PicoBlog

If there is one question I am asked almost daily, it is this: What’s the name of your favorite thrift store? The answer is almost always that I go to as many as I can, as often as I can. But there are some gems out there—it just takes a little while to round them all up. I have for a long time wanted to create really useful, paid subscriber-only content, where I detail exactly where I shop when I travel (or when I’m home, in Ponte Vedra and the surrounding areas).

Please tap the {{heart}} button, which helps new readers find All Predictions Wrong. In 1957, Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to ensure the safety of the Little Rock Nine, first African Americans to enroll at Arkansas’s famed Central High School. The school was desegregated, with violence avoided. But city fathers weren’t amused. They began work on an urban highway that would bisect Little Rock along its west-east axis, with the mainly black neighborhoods of the south side physically separated from affluent mainly white neighborhoods – and the state capitol building – to the north.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little. Diogenes We've all been there: lured by the siren call of a fast-food ad, only to be met with a reality that falls short of the promise. But what happens when that disappointment crosses the line into deception? Enter the recent class action lawsuit filed against Arby's Restaurant Group in the Eastern District of New York.

Last week, Netflix released a list of viewing statistics for over 18,000 films on their streaming service. The list covers all the films and TV shows that were watched for at least 50,000 hours during the first six months of this year (January to June), and my friend Matt Page notes that a few Bible films appeared on this list. I thought it might be fun to expand on Matt’s list by searching for all the titles that I’ve been including on my Bible-movie box-office chart, and by doing a bit of back-of-the-napkin math (as Sean McNulty calls it) to see how many times a film or show would have been viewed if every single film or show had been watched from start to finish.

Have you ever noticed that a lot of the same restaurants come up in travel articles about Medellin? That’s not uncommon in travel journalism. But we still wanted to put our theory to the test, which is why we went through Medellin travel articles from 11 different media outlets and tallied the results. Below you’ll find a list of the restaurants that were mentioned by the most media outlets. We also put together a chart featuring the Medellin restaurants that each of the 11 media outlets recommended.

I did it again. Last week, the New York Metropolitans announced that they plan to retire the uniform numbers of a couple of franchise legends, Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry. The same day, local radio personality Lance McAlister asked a fairly benign question over on twitter/x: “Which Reds player should become the next to have his number retired?” I thought the answer was self-evident, so I did what I usually do on twitter: I responded with what I thought was a sarcastic answer.

“Whipstitch” is a niche slang term meaning an instant. In the South, it constitutes an idiom meaning in short intervals— the birds, they come to feed there every whipstitch— and it is mainly a term used in sewing and embroidery, to sew with stitches passing over an edge, in joining, finishing, or gathering. Whipstitching is also a very cute book-binding method. This is my attempt to write more in the moment— allow some glimpse of what is currently being fed through this finicky, slow machine.

We adopted a new family member last week from the wonderful Hounds in Poundsrescue in New Jersey. Please meet Sugo! He’s a beautiful mutt who we found out is roughly half Husky and half mini-Schnauzer. His sibling’s adoptive parents named them both “Shnusky’s!” Sugo is about 1.5 years old, so not quite a puppy and not a full grown adult quite yet. He’s a gentle, skittish muppet who’s gaining confidence every day.

About a year ago, my ladyfriend Hannah and I watched The Break-Up, a film that embraces one of cinema’s richest traditions: female characters written by men.  The Break-Up is a film directed by a man (Peyton Reed) and written by two other men (Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender) based partially on a story by a fourth man (Vince Vaughn).* It’s a film that doesn’t really work for me, but I can see why it—and Jennifer Anniston’s character in particular—resonates with many people.