Matt Weiland

"In fact, the crowd was so quiet [hearing "Purple Rain" for the first time], producer David Z had to tweak the recording. 'I cheated and put a crowd from the Minnesota Vikings in the audience track.'"

Minneapolis Tribune, Sunday, August 7, 1983. Item in music news column with two photos from the Aug. 3 concert at First Avenue. One is Prince playing guitar with arm raised and a kind of wild look on his face, and the other is Loyce Houlton of the Minnesota Dance Theater with Prince beaming at her, on stage. The text says the concert, with tickets at the high price of $25, raised about $2,300 for the dance company. Houlton had caught Prince, who took classes the MDT, while the Purple Rain album/movies rehearsals were underway two weeks before. Crowd estimate: 1,100.

42 years ago today, on Aug. 3, 1983, Prince "and Friends" (soon to be known as The Revolution) performed songs for the first time that would appear a year later on the soundtrack album and in the movie "Purple Rain."

In the fifties the covers of Anchor Books were printed with a flat color process that limited them to three colors and black, each printed separately. Edward Gorey turned this limitation into a virtue and many of his covers, like this one, have a distinct Japanese woodcut flavor.

prestige Sumerian myth

Some great worms of recent cultural history

1. Lowly Worm, in Richard Scarry BUSYTOWN books (1960)

2. Slimey, Oscar the Grouch's pet worm on SESAME STREET (1971)

3. Sandworms, in Frank Herbert DUNE (1965)

4. The ones in Carlo Ginzburg THE CHEESE AND THE WORMS (1976)

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: SciFri Book Club July 2025 Meeting - FROSTBITE. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting. Want to meet other SciFri Book Club members, talk about the book selection, and find more resources for deeper learning—all without leaving your home? Our community meeting is the place for you! This...

This month, the #SciFriBookClub has been reading “Frostbite” by Nicola Twilley, a book about the hidden global network that keeps food cool.

Join us this Thursday, July 31, at 8:00 PM ET for our "Ask the Author" virtual event. Come with your queries and wonderings.

RSVP Here: buff.ly/BKwPX0Q

What is "fish & amp chips"? It looks like someone screwed up somewhere in the signmaking process and included the HTML code for ampersand: "fish & chips"

HAPPENING TONIGHT: If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, come join us at the @cwclub.bsky.social for an important conversation on SHADE, with journo @samkbloch.bsky.social!

Bloch’s new book, “Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource,” expands on an article published in Places in 2019.

Heat Wave | Eric Klinenberg What Chicago needed was a social autopsy, a study of the institutions and relationships that permitted this catastrophe.

What a line, from this 2002 classic:

"Most of the victims, like Joseph Lazcko, came into contact with the two things that might have saved them, air conditioning and attention from state agencies, only after their bodies were delivered to the morgue."
thebaffler.com/salvos/heat-...

Congrats to one-of-a-kind Ed Park on his new book

Cover Spotlight!✨

Check out the stunning cover of the memoir A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco (9.9.25), designed by Beth Steidle! ✨

“Unspeakably compelling.”
—Ed Park

✨ More info and preorder: bit.ly/SilentTreatm...

Only in America does elementary school entail the same things as prison: putting on a clear backpack, passing through metal detectors, then spending the day locked in with armed police and attack drones all around. Just so that adults can get assault rifles with no background check or waiting period

The Fonseca tour! Event links to come soon.

Pruning an elm tree
Malden, Massachusetts
c. 1896

FLASHES OF BRILLIANCE by Anika Burgess. The best book featuring a pigeon photographer you'll read this year.

“An entertaining romp through the whirlwind years of early photography.”—WSJ
"Elegantly written [and] a lot of fun."―WaPo
"Scintillating."―Kirkus ⭐
"Thrilling."―PW

"A fast-paced history of criminal profiling from the Victorian era to the present.... Readers of true crime will be fascinated." -PW

The new book by @rachelcorbett.bsky.social, coming from @wwnorton.com in October...

Virginia Woolf in Turkish, designed by the great Utku Lomlu.

Garden Apartments How a form of multifamily housing with idealistic roots became a ubiquitous model promoted by both public entities and private developers.   Eminent historian Joshua Freeman rescues garden apartments—...

Joshua Freeman, who wrote "Working Class New York," has a new book coming out about garden apartments (!) press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97

RIP maestro
From the Vatican Rag to Hanukkah in Santa Monica, from Poisoning Pigeons in the Park to Pollution, Who’s Next? and National Brotherhood week, nobody wrote funnier brilliant songs better or better brilliant songs funnier

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a...

The cover of a Richard Scarry book showing the occupants of Busytown. The title has been changed to read “all We Do Is Work on Documents, That’s All Anyone Does Anymore.”

Good to see them updating the Richard Scarry books

"Pretty Good Offramps of Our Time"

cc @colinhamilton.bsky.social

A beautiful ad for a beautiful machine.

Unless my rusty Italian fails me...
Family letters, cover letters, business correspondence, greeting cards, sales letters, confidential letters, love letters, memos, letters of resignation, thank-you letters.

cc @robertpbaird.com

Send in the clouds
And bring down the rain

This was the edition my father had, which I read in high school and which left such a mark on me. A quarter century later, I went to work at Ecco. I told Dan how much I'd relished the book and was bummed to see it out of print. You should reissue it! he said. And so I did (Ecco, 2010). It lives!

Then Fowles' text was published on its own by Dan Halpern (Ecco, 1983)...

PS:
The book has an interesting publishing history. Fowles' text was originally published to accompany the illustrious photographer Frank Horvat's photos of trees (Little Brown, 1979)...

That's INCREDIBLE! And delights me.

“ ‘Even mentioning my mother’s birthmark is a betrayal,’ he tells us, and we believe that he believes this. But the pages he spends on this subject … are astonishing in their artistry and, for me, could hardly be read except through tears.”

You know what's gonna happen, is "Coldplay" will become a verb, like "they got coldplayed," and the word will outlive the legacy of the band so it'll become this weird origin story you find in trivia lists, like the Earl of Sandwich or Thomas Crapper.