PicoBlog

Hi there! Welcome to A Letter a Day. If you want to know more about this newsletter, see "The Archive.” At a high level, you can expect to receive a memo/essay or speech/presentation transcript from an investor, founder, or entrepreneur (IFO) each edition. More here. If you find yourself interested in any of these IFOs and wanting to learn more, shoot me a DM or email and I’m happy to point you to more or similar resources.

We lose landmarks all the time in this city. I don’t mean lose them to the jackhammers only — though, lord knows, way too many get torn down. I mean landmarks that survive, but still get misplaced. People forget they’re there. I love lost landmarks. In fact, I collect them — in my head, and my heart. Some are just rooms. Like the Laurie Beechman Theatre, downstairs at the West Bank Cafe on far West 42nd Street off Ninth Avenue, a handsomely-outfitted 80-seat cabaret that is a landmark to the characters who’ve paraded through it; nearly all of them memorable, one way or another.

Steve Almond was recently on the show with my co-host Marrie Stone to talk about his most recent book, Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow, and was on the show with me a couple of years ago to talk about his first novel, All the Secrets of the World (links at the bottom). Steve is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football.

For a guy whose work mostly appears on other people’s records, Steve Cropper is surprisingly findable on the music services of the Interweb. The guitarist, songwriter and producer contributed in multiple ways to the mid ‘60s success of Memphis-based Stax/Volt Records. As part of Booker T. and the MG’s, the house rhythm section, he helped create the label’s elemental, high-tension grooves. As a songwriter, he wrote or cowrote classics – among them Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” Carla Thomas’ “Comfort Me,” Otis Redding’s “Just One More Day” and “(Sitting On) The Dock of the Bay” – all built on Stax’ crisp, no-nonsense rhythmic signature.

In 2010 Steve Jobs created a bit of a sensation when he decided to ban from Apple devices any app that was deemed pornographic in nature. “Folks who want porn can buy an android,” Jobs famously wrote to one customer.   So what did Jobs have against porn? Walter Isaacson, in his highly impressive 2011 biography of Jobs, detailed a correspondence the Apple co-founder had with tech blogger Ryan Tate, who thought Jobs’ wish to give Apple users “freedom from porn” was hypocritical to Apple’s spirit of revolutionary freedom.

The Blob is a lot of things. Most of us would agree that it’s a cheap B-movie—it is, after all, a film about a giant alien blob destroying (consuming?) a small town in Pennsylvania—but it’s also in the Criterion Collection. (Kind of an odd choice for the esteemed preservationists of classic cinema, but I appreciate that it’s there.) And it has one of the earwormiest theme songs in film history.

So I received a literary gift the other day, the Steve Sailer anthology Noticing, published by Passage, run by my friend Lomez, to go by his nom de guerre. Buy it & revisit the major American changes in society of the last 30 years or so, seen through the eyes of the only man who noticed & talked candidly, intelligently, mixing the curiosity of the student of political science & the concern of the citizen.

A friend and former colleague, Steven Wise, a lifelong warrior for the rights of animals and founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project, died last week. For many years, he taught at Vermont Law School (and has the sweatshirt to prove it, photo, above) and a few years ago, I had the privilege of introducing him at Bookstock, the annual literary festival in Woodstock, VT. Below are excerpts of an article I wrote in 2017 when I was a columnist for Vermont Woman; it’s a little longer than my usual posts, but Steve is worth getting to know.

“Learning to stick to something is a life skill that we all have to develop.” — Angela Duckworth For those who went to Catholic school, you might remember the nuns telling you and your peers to develop “sticktoitiveness.” Nuns urged students to make sure “sticktoitiveness” went into each homework assignment — and preached the word as if it was written in the Bible. The term “sticktoitiveness” was a daily call to action for them to educate and inspire excellence and perseverance.