Hope you’ve had a smooth week.
This is yet again a slightly leaner set of links (it’s been a real spring), and next week, there will be no newsletter. Back in May!
Links
The LA Times profiled the mountain lion that lives in Griffith Park:
“Of course, you go down the road of, ‘Why did you do that to Killarney [a koala]?’” said Beth Schaefer, the zoo’s director of animal programs. “But we’re in Griffith Park, and Griffith Park is his home, and we have to respect that. You can’t hold a mountain lion accountable for being a mountain lion.”
The big experiment with the pitch clock in the minors has shaved 20 minutes off of games on average. Let’s do it, MLB! This weirdly gets people going, tradition-wise, but like, come on, they’re the best players on earth, most of these people are getting paid $1 million a year, they can pitch or stand in the box a little faster.
Tangentially: A sharp piece about the dominating Oklahoma softball team / the virtues and fast-paced quality of softball.
In more cool Homefield t-shirts, they just put out a set of great Air Force Academy t-shirts.
Light book commentary
More on George Washington sometime soon.
On NYT critic Molly Young’s recommendation, I read Mabel Seeley’s 1941 Mystery of the Year, The Chuckling Fingers. (The titular fingers are a fictional rock outcrop on the North Shore of Minnesota that make a ghostly noise — nice, Mabel.) Young described it as “Nancy Drew for adults” and advised:
Read if you like: The 1944 movie “Gaslight,” Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” eavesdropping, taking liberties, Minnesota
I was a Hardy Boys reader (Nancy Drew was for girls), but same principle, and she is 100% correct. This is definitely one of those mysteries where people dressed up like old fashioned LL Bean ads have to solve murders because the useless police never do! People are described as being “nettled,” and sit in diners drinking coffee trying to figure out who among them is the killer. Definitely recommend for a beach or vacation-like setting.
I also finally read Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis, which — much like certain Edith Wharton novels — feels extremely contemporary, even though he published this in 1900. The general line: Two teens fall in love and scheme to get married; later on, the husband, the narrator, believes his wife has betrayed him. There’s a level of irony and unreliability throughout, so it’s not ever quite clear who’s bad, good, wrong, and right; I was looking for something serious but not containing totally brutal subject matter, and this really worked here for that. There are also a good number of turns to consider, like so:
Escobar went on opening up his whole soul, from the street door to the back fence. A person’s soul, as you know, is arranged like a house, not uncommonly with windows on all sides, with much light and pure air. There are also ones that are close and dark, without windows, or with few, and these with bars on them after the manner of convents and prisons. Others are like chapels and bazaars, simple sheds or sumptuous palaces. I do not know what mine was.
A friend gave me this book a while back, but more recently, Parul Sehgal has written quite a bit about the author, as well.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.