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

1. Artist Amy Sillman on how her creative work is about getting in and out of trouble.
   
   

2. Even though I didn’t watch it with a pair of headphones, I liked the documentary 32 Sounds, especially the spine-tingling scene of physicist Edgar Choueiri listening to a recording he made when he was 11 years old: “Although you exist in a different time, I am talking to you through this machine I have in my hands.”
   
   

3. “There’s something I started writing about, about a year ago: listening ‘with’ as opposed to listening ‘to.’ And it’s my sense that if I’m standing here, I’m just one of many organisms that are listening with one another within this environment.” Learning to listen with composer Annea Lockwood.
   
   

4. A poem: “I Worried” by Mary Oliver, read by Helena Bonham Carter.
   
   

5. In Tuesday’s letter, I asked, “How do you draw time?” I got some terrific responses from y’all, like the cosmic calendar from Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Richard McGuire’s Here (see #7 of this letter), and a TikTok video of co-workers comparing how they visualize the year.
   
   

6. Documentaries occasionally have epigraphs, and if I were to add one to Will & Harper, a movie about Will Ferrell going on a road trip with his trans friend Harper Steele, I’d choose The National’s lyric, “No, I wouldn’t go out alone into America.” (I noted the phrases “uncharted waters” and “unknown territory” in the story — to hit the edge of our maps can be scary, but also thrilling, and, if we carry on with a sense of adventure, ultimately enlarging.)  
   
   

7. “This is where I'm staying / This is my home…” I heard Bjork’s “Anchor Song” for the first time while shopping at Breakaway Records. Here’s a lesson from Ethan Hein on what’s musically special about the song.
   
   

8. A popcorn flick for grown-ups: Meg and I enjoyed the low-key “silver-fox charm” of Pitt and Clooney in Wolfs.
   
   

9. RIP actress Maggie Smith. (I’ve been meaning to watch her in A Room With A View.) RIP actor John Amos. (I’m almost always in the mood to watch Coming To America.) RIP “American Renaissance man” Kris Kristofferson. (It’s the perfect “open season on suckheads” to watch Blade.)
   
   

10. Your assignment this week comes from Kristofferson’s interpretation of William Blake: “He’s telling you that you’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.” 
    

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. For every book I write, I start a fresh banker’s box — here’s a peek from my Instagram stories at what’s inside them: