Links

Strange, wandering, often horrific reconstriction of stories from the history of Russia; a kind of poetic reflection on/of cultural identity. Reminds me of Curzio Malaparte’s Kaput in its (successful) attempt to capture a sense of reality by telling reality-adjacent stories more effective than mere description. Beautiful and remarkable writing, as usual.

Beautiful performance of a beautiful aria, made somehow more pleasing by being a studio performance rather than on stage; brings home the talent involved in doing the job of the artist when the infrastructure of performance is removed.

Bill Buford is a great writer and a great food writer. This is his story of dragging his family to Lyon where he wants to go to cooking school and how he started out working in a bakery. About life, death, love, family, and taking chances as much as it is about bread.

From before the LLM furore, this is one of the sanest considerations of what AI means, what it doesn’t, and how we should be thinking about it.

Can’t resist including this gem of an image from the article: