PicoBlog

Jennifer Burns at Capitaf with Milton and Rose. I assume Doug Irwin gets the photo credit based on the tweet from which the photo is taken. Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is a very accessible introduction to the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most influential economists. In terms of the breadth of his influence and impact on public policy, Friedman is arguably unrivalled. That influence is all the more remarkable for the fact that most of his contributions were initially met with outright rejection by the economics profession.

  He never saw fall. I think about that a lot. September isn’t quite it. It’s the time of year we start pining for fall. Trees are still green, on the cusp of color but unchanged. Football is on, but just barely. The air still sits warm and heavy on my shoulders when I head outside with a beer, bare feet on the rough porch slats that buckle in the humidity every summer.

When I joined Twitter in 2007, I was lonely and living in the middle of nowhere. I was in graduate school in a very small town in a part of the country where it snowed for seven or eight months out of the year, often more than 300 inches. It was beautiful but isolating. So very isolating. I loved what I was learning in school. By virtue of geography and being grad school broke, I wrote all the time.

Reader: I learned a new word recently. It’s always fun to learn a new word, right? And if you read the headline of today’s newsletter, you might’ve learned one too! If you see the word “mononym” written somewhere, it’s pretty easy to figure it out: “mono” meaning “one,” “nym” meaning name. But if you’d asked me the word for a person with one name, I wouldn’t have immediately come up with it unless you gave me time to break it down.

So the final season of The Last Kingdom arrived in Netflix in early March. After having watched all eps, which were released simultaneously on the platform, I have the following views on it below: As per the other seasons, the season was very well done. It’s historical fiction, of course. So not every point will match the established narrative. However, Uhtred was his normal strong and noble self. All other characters were on point too, especially in seeing Athelstan gain the battle experience for him to one day unite all of England under his rule.

When I used to live in Chorrillos, a fishing village on the southern end of Lima, Peru that was swallowed up by the city’s urban sprawl, I occasionally would see men with long poles climbing down the coastal cliffs, where waves crashed were crashing into the rocky shore. Later I learned that they were catching pejesapo (Sicyases sanguineus), a fish I have grown fond of in recent years. Often called the Chilean clingfish or frogfish in English (though not to be confused with anglerfish and others with the same moniker), pejesapo is not a pretty fish.

It was a good Christmas. But also lousy. Listen HERE to find out why. Thank you, all of you, for everything this year. E. Ver. Ry. THING! We love you. And as always, get up in these comments & tell us what is going on with you. What did you think of the episode? Do you have a New Year’s Resolution? What are you eating for lunch? TELL US! ncG1vNJzZmiapajGsbTIpaCpqKOewKW7yKeeoZ2il7K0wI2srJurpJawrHrCqKRoqF%2BptaZ5y5qqrWWgpLFuu8VmaWlqYw%3D%3D

Some things are better left in our past. Bath and Body Works blue raspberry scented roll-on glitter. Butterfly clips with springs. The milky white SoBe drink. Sometimes how we remember something is better than it actually is. And today that something is the beloved 90’s animated movie Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992, 75 minutes).  This newsletter goes out to Mike who casually suggested Ferngully to me via DM. Even though this one was painful - I am still taking suggestions.

If we’re honest, we can admit that life can be really hard. If we’re really honest, we can admit that the hard parts are often our own fault. I am here to help. Allow me to introduce you to the gloriously obscure Law of Holes. First a note to qualify this whole thing: There are places on the internet where people have tried to expand the Law of Holes beyond where it can reasonably go.