Raising the bar

UC Berkeley Law School: no AI. UT Austin School of Law: engage students so that they’re not distracted by their devices. U Chicago Law School: no phones, laptops, or tablets in the classroom for first-year students. Read more: “To AI-Proof Lawyers, Some Law Schools Restrict Technology” (Inside Higher Ed ).

Note to UT Austin: the simplest way to keep students from being distracted by their devices is to remove the devices: Occam’s Razor with things.

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Deborah Vance’s notebook

[Jean Smart as Deborah Vance. From “Hacks,” the final episode of Hacks (2026). Click for a larger notebook.]

The white print on the back of that notebook means that it’s not a Moleskine. Notebook Stories guesses that it’s a Mont Blanc. All I can say is that it must be one of the most consequential notebooks in the history of notebook sightings.

I soured on Hacks somewhere in the fourth season — too much meanness. The fifth season brings the series to a more kindhearted close. Still not really my cup of tea, but it is a cup of tea, and it’s good tea. And Jean Smart is terrific.

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Grammar and soccer

From The New Yorker , “British Grammar Invades the American World Cup.” These sentences sum up what’s at issue:

In this cultural exchange, America is a winner.

Or are they?

I’m having difficulty deciding if are/is is a matter of grammar or a matter of usage. Usage, I think.

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Dear Lara

The documentary film Dear Lara (2026) is the work of Lara St. John, a world-class Canadian violinist and first-time filmmaker, who has set out to chronicle a long history of sexual abuse in the world of classical music. The title is inspired by the many letters and e-mails that St. John received after making public the story of her time studying at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she was sexually abused and raped by her (so-called) master teacher, Jascha Brodsky. She was fourteen. He was seventy-eight. Administrators at Curtis — no surprise — did nothing.

It’s a harrowing documentary, with account after account from survivors and their loved ones of powerful men acting, sometimes over many decades, without fear of consequences, in institutions that proved to be appallingly complicit. We see screens full of messages of support and celebration as abusers move on to new positions, and screens full of messages of misogynistic hatred directed at those who have brought charges against their abusers. And it all hits close to home: Elaine went to school (Juilliard) with one victim (whom she didn’t know) who later took her own life. And we both attended a concert not knowing that one of the musicians, whom Elaine knew in elementary school, had been that victim’s fiancé.

I want to say that it’s beyond me how men purportedly devoted to the beauty and joy of music can prey upon those who are supposed to carry that beauty and joy into the future. But it’s not really beyond me: there is no reason that a devotion to art cannot exist alongside predatory brutality.

After a month’s streaming in Canada and several screenings in the United States, Dear Lara is, for now, unavailable. I hope that will soon change. The film tells a compelling and disturbing story and deserves to be widely seen, via a distributor, or PBS’s Independent Lens, or some other means.

Thanks to Lara St. John, who trusted Elaine with a link (sorry, not to be shared) that let us watch the film. Elaine has also written about the film.

Dear Lara (The film’s website)

Joey’s

Elaine and I hit on a marketing scheme: coffee for babies, sold under the brand name Joey’s. The logo: a baby roo in a pouch, holding a cup and winking.

Making a satisfactory drawing of this logo is beyond my art skills. (And I won’t do AI.) Instead, please enjoy this image of children enjoying their piping hot cups.

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[A necessary disclaimer: you should never ever give coffee to a baby.]

And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street and East 6th Street

[245 Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York. c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much larger view.]

It was the cat (or dog?) that caught my eye. I didn’t realize that no. 247, just north, was to house the Ravenite Social Club. I made my way down the sidewalk and noticed the cart:


I wondered what might be found at 734 East 6th Street, on the Lower East Side, or in what is now known as the East Village:


Buildings and carts, one bearing an address. The large cart suggests the rag trade. But look here:


Whoomp, there it is, sort of:


I doubt that this cart had any idea that it was featured in at least two — or more? — tax photographs.

After looking more carefully, I realize that it’s not the same cart - the 3 and the T of ST. are clearly different on each cart. And yes, to the reader who wondered about “at least”: I should’ve omitted those words.

Did you spot the woman at the window in the 6th Street photographs?

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I always dislike it when a puzzle — a crossword, the NYT ’s Connections, whatever — uses a solver’s knowledge against the solver. Take, for instance, today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell. 9-A, five letters, “Two-time pianist on Bennett albums.” The reasonable answer is EVANS, as in Bill, with whom Tony Bennett recorded two celebrated albums’ worth of duets. But no, that’s wrong. The two-time pianist whose name fills the squares was indeed the pianist on two albums with Bennett. But the clue suggests a duo, a pairing. And the answer, no, not really.

As my son would say, Anyhoo. Moving on.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, four letters, “Intro for the word.” This clue gets the puzzle off to a weirdly and difficult start. Some prefix?

6-A, five letters, “Atlantican princess of filmdom.” It helps to have granddaughters.

8-D, four letters, “Roaming browsers.” Hello, friends.

18-A, ten letters, “Mojito adjuncts.” I’ve never had a mojito, but thank goodness for this clue.

20-A, twelve letters, “High-profile gridiron celebrity.” TRAVISKEL — no, doesn’t fit. There are whole areas of American culture that are off my radar.

