ThomasLitchford

The kind folks over at The Orwell Prize have begun a remarkable project: a daily blog post corresponding to George Orwell’s diary entries of 70 years ago. Here’s today’s entry:
This morning all surfaces, even indoors, damp as a result of mist. A curious deposit all over my snuff-box, evidently residue of moisture acting on lacquer.
Very [...]

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Deciding which of New York’s bookstores to visit should not have been difficult. There are a lot of choices—Barnes & Noble, Borders, Housing Works, St. Mark’s, Gotham Book Mart—but the one to see is the one we (kind of) stumbled on: Strand Books.
We arrived in the city with a long mental list of potential things [...]

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As publishing moves into the digital future, Jonathan Karp sees the end of disposable books:
Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction [...]

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Angel food cake is one of my favorite things. It’s so simple and good and sweet. I have never contemplated baking it at home. Danielle on the other hand, has made 2 sponge cakes (a lemon sponge cake and the angel food cake) in as many weeks.
There’s a story here. First: we’ve had a lot [...]

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I posted over at the Milspouse blog about the CSA Danielle and I are members of.
Now that it’s summer, we’ve got more veggies than we know what to do with: radishes, Swiss chard, broccoli rabe, spinach, mesclun, kale, and potted herbs that we can grow at home (we chose rosemary). Half the fun is hunting [...]

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WARNING: Sort of contains a Battlestar Galactica season 3 finale spoiler, so maybe don’t read it if you’re not caught up in the series.
Me: ‘Do you hear that, or am I losing it?’
Danielle: ‘Maybe…’
Me: ‘I keep thinking I hear music.’
A few minutes later:
Danielle: ‘You’re not losing it. It’s the copper ornaments hitting the window because [...]

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This is one of the best shorts I’ve seen in a long time.

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Danielle found this cool article over at the New York Times. It’s the story of a family who renovated a seriously broken down house over the course of twelve years.
Isn’t there just something quintessentially American about someone who will pay $65,000 for a 1913 Tudor and then do almost all the renovation work (minus the [...]

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So goes the jab from Nelson on the Simpsons toward a print journalist sitting on a discussion panel. It’s pretty funny.
But the trials and travails of print journalism - specifically newspapers - are quite real. This New Yorker article examines the issue in depth. Eric Alterman has written a broad review of print journalism’s difficulties [...]

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My friend Nancy, whom I love dearly, pointed out, via Facebook, that I haven’t posted anything new in a month, and that she’s bored. So.
As a tribute to Nancy, a filmmaker and mixtape-maker, I offer this little tidbit from Newsweek:
Philips first unveiled its cassette in 1963, but the durable plastic has long since been replaced [...]

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