The best Halloween costume for a department chair is a "Where's Waldo" outfit
(Image created with AI)

Summer’s best find: Parker novels. Richard Stark’s prose is like his main character: mean, fast, no ballast, no emotion.

Lee Child's Reacher books are underappreciated wordsmithing works of art. He keeps chipping away at the non-essentials until pretty soon an entire book will consist of three-word sentences:

My latest newsletter, about reality, fiction, and perceived realism.
mediatedmessages.substack.com/p/what-a-pop...

How did people learn about nu songs before the advent of radio? And are TikTok or Taylor Swift really that different? A thought experiment
mediatedmessages.substack.com/p/what-my-gr...