Napkins

A gift from my mom

Hi, I’m Edith, and this is a newsletter with comics and links. If you’ve been enjoying it, please consider becoming a paying subscriber, for $40 a year or $5 a month! Subscribers support the work, join the community, and receive subscriber-only installments. I’d love to know what you think; please feel free to reply to this email!

Links from around the web:

• “‘Jay?’ I asked. ‘Am I … dying?’ He didn’t reply. Which, everybody knows, means: Yes girl, you’re a goner.” I enjoyed this story from Ali Frances, for Narratively: “How the World’s Most Venomous Fish Convinced Me to Stop Working Myself to Death.” The illustrations are also fantastic. 

• “You bring yourself into horror. In a sense, what scares us most about horror is often ourselves, where our minds will take us...” A horror expert walks the interviewer through the Five Scariest Books, on Five Books. I haven’t read any of them. 

• Lol. “Sending Tony an Email,” a comic by Margalit Cutler. [TNY]

• “If we take the recipe at face value, it may include fifty cloves of garlic, a pretty potent mixture! But surprisingly good with a fresh warm loaf of bread and a few olives.” From “Nine Recipes From Ancient Greece and Rome,” on The British Museum’s blog (via Metafilter). I’m curious about the honey-glazed prawns. 

• “What do you call that?” “I call this move New Release, ‘cause you’re checking me out!” From Bird Library, a site featuring photos of birds in a Virginia birdhouse designed to look like a library. (Thanks, Steve.) There is also a live YouTube feed.

• For some peaceful and beautiful portraits (and flowers and ice cream and other art), I recommend Erin the Creator, on Instagram. Here’s a personal fave.  

• “He believed that poker held the key to answering the very question that was on my mind — What do we control and what don’t we control? — and whether we can make the most of the former while making our peace with the latter.” Maria Konnikova on how poker mirrors life, in the NYT. (“Skill, it turns out, is what you make of luck.”) This story makes me want to play poker.