Totoro has been a staple in our household since our first (now 7) started watching movies.

Mutual Aid Highlander

Can't wait to see how you're going to fit them all in the store.

First order of business: buying minutes for her phone.

I've been looking forward to this one for a long time.

Must give these gifts with no strings attached

"Long silence. Made what would later prove fatal mistake: spent hours play mah jong on my phone, under impression I had unlimited roaming data in EU."

Oh that's nice.

What a time to be not dead.

"A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her on the basis of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and so much the worse for her. The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is a quiet reproach to its audience’s most parochial instincts. Its mission is not to indulge existing tastes but to challenge them—to create a certain kind of person and, thereby, a certain kind of public."

Replace "newspaper" with "bookstore" and this gets at the heart of what makes good bookstores valuable. (This is from Becca Rothfeld's piece on the undoing of the WaPo's Bookworld.)

What a time to be alive.

Very tempting.

This goes to show you that you can overcome any obstacle to fulfill the American Dream (shooting someone).

A screenshot of a paragraph that reads: "Still, on opening day in Hawthorne there were signs that this Applebee’s-Ihop union – which a staff member said should not be referred to as “Ihopplebees”, “Applehop” or “I, Apple” – might bring back clientele."

Give Adam Gabbatt a Pulitzer now.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

How Adults Took Over YA By treating young adult fiction as a laboratory for professional-class moralizing, the publishing industry has effectively abandoned actual teens.

"[C]hildish media — made for, marketed to, and consumed by adults — is everywhere, YA books being only one symptom of a broader cultural infantilization."

From a certain point of view, a good bookstore is at least mildly antagonistic toward popular culture.

I'm worried for Wednesday's groin.

An advance copy of Robert Suits' The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants, published by Princeton University Press

@robertsuits.bsky.social's forthcoming 'Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants' presents a compelling reframing of the hobo phenomenon. It's also fun to read.

I've got another 250 copies for you to sign at the end of the week.

It's incredible and from what I hear, the forthcoming translation of The Marsh King's Daugther is even better.

Rain or shine, UPS Steve stuck with West Marin - Point Reyes Light A Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly covering West Marin, including the towns of Point Reyes Station, Inverness, Bolinas, Stinson Beach, Marshall, Nicasio, Lagunitas, Woodacre, San Geronimo, Forest Knolls,...

It's nice to honor people who do good, modest work.

Los Angeles Times Book Prizes - Honorees and Awards Ceremony The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes celebrate the best books of the last year at our awards ceremony.

I enjoyed serving as a judge on the science and technology committee for the LA Times Book Prize this year. The five finalists are all very worthy books.

A Landscape Artist in Winter In rural Scotland, Andy Goldsworthy, the sculptor famed for his use of natural materials, contemplates his own decay.

“Change is best understood by staying in the same place, and it takes a while before you really get to see and understand change."

My solution is to punch right into the top of them. It's very satisfying, on all levels. (And it works.)

A bud on a California buckeye coming into leaf

Another bud on a California buckeye

The Aesculus californica is a harbinger of spring.

Spotify Adds Bookshop.org Links, Page Sync Spotify Premium users in the U.S. and U.K. will soon be able to purchase physical books through its new affiliate partnership with Bookshop.org. The company also added a feature that syncs audiobook l...

Bookshop's brand relies on cute posts explaining how indies are morally superior to Amazon, but with news that Bookshop is partnering with Spotify, whose CEO is deeply invested in an AI military startup, it's fair to ask where the line of morality is drawn.

I've read enough for it to feel too close to home.

Two signs at the Sausalito library. One reads "Boating" and the other "Alan Watts".

At the Sausalito Public Library.

Only in July.

The Giacomini wetlands in Point Reyes Station, with the Inverness ridge swathed in fog in the distance.

The Point Reyes variety of a white Christmas.