do it more often than every season?

Go paid and join the discussion

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

1. After visiting a museum that has gone “paperless,” I wrote about fossil records and paper trails.
   
   

2. As a result of that same visit, I’ve gotten really interested in trilobites, which has led me to the work of Richard Fortey, who’s written books such as Life: A Natural History of The First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution. I enjoyed his interview on the BBC podcast The Life Scientific. (Also: I’m adding trilobite fossils to my Christmas list.)
   
   

3. One of my summer fantasies is to live on an island off the coast of Finland like Tove Jansson. (For now, I might just re-read The Summer Book.)
   
   

4. The Oakland library exhibits things found in library books.
   
   

5. I was surprised how deep I found these principles of clowning, although I shouldn’t have been, given how much I believe in the the comedy of survival and learning to play the fool. (Thanks, Kyle!)
   
   

6. My friend Wendy MacNaughton has added a “Grown-ups Table” to Draw Together. Her first two pieces of advice: Draw in front of the TV and start carrying your sketchbook everywhere.
   
   

7. “Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop.” An education essay by C. Thi Nguyen I read in anticipation of my kids going back to school next week. (For more of Nguyen’s work, see #2 in this newsletter from the archives.)
   
   

8. Music: new Deerhoof live in the studio and the perverse, perfect 90s nightmare, Now That’s What I Call Rushmore! Also, this note on listening to records: “Albums are mixed in order to be reproduced. When that process truly was 100% analog… the master tape was deliberately mixed with more high end than desired, because it was predictable that some of that would be lost in the reproduction process toward pressed records. In other words, the original master tape is not how those analog albums were meant to sound.” (I think this is related to why I’ve been enjoying the recent Beatles remixes so much. One remix I’ve been dipping into is George and Giles Martin’s Love mashup that they made for Cirque du Soleil.)
   
   

9. Movie: I loved Prey, the Predator prequel set 300 years ago. (I recommend the Comanche dub.)

   
   

10. RIP cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé. RIP songwriter Lamont Dozier. RIP artist Jeanne Steig. RIP designer Issey Miyake. RIP writer David McCullough. RIP writer and editor Bret Stetka, whose widow, Amanda Petrusich, is one of my very favorite music writers. (You can make a donation in his memory to a college fund set up for their one-year-old daughter.)

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to buy my books, hire me to speak, shop for some of my favorite gear (I get a cut), or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin