Listening to: Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman by Alan Rickman 📚 Starting from a few years after his screen debut in Die Hard, these entries skate across the surface of his life, but Jesus, so much surface, such a busy life. I like his tart, terse reviews of plays, movies, and people.

Finished listening: Sense of Wonder by Bill Schelly 📚 Mainly for comics enthusiasts, a memoir of Schelly’s growing up in the Silver Age of Comics and his involvement in comics fandom. So far, so ordinary. Yet his ordinary life includes his growing awareness of his homosexuality, fathering two children with a lesbian couple, and pouring enormous amounts of energy into a quite marginal artform – fanzines – that nevertheless was a lifeline for marginalized personalities like his own: artistic, nerdy, introverted, and – because of their love of comics – pretty socially isolated.

Daniel Lemire on how the current system of producing PhDs is backward and unsustainable. As he says,

“…[T]his system works like a charm as long as universities are expanding. But what happens when they hit the brakes? You guessed it – a PhD glut.”

During my year in PhD land I was always astonished by stories of the medieval personnel management practices and politics, and the infantilization of the PhD holder: stand before us every few years to justify your existence and why we should let you stay in the club.

A few personalities are well-adapted to the system and succeed in staying themselves while climbing their ambition’s ladder. But too few.

Most of what I write about here is minutia about me. So … me-nutia?

Across these differences, their food and service are so dependable that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) consults an informal “Waffle House Index” to determine the severity of a storm’s impact on a community, where “Red” corresponds to a closed Waffle House, “Yellow” corresponds to a limited menu, and “Green” indicates an open Waffle House.

Source: The Photographer Capturing the South From Waffle House Booths - Gastro Obscura

“It is a most wonderful comfort…”

Found by Liz: Lake Street Dive Plays “I Want You Back” On a Boston Sidewalk

The unchosen thing is what causes the trouble …