PicoBlog

Skip to the end (or click here) for a puzzle I’ve made you (it’s been awhile, but I’m back, baby!). My crash course on how to do cryptic puzzles begins here. When I started writing this newsletter (more than a year ago!), I envisioned it as being primarily about cryptic crossword puzzles, with a healthy sidebar in other wordy or puzzly topics. That mandate has changed in a way that I’m pretty happy with—a mix of following my own interests and responding to feedback from readers, which is healthy and good and natural for a newsletter.

This sounds like a powerful and moving memoir. The way you describe the author's grief and the structure of the book is very insightful. I'm curious to learn more about their relationship and how she grapples with loss. Thanks for sharing! Expand full comment ncG1vNJzZminoJq7b7%2FUm6qtmZOge6S7zGinrppfnLywsNOoq6GhnqDEqsDHaKdoq5%2Bism7Ax6isoKCkqHqwuoyhnKudXZaztbHRZpimsV2htq%2BL1K2kmKufqr%2BksZyppqysVpi8rrnEp6usdaSnwqZy1K2kmKWVmba2uZywnJs%3D

So today my partner was talking about a long-held frustration of his: the assertion, popularized by Kendrick Lamar and oft repeated by many fans of hip-hop and hotepery, that the word “nigga” came from the Ethiopian word for king: Negus. As an Ethiopian-American, Gabriel’s list of grievances with this is fairly long and very justified: the continued exotification of East African culture and history (including, of course, the widespread exotification and oversimplification of Egyptian history and culture) by Black Americans, the danger in romanticizing the brutality of monarchy and the specific erasure of the brutality of Ethiopian monarchs, the fact that that’s not even how you say Negus (his uncle is named Negus, btw), and so on.

Today we're kicking off the third Summer of Math Exposition, SoME3. It's an event to encourage more people to create online math explanations, with prizes and a chance to have your work surfaced to a larger audience. Learn more at https://some.3b1b.co You could make a video, a blog post, or whatever else you dream up, about essentially any topic you'd like, as long as it's loosely related to math. Whether you're a student, a teacher, or just a math enthusiast, as long as you have a lesson worth sharing, we encourage you to make something and submit it.

“We can sing and dance / And we don’t need pants / See, we’re just like you!We’ve got regular jobs / Just with low doorknobs / See, we’re just like you!Yes, we graduate from Harvard / ‘At the head of my class!’But if you test sobriety / ‘I might not pass!’There’s no strings attached / And there’s no hand up my ass / We’re just…like…youuuuuuu!”Did everyone sing along? You didn’t? Well, all right, I’ll allow it, but only because so few people ever had the opportunity to enjoy FOX’s Greg the Bunny to begin with.

Humans are complex. We want to be seen, heard, recognized, understood and yet … we also crave anonymity. To be left alone. Lost in a crowd. One of many. Don’t look at me. Introducing, Dotted Line Face, a new emoji that embraces this tension of the human condition, landing on your device of choice via Unicode's Emoji 14.0 release. Dotted Line is one of a couple new face emoji that play with metaphor— an exciting development for your keyboard.

Thanks for showing me around last night Hope you don't think I don't care Because I do, I just don't know if I Should feel this bad about you It’s been a hectic past few weeks as I wrapped up my first year of grad school. While I’ve still been listening to Charli XCX’s CRASH on repeat, there has been plenty of new and old music to fill all my late nights.

Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train” is the greatest song of all time. The first time I heard it—blasting from a Spotify Radio playlist through the dinky Blutooth speaker I’ve had since 2016—it injected some desperately needed life into yet another of the early pandemic’s endless rounds of doing dishes. Scrub Daddy in hand, I tapped my feet and shoulder-danced through the song’s bouncy verses, which narrate the simple story of a horny woman waiting for her man to come home and give her the businesses: “It seems to last forever, and time goes slowly by / ‘til babe and me’s together, then it starts to fly.

Of all the songs that eventually got people tapping their toes to this weird band, “Avalon” was perhaps the biggest surprise. It surprised me when I wrote it. It surprised the band when I brought it to them, and it surprised some of the few folks who actually listened to us at the time, because it was so off-brand. This band that had just released an album where they klezmer-screamed about Polka, Cider, Gin and Poutine was suddenly doing, like, a… Bruce Springsteen ballad?