Junot Diaz and Min Jin Lee took to the stage for a con­ver­sa­tion at the Asian Amer­i­can Writ­ers Work­shop Page Turner Fes­ti­val, held at Pow­er­house Books in Dumbo. We were amazed at how many peo­ple showed up despite the apoc­a­lyp­tic weather of sleet, wind and freezingless.

Junot was hum­ble and inspir­ing as always. A long time friend of the Work­shop, Junot hasn’t changed, despite win­ning the Pulitzer Prize (among many other hon­ors) for The Brief and Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao. He and Min Jin met in Korea on a State Depart­ment cul­tural trip of sorts, where she was sup­posed to be the Korean Amer­i­can, and he was sup­posed to “the American”

Here are some tid­bits from the talk, par­tially from my own notes and par­tially from the lovely tweet­ing by Sepia Mutiny. Some of these may be slightly off in our haste to take notes.

Junot quit writ­ing his novel twice for over a year. Some­times you just enter a “free fall” where “you don’t believe your words are worth any­thing.” It took him ~13 years to write novel (Min Jin took 12, beat him by a year, she said.)

Junot said, “I live in the uni­verse of doubt. The hard part isn’t writ­ing the book — it’s fin­ish­ing it.” He added, “To fin­ish a book, you need com­pas­sion for your­self.” He added, “I looked into a mir­ror and said, “It’s okay. You suck.’”

Food porn. Mak­ing fresh pasta with chef Cather­ine de Zagon through sidetour.com

It’s like liv­ing among cartoons.

It really is lovely.

Lis­bon is beau­ti­ful, and very afford­able. Lots of lay­ers of his­tory, and one of the clos­est points to the United States in Europe. Highly highly rec­om­mended. We actu­ally went there because it was the eas­i­est point to use miles to get back to the States. No regrets. I can’t wait to go back.

I’m exec­u­tive pro­duc­ing a short (with my friend Eric T. Lee) by Nathan Parker, who wrote “Moon” start­ing Sam Rock­well, which I saw at Sun­dance a few years back and was really impressed with. Nathan is both the screen­writer and the direc­tor. As they say in Hol­ly­wood. Film is a director’s medium. Tele­vi­sion is a writer’s medium.

Here are some pic­tures from a shoot we did at Bar Lubitch in LA.

Direc­tor Nathan Parker set­ting up a bath­room shot involv­ing drugs

The pro­duc­ers on set.

Actress KaDee Strick­land, who was just nom­i­nated for an Emmy.

The logis­tics for film­ing are insane with infor­ma­tion on weather, clos­est hos­pi­tal, included.

Mod­ern day film can­is­ters are these 2-terabyte G-drives from Hitachi.

The iPad is now being used as a remote con­trol for the sound record­ing equipment!

Pro­duc­tion meet­ing after the shoot: pro­duc­ers, assis­tant direc­tor, direc­tor and direc­tor of photography.

Mex­i­can din­ner after the shoot. Yum.

