Austin Kleon - Not languishing, but dormant

Hey y’all,

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

1. I’m not languishing, I’m dormant.
    
2. Reading like a bird of prey. (Speaking of, The Coconuts have been elsewhere for a few weeks, so I’ve been consoling myself with the livestream of Merlin and Minerva, a pair of screech owls nearby who now have five owlets to feed!)
    
3. Alan Jacobs recommends tools for reading longform works online: Push to Kindle and Print Friendly for PDFs.
    
4. When Ryan Holiday told me he was opening a bookstore, I thought he was crazy, and that was before the pandemic. The Painted Porch is now open! (Here’s an interview we shot in the building a while back.) 
    
5. Specializing earlier in life doesn’t necessarily better prepare people for careers. (An excerpt from the new afterword to the paperback edition of David Epstein’s Range, one of my favorite books of 2019.)
    
6. This Alice Neel show at The Met looks spectacular. Here are reviews by Hilton Als, Roberta Smith, and Jerry Saltz. (More on her working life.) 
    
7. I finally watched Star Wars with my 8-year-old, and I had some thoughts.
    
8. Poem: “Not Waving but Drowning.” 
    
9. RIP astronaut Michael Collins, who, after being the first man to orbit the moon, said that he rarely looked at it “on purpose.” RIP singer-songwriter Anita Lane. (Here’s a remembrance by her former bandmate, Nick Cave.) RIP actor Michael Martin, the star of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. (I wrote a little bit about the movie here.)
    
10. I’m still experimenting with spending my weekends away from social media and it’s going great. Can’t recommend it enough.