Friends, I’m on a heavy deadline this week regarding the illegal stuff I referenced Saturday, and there wasn’t enough time to do a meditation.
Still, Thursday night, I grabbed an hour and thought, c’mon man, do something.
Sundays, I send out a newsletter that’s a round-up of things I’ve loved recently, in hope that (paying) subscribers will love them too. So, today’s newsletter will be that. See you next week for a return to the regular.
Blackouts by Justin Torres just won the Tournament of Books, an event I help to organize. It’s a wonderfully strange, elliptical novel.
If you want to know more about it—it also won the National Book Award—check out thoughts from our panel of 16 judges and huge community of readers.
Yes, I’m listening to the new Future album while driving around L.A., and it’s good, but I’m also loving a couple girly (and boy-y) new or recent singles.
Some praise for Bach’s cello suites with examples of what makes them great
What it’s like to experience the “very tame dread” of riding in a “paternoster,” aka, a cyclic elevator
Person after person tries to fly over a set of 25 stairs in France
I’ve been reading Rachel Cusk again, she’s just so smart and precise. Also, so published? I err toward being a completist of authors I really enjoy, and I’m about four Cusk books short. Right now I’m redoing Aftermath and the Outline trilogy, discovering them anew.
If you like things ambient, things choral, and maybe a mix of both (and things strange), two albums I just discovered from Philip Sherburne’s Futurism Restated.
Why do identical businesses open side by side in African cities? Because it generates an informal welfare system
A round-up of contemporary painters reviving Impressionism
A review of rejection letters written by Toni Morrison when she was a book editor. “It simply wasn’t interesting enough.”
I saw Love Lies Bleeding on Tuesday with a friend and really liked it. Weirdo ‘80s blood-splatter, a sort of lesbian True Romance—sexy thriller fun with an imaginative ending.
As the friend put it, leaving the theater, “Kristen Stewart is our generation’s James Dean.”
And maybe this was just a good week for gay erotic-thrillers, but I got invited to a screening Thursday night of Femme, starring my friend Nathan Stewart Jarrett. Out now!
Rain Szeto’s densely detailed ink and watercolor illustrations
An archive (of sorts) of naughty T-shirts
Pictures of signs in Hong Kong warning people about falling fruit
There’s a tiny new sushi spot opening in New York’s East Village soon, Bar Miller, and wow, beautiful. Some thoughts on the design.
A quarter of Paris residents live in government housing—an aggressive effort “to keep middle- and lower-income residents and small-business owners in the heart of the city”
“Wi-Fi” turns out not to be an abbreviated version of wireless fidelity—it’s a name invented by the same marketing company that came up with “Prozac”
Publishers put fake Van Goghs on their book covers
With many wishes to you for a good week, here’s the new, sunny-chill Alex Siegel song I listened to on repeat while drafting:
🪴 Hi. If you enjoy these meditations, I’m able to write them because some of you—less than 5% of the 4,800+ of you—support my work.
If you have the means:
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly mini-essay from Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ ideas of things to love, plus a monthly dispatch from the road, for some inbox wanderlust ⛰️
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. His most recent novel, The Last Kid Left, was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Titles mentioned in this newsletter are stored on a Bookshop list, which pays a small commission. For more—books, articles, etc—check out rosecransbaldwin.com.