PicoBlog

John Goodenough, who died Monday at the age of 100, invented an extraordinary time machine—one that is saving the residents of his adopted state of Texas this week, and that will play a crucial role in the planet’s future. Goodenough’s obituary marks him as one of the last of a certain kind of American. He left Yale to join the wartime Army, then earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago on a government scholarship, studying under Enrico Fermi; first at Westinghouse and then at MIT, he helped lay the groundwork for what became Random Access Memory in computers; and then—moving for a while to Oxford before finally landing at UT Austin—he took on what became his life’s work.

MOONGLOW by Duke Ellington 1934 A popular song everybody knows, “Moonglow” was introduced in 1933, first as an instrumental - the premiere recording is supposedly by Joe Venuti and his Orchestra, from September of that year.  The first record with the lyrics - by Eddie DeLange - came a few months later from Cab Calloway and his Orchestra. “Moonglow” is a great song, and importantly, it incorporates several other songs in both its prehistory and also in its subsequent evolution.

In October 1529, in Marburg, Hesse (in what is now Germany), leaders of the embryonic Protestant churches of Germany and Switzerland met to attempt to reach doctrinal agreement – an agreement important not only for the ecclesial life of the churches but as the precondition for a defensive military alliance. And so a veritable who’s who of the early Reformation assembled: Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, Martin Bucer, Justas Jonas, and more all gathered for discussion.

When you work in and around books for as long as I have, it is incredibly easy to become disillusioned. There are so many problems with media, with the publishing industry, with feeding into the apparatus that I’ll call the art-versus-commerce-blues. I’ve really been feeling it lately. But despite it all, I still love books. And I am … ncG1vNJzZmilkae2tLfRnqCzpZGje7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZq2glWK6or7IrGSrnaaesrh5wGapnqSRqruktA%3D%3D

I wasn’t writing about cocktails during the first heyday of the “Martini Menu,” which was roughly from the late 1980s to the early aughts. It was only when doing research into the Bad Ol’ Days of the 1990s for my 2019 book The Martini Cocktail that I spent quality times with the long sheets of “‘tinis” routinely handed out at big-city and small-city bars and restaurants. It was then that I encountered creations with such names as the Raspberry Martini, Lady Godiva Martini (chocolate-flavored) and the Cloud 9 Martini (vodka, amaretto, Kahlúa and Bailey's Irish Cream).

I swear I didn’t start out this pandemic thinking I’d become obsessed with Mary Worth. It’s one of those beyond-your-control things that just happens—much like becoming a timeshare owner. One second you’re just living your life and then—bam—you realize you’re a sucker.  Back in 2020, when everything was uncertain and frightening (I mean, more so), I took a lot of solace in the daily comics. News of the novel coronavirus was just too upsetting, so every morning I would skip past sad and discouraging headlines to the comic section (I would also read the violent and bleak crime report, but since it had no Covid content, it was okay).

The songwriter Jimmy Webb was always one of my favorite people to interview. Each session at a restaurant near his office (we met a few times between 1989 and 1993) became a seminar about the art of songwriting and making and arranging records. Most interesting to me, in our conversations, was the way that he struggled against the middle-of-the-road identity that came with his early success as a pop songwriter.

There are new reports that Montecito’s Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, continues to hang out with 89 year-old Gordon Getty at the Beverly Hills Hotel, despite rumors that Getty’s family has endeavored to cut ties between her and the billionaire. Astute political observers believe they know Meghan’s motive for ingratiating herself with the reclusive Getty—and it is not, they say, the obvious: A quest for big bucks to fund a lavish lifestyle post-Netflix & Spotify debacles.

One of the biggest advancements for the way Americans understood domestic violence wasn’t a feminist awareness campaign or legislation: it was the polaroid camera. Suddenly women could take instant snaps of their injuries, give the evidence to the police or simply hide the pictures away for future use.  Today, technology isn’t so kind. Tools that abuse victims once counted on to bolster their credibility (because a woman’s word is never enough) are now being used against them.