Man with a Hoe / L’homme à la houe by Jean-François Millet (1860–1862)

Catching up on my @newyorkermag backlog. The artist Celia Paul: “Dostoyevsky’s writing makes me think of Francis Bacon’s portraits. All the action seems to happen within a closed, claustrophobic space where the figures are garishly lit, like actors on a dark stage.”

Your argument has just been invalidated by Jack Kerouac’s 1943 Naval Reserve enlistment headshot.

Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head by Henry Fuseli (1793)

Hyakki yagyo / night parade of 1000 demons by Itaya Kei-i Hironaga 板谷桂意廣長 (circa 1800)

Reading about the Scopes trial this week, which feels like a perfect historical topic for this very moment in America.

Tonight’s movie is Action in North Atlantic (1943) with Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey.

Berthe Morisot on a divan by Édouard Manet (1872-73)

It’s beautiful.

This and only this all day long

A birthday present from my family that I finally get to enjoy. I’m reading the essays out of order and started tonight with the chapter on St. George before moving backward to the second chapter on Venetian art.

Book. Cat. Blanket.

The moment is right to defund a lot of the wasteful and abusive animal experiments that have been funded by the federal government for decades—many on the dole for longer than I’ve been alive.

Cymande / Renascence (2025)

David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil exiting the Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina 65 years ago today after their sit-in to protest being denied service on February 1, 1960. #valentinesday #superbowl

Happy Birthday to Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901), photographed here with Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston at the Tuskegee Institute in 1927.

I gave up on Onyx Storm (for now). I spent more time thinking of ways to distract myself from it than reading and enjoying it. Onto something else. Also picked this one up in my hometown Carlisle independent bookstore.

New audiobook. I’m about a quarter of the way through it, and it’s just as much a biography of the city of Cleveland as it is about John D.

Happy Birthday to Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau (born January 29, 1859 in New Orleans, Louisiana), better known as Madame X in John Singer Sargent’s portrait (1884).

Spending Tuesday night with John Lewis. Just picked this up today at Whistlestop Bookshop—my hometown independent bookstore in Carlisle, PA—and just holding it in my hands gives me chills. I will never stop looking for “good trouble.”