enthusiasm unbridled

An excerpt: 

My friend Christian, who is about a decade older than I am, has spent more than 20 years accumulating thousands of rare garage-rock records. And she gives great parties, schlepping her vinyl to and fro in a vintage carrying case. Meanwhile, another friend, who is my age and works at an ad agency, makes decent money D.J.’ing with songs he downloads to his laptop; once a month I make a quick buck or two doing the same. The difference between Christian and me is that I know the provenance of roughly only half of the songs I play, and I live in fear that some eager fan will approach the “D.J. booth” (that is, the counter with my laptop on it) hoping to nerd out on some performer that I only just heard of that day via YouTube. I fear that person because I used to be that person. And I know how much the old me would have hated the current me’s guts. But this guilt immediately washes away when I play the latest Azealia Banks song and everyone goes nuts.

My quarrel here isn’t with the idea that cool people don’t know as much about stuff as they used to. If you really want to drill deep into your interests, you still have that option. You just have to accept that most of your findings will have no social value.

Read the whole article (via NY Times)

Jhumpa Lahiri, My Life’s Sentences

Frank Bruni, Silent Night? Not with us.

Very proud of Jacob, this project and the whole cast and crew. 

girlwalkallday:

A Q&A with Jacob Krupnick by Julie Bloom at the New York Times

A few of Wendy McNaughton’s Snacks of the Great Scribblers in the Sunday Book Review. I like thinking of Emily Dickinson baking her own rye bread before writing a poem. 

Kristina Davis talks about convincing her husband to wear brightly patterned Robert Graham shirts (via NY Times) 

Leanne Shapton does it again: A Month of Wednesday Patterns

Excited to procure a copy of The Cloud Collector’s Handbook. The NY Times has a fantastic slideshow of cloud types and article about the book, which also alerted me to the existence of The Cloud Appreciation Society. 

The book contains photographs of dozens of cloud types, with information on how they form and how they differ from their close relatives; a guide to rainbows and other optical effects of clouds; and a glossary of technical terms. A chart shows how meteorologists classify clouds by genus, species and variety, the way biologists classify flora and fauna.

The NY Times goes DIY with good-looking recipes for chocolate-hazelnut paste, maple vinegar, tomato chili jam and more.