Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week: 

1. Since I finished the new book, I’ve been using the daily blog to stretch out a little bit, keep my writing muscles from atrophying too badly. Lately I’ve been writing a lot about parenting: how children are velociraptors testing your fences for weakness and what a jazz it is to have a little budding artist in the house. 
    
2. I cannot get enough of Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies. Sweet and smutty and dirty and pretty brilliant. If you like Please Kill Me or Patti Smith’s Just Kids or The Andy Warhol Diaries, I think you’ll dig it, too. My one beef with the book is that it doesn’t convey just how wonderfully visual the notebooks really are. (Will definitely go in my file of inspiring diaries.)
    
3. A few more Leonardo da Vinci notebooks are now online.
    
4. The women who transformed Rolling Stone. 
    
5. The truth about Devo, one of America’s most misunderstood bands. (See also: Mark Mothersbaugh on the politics of Devo’s use of synthesizers.) The new book looks very cool.
    
6. I always enjoy stories about celebrities who walked away so they could come back. (Several of the dudes in Journey seem pretty solid?)
    
7. Labor day has come and gone, but it’s always a good time to read my favorite books about work.
    
8. Why we need libraries. You know I’m a library tourist and the NYPL is one of my favorite places in the world, so Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Ex Libris is right up my alley. Best of all, it’s now streaming on PBS. (There’s still time to complete your summer reading assignment, btw.) 
    
9. Ear candy: this Jonathan Richman song has been of great comfort to me lately. 
    
10. RIP Kenny Shopsin. I highly, highly recommend his daughter Tamara’s memoir about her dad’s philosophy and growing up in the restaurant, Arbitrary Stupid Goal. One of my very favorite books I read in 2017.