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Photo courtesy Boston Globe We’re doing Mahler’s 8th Symphony this weekend. It’s the first time for me since 2015 and only the second since I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus 19 years ago. (I wrote about that experience performing with James Levine, the late great Johan Botha, Deborah Voigt, and Heidi Grant Murphy (the soprano in the rafters) among others, at the time). The work remains galactic in its scope …

Carl Becker told his fellow historians in 1931 that we are not dissimilar from “bards and story-tellers and minstrels, of soothsayers and priests, to whom in successive ages has been Read more The post Kollin Fields on Daniel Wickberg’s *Thinking the Modern: A History of American Thought, 1860-2000* first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.

Big Fish (2003) Tim Burton, you bastard, you’ve done it again. Hit a remarkable 0.7 Titanics on the cry-o-meter and made me want to call my papa. (8/10) Alien: Romulus (2024) I reviewed this one in full back in August, so go check that out if you want more detail. A stylish sequel (sevenquel?) that makes the world of Alien more believable than ever and introduces some great new talent. …

Here's my weekly update with a few interesting random findings that I came across the last week or two. I am going to try to make sure they're here in time for you to enjoy with your morning coffee (or beverage of choice) every Saturday or Sunday, and include some of my thoughts around them.The Latest Drippings ☕️I've said it before - I love the Apple Watch. Not only has …

It is October! Time marches relentlessly forward, and 2024 nears its end. My Week I had a busy week, lots of medical errands and paperwork and end-of-month things to attend to. I think I had to go the hospital on 3 out of 5 weekdays during the week, mostly for paperwork stuff, but also to get some test results we've been waiting for and have been really anxious about and …

My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup

We’ve really entered autumn this week, it’s cold, it’s grey and the leaves turn yellow and red. And somehow it’s also the weird, weird moment of the year when not everyone realized that the warmer times are over – just now I went for a walk, nicely wrapped in my puffy jacket and with a hat and there were people around with only a t-shirt. My good man, it’s 8°C! …

It was almost exactly ten years ago when I last saw June Tabor and Oysterband at the De La Warr Pavilion, my first time visiting this stunning piece of 1930s architecture. I wasn’t even living down here yet but a friend had a spare ticket going and I came down for the weekend. So, when Oysterband announced their ‘Long Long Goodbye’ farewell tour with June Tabor, once again, as their …

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Open Graph images are what websites such as Twitter choose to display when showing a preview to a page. There are plenty of ways to generate these dynamically - like using Netlify Edge Functions, for one. But recently somebody posted a plugin they’d built the Eleventy Discord server, which gives the ability to create (fairly simple) Open Graph images at build time. Installation Installation was pretty straightforward: npm i --save-dev …

PolemicistOut 27th September, self-released The paradox of well known phrases is that, by virtue of wide usage, their meaning becomes unknown. The commonplace phrase goes unexamined. Melodic black metal is one such example. Prima facie an obvious, self-explanatory subgenre. But one that has thus far avoided re-appraisal or revision since the subgenre’s solidification in the mid-90s, leaving it vulnerable to misapplication. Polemicist, through their patient, focused study of classically minded, …

Sometimes, it would be interesting to see what you can build using your favorite framework. This is especially useful when you’re in the phase of selecting a framework for your next project. Open-source projects can be useful since you can dive deep into the code and see how people have solved similar problems. And since these projects are open-source, you can also contribute to them and learn from the community. …

There is a positive feedback loop that happens when you make a tool for people, how people that use it inform what you build, and in turn what you build informs their creative decisions. We will talk about how building these alternatives helps to create a better overall culture where everyone can participate. Let's leave behind monopolies, enshitification, and present tech controversies to discuss building better avenues of participation with …

The Children's BBC comedy Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde, which starred a young Olivia Hallinan as a schoolgirl who involuntarily transforms into a monster after her chemistry project goes wrong, but was otherwise very very loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson's original novella, ran for three series between 1995 and 1998. It manages to get the word "booze" into its first episode, as part of an admirable commitment to pushing …

"I see you brought some honkies with you, Jelly Roll," said the huge Negro man."Yes, I have, John Henry," said Jelly Roll, "but I assure you they're cool, daddy-o.""The lady looks cool," said the man."Why, thank you, kind sir," said Miss Blackbourne, "for the delightful compliment.""You can come in," said the big man. "May I ask your name?""Blackbourne is the name, Margaret Blackbourne," said Miss Blackbourne, "but, please, call me …