26-A, five letters, “‘I’ve got it for now.’” Never heard it said. My two millennial informants tell me they’ve never heard it either. (I’ve never heard anyone say ‘I’ve got it for now’ either.)

35-D, five letters, “Formal presentation.” Oof.

46-A, twelve letters, “Oscar category for The Incredibles.” I’d like a generalized clue. I’d also like italics.

47-D, four letters, “Small score” and 48-D, four letters, “Small store.” Nicely paired.

My favorite in this puzzle: 24-D, eleven letters, “Out of time?” Just because I liked seeing the word.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Bleak House again

Thinking more about the recent Atlantic article about the end of reading and its horror story of college students struggling to read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House : I looked up the source (account required): Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel’s “They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.” And I began to wonder: does it make sense to give students the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s novel with nothing in the way of context, nothing to orient their reading? And: is it wrong to think it appropriate and necessary to offer some context?

I looked up the handout (that odd word) that kicked off my teaching of Dickens’s novel. Bear with me:

Bleak House

Charles Dickens (1812–1870), 1853

What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! [Chapter 15]

Present time: perhaps the late 1830s. The events of the novel unfold in relation to the Court of Chancery, a court devoted to matters of wills and trusts. As a note to our edition of the novel says, the Court of Chancery was “a byword for inefficiency and delay,” a world of endless legal entanglement and complication. One of those endless entanglements is a lawsuit known as Jarndyce and Jarndyce. (Jarndyce is pronounced jarn dice .)

Bleak House is a novel of “connexions,” some of them immediately graspable, others remaining mysterious or unrecognized for a long time. Jane Austen gives us a world whose connexions range across a limited cast of characters drawn almost exclusively from the English aristocracy. Dickens gives us a world in which connexions multiply unpredictably to form a vast network of social relationships among people from all walks of life. Austen describes her task as a novelist as a matter of working on a tiny piece of ivory with a fine brush. Dickens, we might say, is painting on a canvas as large as a city.

Bleak House is an example of what’s called serial publication: the novel appeared in twenty installments over nineteen months. We’ll be taking twenty-one classes to read the novel, one installment per class (at least twice as much time as many college profs spend on the novel). I want for us all to really read Bleak House, not run and stumble through it.

Some advice about reading

1. Read nothing but the novel. Consider yourself honor-bound not to look elsewhere. There are mysteries in Bleak House that should remain mysteries until it’s time to figure them out. Reading any sort of summary will ruin the novel for you. Don’t read the notes at the back of the Penguin edition (they’re prefaced by a warning to first-time readers). Don’t read anything but the pages of the novel. Some details and references will therefore be unclear, but that’s okay. We’re not going to get everything.

2. Take notes as you read. Much of the challenge—and pleasure—of the novel lies in working out the connexions among the novel’s people and in figuring out the significance of past incidents as they fall into place in the novel’s design. If you don’t make a record of your reading, you’ll be lost. We’ll spend lots of time in class putting together our sense of what’s going on, just as readers of the serialized text no doubt did.

3. Don’t fall behind in the reading. If you do, the novel will soon become impossible. Put in the time to read for every class, and come to class excited to talk about what you’re reading.

4. Recognize that much of what makes this novel the great pleasure that it is is not to be found in “what happens.” Reading for “what happens” will leave you at many points pretty disappointed. But reading for Dickens’s genius as a storyteller, as a creator of characters, as a describer of scenes, as an inventor of dialogue, will leave you (I hope!) absolutely delighted. Dickens is a great entertainer. Give him the chance to delight you as he has delighted millions of readers (in countless languages) before you.

See? I’m always optimistic.

My fear is that “They Don’t Read Very Well” feeds the assumption that we can’t ask students to engage difficult texts, that we must, as the mantra goes, meet them where they are. It’s better to invite them in, I say, and then offer a map of the territory: You Are Here.

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On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. Here he is in July 1919, writing to Violet Schiff, a musician married to Sydney Schiff, who translated Le Temps retrouvé using the pseudonym Stephen Hudson:

I can feel that my caffeine is no longer strong enough to help me write you. But before saying adieu, I should like to reply to an objection of yours which moved me very much: “I feel that I shall have many sorrows.” I think perhaps by that you mean, since you so graciously regard Swann as a living person, that you were disappointed to see him become less sympathetic and even ridiculous. I can assure you that it has caused me great pain thus to transform him.

But I am not free to go against the truth and to modify the laws that control the characters. “Amicus Swann, sed magis amica Veritas.” The nicest people sometimes go through nasty phases. I promise you that in the following volume when he becomes a Dreyfusard, Swann once more starts being sympathetic. Unhappily, and this causes me much sorrow, he dies in the fourth volume. And he is not the principal character in the book. I should have liked him to be. But art is the perpetual sacrificing of inclination to truth.

From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

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[Found by opening the book Augustine-style, as I’ve found other passages from letters to post on Proust’s birthday. “Amicus Swann, sed magis amica Veritas": Swann is a friend, but truth is a greater friend, a play on Plato.]

Diplomatic notebook

Mike Kells (Tyrone Power) is a diplomatic courier. And he carries a notebook. Here he makes notes in a train corridor. From Diplomatic Courier (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1952).

[Click any image for a larger view.]

I always like seeing a notebook take over the screen. I think of it as a reality effect — proof that someone is really writing something.

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All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)