Links for March 19th
The U.S. Senate and time itself, Ukraine, Pride & Prejudice, George Washington
Hello, hope you had a smooth week. Keeping it slightly brief this week, as a couple things are percolating.
Links
Highly recommend this process story of how the Senate accidentally tried to change time itself this week, featuring a number of amazing quotes from senators.
The three most compelling stories I read about Ukraine this week:
A. My colleague Christopher Miller attended the funeral of a solider, whose brother was also killed this month, that the entire 3,000-person town attended.
B. This story about the people returning to Ukraine, who are often mothers or daughters going to retrieve family members or help them.
C. Evan McMorris-Santoro interviewed Ukrainian Americans in Ohio who can’t sleep and are trying to get supplies there.
This is also like genuinely a line from my father:
Two more great quotes, the first from this obit of the founder of Details magazine (an overall nice, interesting read about New York in the 1980s and magazines):
“We are not an intellectual magazine,” she told Judy Klemesrud of The New York Times in 1985, the year Details won an award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. “We are strictly for people who have an artistic bent, or are fun-loving people. We represent a way of life: people who really like to laugh, have a good time, go out and care, at least some of the time, about what they wear.”
And then I thought this was a nice one from Joe Wright, about the way people read books:
Also, my dyslexia meant that I didn’t get to read these books when I was a kid. So when people say, “Well, this is a really important book,” I go, “Well, why?” I refuse to be cowed by the expectations of culture that people place on certain things. When I read Pride and Prejudice, I was like, “This is an amazing book! It’s written by this 21-year-old person who was discovering their own talent as they wrote it, and it has this youthful vibrancy and energy to it. So we have to have an 18-year-old play Elizabeth Bennet, and we have to make it about kids, and we have to make sure that it has that energy to it.” There are as many versions of Pride and Prejudice as there are readers.
Lastly, in cool stuff to look at: the Indiana cheerleaders getting the basketball unstuck.
Light book commentary
For some work reasons, I’ve been reading Chernow’s biography of George Washington, because I (correctly) thought I didn’t know that much about him. Anyway here are two tidbits from that:
1. Apparently, at what is now Pittsburgh, Washington just popped right into the Allegheny River and crossed it by horseback in December, while everyone else he was with was like, “We’ll take a canoe.” It is odd actually in that kind of Great Gatsby way to think about Pittsburgh not really existing, minus George Washington riding around on a horse.
2. This did make me laugh:
George routinely dropped into see Mary and his sister Betty Lewis, who had married Fielding Lewis, a wealthy merchant and lived nearby. (Betty bore an uncanny resemblance to George. Indeed, it was said that had she thrown on a military cloak and hat, battalions would have saluted her.)
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.