PicoBlog

Hello everyone! I’ve seen some interesting conversations about British and American English on social media recently, including on my Facebook page, so I thought I would put all my thoughts together in a newsletter, along with some answers to common questions, which you can find at the end. Let me start by telling you that I’m British. I’ve spent most of my life in Nottinghamshire but I also spent twenty years in Cambridge and four years in the North East.

When the soundtrack of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show goes quiet—which is to say, when the dialogue and the steady diet of Hank Williams songs stop—the wind picks up, howling through the tiny town of Anarene, Texas. It’s a haunting noise, as if nature has come to reclaim this small flicker of civilization that is slowly and inexorably burning out. Perhaps there was once a time when downtown bustled with enough activity to mute the howls of the arid plains surrounding it, but once Sam “The Lion,” the owner of the pool hall, the café, and the movie theater, dies of a stroke, Anarene essentially dies with him.

Although Eastern Europe is a little outside of our typical purview, I leapt at the chance to speak with Jacob Mikanowski about the region’s history. Jacob is a historian, journalist, and critic. He’s written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The New York Times, appeared on NPR and the BBC, and is the author of Goodbye, Eastern Europe, published in July. Jacob’s focus on the diversity of the area, both in the book and in our interview, contextualizes the Russo-Ukrainian War and a whole lot more.

Good morning! Today is Wednesday, August 21, 2019. Need to subscribe? Sign up for free here (charlotteledger.substack.com). Send to a friend. Nearly a year ago, a group of about 90 doctors with Mecklenburg Medical Group left parent company Atrium Health to launch an independent practice — Tryon Medical Partners. It was one of the Charlotte area’s biggest healthcare stories of the year, as it defied the trend toward industry mergers and consolidations. The doctors pushed Atrium to allow them to leave by filing a lawsuit that claimed the hospital system was “self-serving” and “monopolistic” and run by a “bloated management bureaucracy.

Errol Morris is one of the greatest documentary filmmakers to ever live, a searching and innovative artist with an abiding interest in the complexity of human nature—our eccentricities, our thought processes, and our capacity for creativity and self-deception. With his new feature, The Pigeon Tunnel, currently playing on Apple TV+, now’s a good time to look back on a career that’s wound through politics and portraiture, and expanded the language of the non-fiction form.

Hello, dewy dust bunnies, and welcome to another edition of the The Don’t Buy List! Let’s start with a little Mary Oliver, shall we? From “Of The Empire”: We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and re… ncG1vNJzZmiilajAqq%2FAnZyfoZ6ke7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZp6toJ28s7XAZpmemaWpxm65xKacrA%3D%3D

Colin here. At the gym this morning, the Pussycat Dolls' track “Don’t Cha” was playing. The spare, bare-bones gym tends to veer between Rage Against the Machine, country, and iconic pop hits depending on who is steering the algo. But, mid-rep, I remembered a particularly interesting backstory to the song. The original version was by Tori Alamaze, a former aesthetician and backup singer for OutKast, and written by CeeLo and Busta Rhymes.

(Significant spoilers for David Copperfield by Charles Dickens to follow, if you can spoiler a classic book of English literature.) Dearests, School textbooks have killed Charles Dickens for a lot of people. When I posted on Facebook yesterday (I don’t use it much except for a) stalking people on my newsfeed, b) moderating my insane Fans of Cats group with its daily drama and c) cross-posting photographs from my Instagram which it no longer does automatically) about finishing David Copperfield for the first time, my friend Ashwati (hi!

FIRST — Exciting news! My book is on sale for only $15.69 on Amazon right now. That’s over $10 off! If you’ve been waiting for a sign to pick it up, this is it! Order here. I stumbled across the Dorito Theory on Tiktok and I’m shook. Look — there isn’t anything radically disruptive here, but I just love it when someone puts a name to something I can fully relate to, and describes it in a way that makes me feel seen.