I wrote an essay for a book that coin­cided with the release of the doc­u­men­tary, “Page One: Inside The New York Times,” edited by NPR’s David Folken­flik. It was also put up on Poynter.org.

~~~

For years, the third-floor wait­ing area of the old New York Times build­ing at 229 West 43rd fea­tured a mas­sive replica of the first page of the first edi­tion of the news­pa­per. Dated Thurs­day, Sep­tem­ber 18, 1851, the news­pa­per back then was known as The New-York Daily Times. (I love the hyphen.) It was priced at one cent.

I must have walked by that replica thou­sands of times before I finally paused for a closer look. It was made up mostly of blurbs, many of them just a few sen­tences long. None was more than five para­graphs. The inter­na­tional news con­sisted of dis­patches from Turkey, Bre­men, Bavaria and Prus­sia, in most cases sum­ma­riz­ing local pub­li­ca­tions rather than offer­ing orig­i­nal report­ing. The local New York City report­ing was quite chatty, with head­lines like “Dis­tur­bance by Rival Black­smiths,” “Run over by an Ice Cart,” and “Women Poisoned.”

Even non-news was news back then. A short dis­patch titled “False Alarm” read: “Item gath­erer failed to dis­cover the first spark of the fire.” And I was taken with a brief from another edi­tion: “Not Dead.-Mr. John Overho, of Prince street, who was reported to be beyond all med­ical skill on Sat­ur­day, from the effect of coup de soleil, we are glad to learn is likely to recover.”

But what struck me most that day, as I stud­ied that front page, was a sin­gle thought.

This looks like a blog.

Keep read­ing…

I went to Glac­ier National Park to do cre­ative hik­ing and research. Hurry, the glac­i­ers are melt­ing quickly and are expected to be gone by 2020, if not sooner.

Apcar Lake near West Glac­ier

Avalanche Lake.

St. Mary’s Lake.

I want to start a cam­paign to restore the Wikipedia page for “bron­tosaurus,” which right now is a hard redi­rect to “apatosaurus” Check for your­self. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus.

That page is even the top search for “bron­tosaurus” on Google!

Depend­ing on how you inter­pret the facts, the bron­tosaurus (“thun­der lizard”) never really existed or it was a dupli­cated name cre­ated for the already known apatosaurus (“decep­tive lizard”). A lot of the con­fu­sion has to do with “miss­ing” skull from an apatosaurus fos­sil dis­cov­ery, and the sub­se­quent attempts to give the fos­sil skele­ton a head (var­i­ously skulls from Bra­chiosaurus, Cama­rasaurus and Diplodocus). Miss­ing skulls for sauropods (the long­necked dinos) were com­mon because while the large thick body bones were pre­seved in the fos­sil record, the more del­i­cate skull bones were not.

As Stephen J. Gould explains in his 1991 book Bully for Bron­tosaurus, the split was the result of a great pale­on­t­ogy rivalry between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh, which resulted in rushed and sloppy sci­en­tific work in the rush to pub­lish. By 1903, paleontologist Elmer Riggs rec­og­nized that Bron­tosaurus and Apatosaurus were the same, with the smaller apatosaurus being the juve­nile equiv­a­lent of the brontosaurus. But even so, bron­tosaurus was accepted enough that it even resulted in early twen­ti­eth Sci­ence mag­a­zine pub­lished papers about the “bron­tosaurus,” includ­ing its weight, its ver­te­brae.In 1979, the apatosaurus head was offi­cially dis­cov­ered. The bron­tosaurus nomen­cla­ture was offi­cially discarded.

The Wikipedia page for bron­tosaurus was merged into apatosaurus in 2008, accord­ing to the merger pro­posal (where there was no oppo­si­tion). How­ever, there is now sig­nif­i­cant oppo­si­tion now reg­is­tered on the apatosaurus dis­cus­sion page.

I would argue that you can’t sweep the bron­tosaurus Wikipedia entry into the apatosaurus Wikipedia entry, even if now they are some­what con­sid­ered syn­onyms for the same bio­log­i­cal entity. There are a few reasons:

• “Bron­tosaurus” as a term has had a dis­tinct cul­tural identy for decades (for exam­ple, “bron­to­burg­ers” on Flint­stones) that is inde­pen­dent of its actual pale­on­to­logic iden­tity. Peo­ple have a sen­ti­men­tal affec­tion for the bron­tosaurus, even if it was an apatosaurus. The U.S. Postal Ser­vice issued a bron­tosaurus postage stamp in 1989, push­ing back on pale­on­togic objec­tions by say­ing that despite the tax­o­nomic iden­ti­cal­ness with the apatosaurus, the bron­tosaurus was still the sen­ti­men­tal favorite. Arguably the sauropods resur­gence of late within pale­on­tol­ogy, is per­haps owned to this per­haps owed to pop­u­lar culture.

