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the archivist March 5, 2024

Clementine Churchill: A Life in Pictures Sonia Purnell From the publisher: Clementine Churchill: A Life in Pictures is a fully illustrated and abridged edition of Sonia Purnell’s acclaimed biography, First Lady, including over 100 stunning and rarely seen photographs. Without Winston Churchill’s inspiring leadership Britain could not have survived its darkest hour. Without his wife Clementine, however, he might […]

the archivist January 24, 2024

South Dakota’s may plausibly be considered the most genuinely innovative, most inspirationally forward-looking professional orchestra in the United States. It is also the happiest professional orchestra I know, and the most engaged. Fulfilling Theodore Thomas’s credo, it “shows the culture of the community.” Link: The American Scholar | Shostakovich in South Dakota A manifesto for […]

the archivist September 8, 2023

About 18 months ago (in the summer of 1996) I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain); and under normal circumstances I would have walked out […]

the archivist May 6, 2023

Yes, volume 8 was posted before volume 7. Want your money back? The girl who grew up in Pasadena, took the bus, loved her mom, and wrote herself into the world. Vulture | The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler — With its sweet and loving disposition, combined with silky fur and elegantly droopy ears, the Cavalier […]

the archivist September 28, 2020

Tom Vanderbilt | Slate: The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy. The pallet. Cindy Lamothe | The Atlantic: When Kids Have to Act Like Parents, It Affects Them for Life. Some people who have to be responsible for their siblings or parents as children grow up to be compulsive caretakers. Christer Petley | […]

the archivist August 7, 2020

Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant Ann Gardiner Perkins Sourcebooks, 2019 Writing for an academic audience (such as in a dissertation) is totally different from how stories are told in popular non-fiction, so it is rare when an author can turn academic research into […]

the archivist August 7, 2020

I like these kinds of lists on other sites and newsletters, so why not give it a go? Judith Humphrey | Fast Company: Six Verbs That Make You Sound Weak (No Matter Your Job Title). I’m guilty of oh, 5 of out the 6. Olivia B. Waxman | Time: What Caused the Stock Market Crash […]

the archivist May 16, 2017

In our Global Archive series, we get to know the world a little better, one country (or territory) at a time. Today’s installment: Russia! So let’s start at the very beginning. Modern Russia has origins in about the 8th century CE. Vikings (called Varangians by the Greeks) came to rule over the people known as […]

the archivist October 30, 2016

HENRY V, ACT 3, SCENE I. France. Before Harfleur. Alarum. Enter KING HENRY, EXETER, BEDFORD, GLOUCESTER, and Soldiers, with scaling-ladders KING HENRY V Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But […]

the archivist April 8, 2015

The J.L. Hudson Company, known more commonly as Hudson’s, was a chain of department stores based in Detroit. Founded in 1881 by Joseph Lowthian Hudson (yes, that Hudson), the company grew in the city’s boom years, and by 1961, the flagship store on Woodward Avenue occupied an entire city block.  By the 1980s, the downtown […]

the archivist May 15, 2013

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. – George Orwell, Ninety Eighty-Four, ch.7. Til the End of Days by Javier de la Torre

the archivist September 26, 2012

  The last manned moon landing took place on December 11, 1972– nigh on 40 years ago. Whether or not you believe it was real, in the end, that wasn’t the point. The “Space Race” was the capstone of decades of a shared imagination of a future of unlimited promise and wholly unfamiliar, something that […]

the archivist July 7, 2011

J & I have been watching a TV show from the 90s on Netflix. Well, actually, several of them. The one we stream is a show that he learned to love in reruns, not so very long ago; I, on the other hand, occasionally caught a bit of it in its original run (if we […]

the archivist March 16, 2003

THE BALL POEM
John Berryman

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over–there it is in the water!
No use to say ‘O there are other balls’:
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy