Dolly Parton’s family requests, instead of flowers, donations to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a literacy initiative that provides a registered child with a book a month, from birth to the age of five.
Parton started the Imagination Library to honor her father, Robert Lee Parton Sr., who could neither read nor write. The program has given away more than 332 million books.
A related post
Dolly Parton on writing materials
[Yes, our household has donated.]
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library
Dolly Parton visits Captain Kangaroo
Elaine remembered this appearance, from October 27, 1976.
I had forgotten what a strange show Captain Kangaroo was. If you don’t have the patience for the marching band bit, Dolly arrives at 2:54 and prepares to sing “Cracker Jack” at 10:18.
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Dolly Parton (1946–2026)
“She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton”: from the Times obituary (gift links).
Dolly Parton was a force for good in the world. I wish that I weren’t sharing this news.
Fifty blog-description lines
For many years the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — served as what Blogger calls a “blog description line.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page, and always keeping the quotation marks that had enclosed Van Dyke’s words. I like looking back at these bits of language from a distance. Sometimes I recognize the context at once, sometimes not. “Who are we as a country?”: Jonathan Capehart, on PBS, November 5, 2024. “Yes”: my mom’s last word to me. “Trying to work off some ‘writing’ on you”? I had to look it up.
“Pineapples don’t have sleeves”
“Puzzled over”
“Off the streets and out of trouble”
“Minus glases”
https://vote.gov/register
“Do not obey in advance”
“Forward”
“It is never too late to change the future”
“You just open it up and you go”
“Could be screens”
“Constantly but quietly in motion”
“Who’s shining you?”
“No kings”
“WWDFWD?”
“I think starting an essay with a quote is a bit clichéd”
“No last-sale date”
“A bag with different things in it”
“Orange door hinge”
“On hiatus”
“Yes”
“Bananas”
“Love and mercy”
“Trying”
“Looking out”
“Across an imaginary transom”
“It doesn’t bend on its own”
“Two words”
“Like we used to say as kids on the playground, it’s a
free country”
“Blërg”
“Writes a chronicle”
“The beauty of fall is the beauty of things fading away”
“Too”
“Later, who knows?”
“Oh yeah?” “Yeah!”
“M’onderstanding”
“Overthinking”
“Early blogger energy”
“Trying to work off some ‘writing’ on you”
“Oh, I know that one”
“Look at this”
“Squirrels do bark”
“Take me to your simulacrum”
“Yes, Virginia”
“Tonight we bake”
“Not to be confused with fictional characters”
“Such as”
“Part-beagle”
“Wade through weeks”
“Is this the same morning, or a different morning?”
More blog-description lines
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty : Is there no end to this folly? : It would appear not : Still more items in a series : And still more
Stefan Zweig’s Salzburg mansion for sale
From The New York Times:
The Paschinger Schlössl, the former home of Stefan Zweig, the Jewish Austrian writer, unexpectedly appeared for sale with the French luxury real estate company Le Figaro Properties in June. The mansion has long been meaningful to Salzburg, Austria, which is also home to the namesake six-week festival celebrating classical music, opera and theater now in its 106th year.Zweig fled Austria for England in 1934. In 1940 he left England with his second wife for the United States. He left the United States for Brazil in 1941, where he committed suicide in 1942. The dramatic film Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (dir. Maria Schrader, 2016) is a brilliant portrait of a writer lost in exile. Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday (1943) is eerie reading in these times.
Hidden within two acres of wooded parkland on the Kapuzinerberg, a city mountain in Salzburg, this stately home has belonged to Wolfgang Porsche since 2020. The 83-year-old German car magnate purchased it from the same local merchant family, the Gollhofers, to whom Zweig’s first wife Friderike sold it, for 63,000 shillings, in 1937.
The castle, which cost Porsche €8.4 million ($9.59 million), is now priced at $14,540,900. It has been beautifully restored. Exactly what prompted the sale remains unclear. In 2025, the city controversially granted Porsche planning permission for a private access road and parking space tunneled into the mountain. The current listing highlights this permission, should its future owner act on it, as “an unparalleled feature within historic Salzburg.”
A longstanding campaign for the city or the University of Salzburg to secure the property for public use has been revived. A petition underscoring Zweig’s legacy in promoting “cosmopolitanism, understanding between nations, and peace in Europe” has garnered more than 6,000 signatures from actors, playwrights, musicians and others. When asked if the university stands a chance to purchase the property, Bernhard Fügenschuh, the school’s rector, said in a phone interview that it depends on the seller, but he hoped so.
Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zwieg posts (Pinboard)
Monday, August 24, 2026
Adam Kinzinger’s Substack
Like Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, This Is Adam Kinzinger is a useful daily digest of news. I keep both in my RSS reader, where they don’t get lost among e-mails.
Profs, busted
From The Chronicle of Higher Education : “Professors Were Singled Out for Using AI in Public Writing. Now They’re Defending Themselves.” An excerpt:
Two professors recently admitted to using generative AI to assist them in writing opinion articles for major publications, igniting a debate over the standards faculty should be held to in their public writing.The justifications from Hausmann and Stankova that the article goes on to detail are, well, something. What’s the harm? And everybody’s going to be doing it anyway.
The Financial Times added an addendum to a guest essay published August 13, disclosing that its author, Ricardo Hausmann, a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab, had used AI to “condense” his piece condemning President Trump’s tariffs, in violation of the outlet’s policy. The Financial Times is conducting an “editorial review process” to evaluate the piece in more detail, a spokesperson said in a statement. Hausmann said in an email that he hadn’t been aware of the policy when writing the article, adding that he believes AI is becoming too common for policies like that to exist.
On Tuesday, The Daily Californian reported that Zvezdelina Stankova, a teaching professor in the math department at the University of California at Berkeley, had used AI to edit an August 15 San Francisco Standard opinion article. The piece argued that the UC system was admitting underqualified students because it doesn’t consider standardized testing, and cited the fact that some students use AI to write admissions essays as a reason to bring back such requirements. A spokesperson for The Standard said in a statement that it allows AI use to assist with writing, but expects that “humans are behind every article.” The piece reflects Stankova and her colleagues’ “original analysis, research, and expertise,” the spokesperson added.
Hausmann violated the outlet’s guidelines; Stankova didn’t. But beyond a newspaper’s code of conduct, what ethical responsibility — if any — do professors have when it comes to AI in their public-facing work, given that students are generally expected to refrain from using it to write?
Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)
[I’m not interested in focusing OCA on AI in academia. But I couldn’t pass up this item in the news.]
“That’s very perspicacious of you”
Today’s Dustin : Kevin reads a thesaurus. See also these two — 1, 2 — Zippy strips.
Related posts
Beware of the saurus : Rewording : Rogeting
Sunday, August 23, 2026
Mutts vibrations
[Mutts, August 23, 2026. Click for a larger view.]
Today’s Mutts takes up a great American song. I’m glad I didn’t miss the title (aka “throwaway”) panel.
Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts and Mutts posts (Pinboard)
[I know: “Good Vibrations” did not appear on the Pet Sounds album. For anyone who needs it: the album cover.]
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