Closing tabs

The most amazing tiny food ever!   (Link courtesy of Julia.)  His Etsy store also has some very good things: I will have to get the Christmas cookie earrings for someone I know will like them.

Stephen Burt on zines.

Edmund White on Cranbrook.

Minor opera thoughts to follow later this evening once I have (I hope!) finished my grading....

How to Keep Rabbits for Profit and Pleasure

A nice piece on the London Library.  (My grandfather had a lifetime membership, obtained in the early 1950s; he must have gotten more than fifty years of use out of it, but my frugal grandmother still sometimes expressed a wish that it could be transferable to me after his death...)

A medical study of the Haitian zombie.  (Via Hari Kunzru.)

The curse of the trochee?

The great game

It is far from the usual Light Reading fare, but I cannot resist the opportunity to link to two major pieces published this week by my dissertation advisor David Bromwich. In general, I have been extraordinarily lucky in my teachers; but perhaps I learned more from David Bromwich than from almost anybody else, not just in terms of an abiding obsession with the writings of Edmund Burke but by virtue of a language for talking about the connections between thought and intellectual temperament and character that I rely upon very heavily in daily life.

The first is at the LRB, on Obama's delusion ("His way of thinking is close to the spirit of that Enlightenment reasonableness which supposes a right course of action can never be described so as to be understood and not assented to"). The second is this NYRB review of Taylor Branch's Clinton book:

Maybe Clinton in his final year in office spoke more easily; in any case, the narrative has a sharper focus now, and the anecdotes fall into a characteristic rhythm:

The president was eating a bowl of bran in January. He said Bob Squier, the campaign consultant, never had a colonoscopy in his life. They diagnosed him six months ago, and he died today at sixty-five. The end comes on quickly if you don't catch it early. "I always eat bran when a friend dies of colon cancer," Clinton said.

Slaves to the ink bottle

From Thomas Mallon's New Yorker piece on Abraham Lincoln's long afterlife:

The American craving for Lincoln soon led to the use of his likeness and name to sell life insurance, cholera remedies, and lead (“By Its Purity & Excellent Qualities This Lead Deserves The Name Bestowed Upon It”). Children began playing with Lincoln Logs, invented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, and, in a telling trivialization, during the 1909 centennial the Waterman Company’s new no-dip Lincoln Fountain Pen guaranteed “the emancipation of millions of slaves to the ink bottle.”