Brian

A park hangout

Hi, I’m Edith, and this is a newsletter with comics and links. I’d love to know what you think; please feel free to respond to this email or share it in any way!

Links:

• Check out Brian’s website and print store. He’s also on Instagram. (Brian Finke.)

• Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking [Goodreads]

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Elsewhere:

• “Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. ... The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as ... the single most shameful lie in American life.” I recommend this 2012 n+1 essay about the US prison system, in case anyone else also missed it or wants to reread.

• “And so we keep sacking our lovers and blowing up relationships, all in pursuit of this idea of love which actually has no basis in reality.” Alain de Botton, with Krista Tippet, from a 2017 episode of On Being, transcribed. (Thanks, Karen.) De Botton is also behind the School of Life, and the other day I revisited their “Importance of Affectionate Teasing” essay and short video.

• “The Perfect Art Heist”? A riveting comic in Bloomberg. (Thanks, Jillian!)

• “The cell restricts, but in doing so it allows a move outward, beyond the limitations of one’s own body and time. ... I have had this feeling when writing Elizabethan sonnets: the strictures of rhyme and meter pulled me in unexpected directions, my subconscious offered up unbidden words that suited my sense, if not my intention.” Irina Dumitrescu for LARB, on restrictions, and Stephen Batchelor’s book The Art of Solitude.

• “Warhol didn’t appear to think time could be wasted. Instead, he argues, it’s ‘the little times you don’t think are anything while they’re happening,’ and not the parties or adventures or art projects, that are the most significant.” Sophie Atkinson on Warhol on solitude, in the NYT.

• It was fun to chat with Erin Williams for her podcast In Which I Talk to Artists. The beginning is a little choppy because I asked her to edit something out (sorry, Erin!). And then check out Erin’s beautiful art on Instagram.

• “Do you have any financial regrets?” “No. I don’t think that’s a productive way of looking at the world.” I enjoyed this interview about money with writer/psychologist/poker player Maria Konnikova for Policygenius. (Also: “What’s the best money you’ve ever saved?” “Eloping.”)

• “Time is a spiral. We constantly circle the same themes and challenges in our lives. The past keeps echoing back. Those echoes are opportunities to make better decisions and grow into more mature versions of ourselves (shifting the spiral ‘up’) or to make worse decisions and regress (shifting the spiral ‘down’).” I appreciated this meditation on time in Yancey Strickler’s newsletter.