• The image of the bron­tosaurus with a rounded nose (see below), as first illus­trated by Charles Marsh in his book Dinosaurs of North Amer­ica, Vol­ume 16, in 1876, is dis­tinct from the more sharp snout of the apatosaurus.

The old skull of the bron­tosaurus at Yale’s Peabody Museum.

Apatosaurus skull below, much snoutier, different.

• The back­story of the brontosaurus’s myth and pub­lic con­fu­sion is actu­ally his­tor­i­cally rel­e­vant and inter­est­ing part of the bron­tosaurus exis­tence, an in and of itself would deserve a Wikipedia page. Below is an xkcd comic about the myth.

Btw, there are other bronto/apatosaurus myths, as pale­on­tol­o­gists have posited that sauropods may be ground feed­ers, with their necks out along the ground rather than upright in the air.

I got invited to try Google+, which has been writ­ten about a lot. Short sum­mary: Face­book should be scared.

The Stream (sim­i­lar to Face­book) is pretty nice UI/UX. Intu­itive icons, clean design. Sparks, the newsy thing (explained by Poyn­ter with a screen­shoot above), not so, though it’s where I think the more inter­est­ing jour­nal­ism poten­tial lies. The Sparks design cur­rently is pretty yucky. Inef­fi­cient use of real estate. Too much white space between posts and to the right (is that for advertisements?).

I only get three posts before the “jump,” whereas the gen­eral use case is some­one who is look­ing to scan really quickly, and wants to see more rather than less, prob­a­bly at least 5–7 posts prob­a­bly). I think they should have an expanded view and a col­lapsed view, where the visual ele­ments can be smaller.

That being said, I think there is a lot of poten­tial there. I’ve often felt there is a sweet spot in the “newsy” space between the furi­ous text-only pace of Twit­ter and the jum­ble that is the Face­book Newsfeed.

With regard to Face­book, the idea of a sep­a­rate “news” (or what­ever) tab has often been floated, where you can get seri­ous stuff sep­a­rate from the per­sonal posts of baby/vacation/cat pic­tures. It’s often dis­con­cert­ing to have it all tossed in together on Face­book. But that kind of prod­uct change now would be her­culean to guide though a bureau­cracy now.

Also, like Groups, a news tab would a retro­fit to Facebook’s evo­lu­tion, so wouldn’t  feel nat­ural. Remem­ber, Face­book started out being about all peo­ple, and not entities/institutions. Thus folks cre­ated all kinds of workarounds to fake their orga­ni­za­tions as peo­ple pro­files, which Face­book would then quash. It was only in the last few years, due to a clear demand, that  Face­book allowed Pages to essen­tially pub­lish a feed rather than being sta­tic pro­files. And it was really only in the last few months where orga­ni­za­tions can adopt the per­sona of the Page like it was a profile.

What could Sparks do? Well, right now it’s search term-driven — which seems like some­thing between Google News Alerts and #hash­tags. But I feel that Sparks could poten­tially set up chan­nels for insti­tu­tion­sid­ual pub­li­ca­tions that we could sub­scribe to, per­haps based on pub­li­ca­tion profiles?

This is a bit like RSS, and a lot of peo­ple are ask­ing about Google Reader inte­gra­tion on Google+. That being said, RSS read­ers seem to have a nat­ural audi­ence cap of around 15%. I don’t use one. Too wonky. Instead, Twit­ter kind of became my RSS.

It’s more intu­itive for me to fol­low or sub­scribe to a pub­li­ca­tion like The New York Times, TechCrunch, and Good­eReader — which are already pre­de­fined (some­times gran­u­lar) inter­ests, than for me to think about ran­dom terms I want to search for, which feels more like Google News alerts). I cre­ated one on “dinosaurs” just because I had recently been out look­ing for fos­sils, and it’s actu­ally a pretty good chan­nel. Appar­ently WTF makes for an amus­ing serendip­i­tous channel.

The his­toric prob­lem for news out­lets like The New York Times and NPR on Face­book is they have to judi­ciously parse out  the num­ber of posts they put up or read­ers’ feeds will be flooded, since those posts algo­rith­mi­cally float to the top given their huge fol­lower counts and com­ment­ing activity.

Media out­lets are not like other con­sumers brands, so the Face­book fan­page for­mat has been some­what awk­ward.
For exam­ple, Ann Tay­lor LOFT (which I am a fan of, I buy like 80% of my clothes there) main prod­uct is cloth­ing. So LOFT sends out two or three posts a day at most, some­times it’s a sale announce­ment. I see it, then I go some­where else in real life or the Web to buy/consume the stuff. But The New York Times and NPR’s prod­uct is infor­ma­tion, or sto­ries, or posts. So those posts essen­tially are their prod­uct.  So the one-size-fits-all approach of Pages has often been hard for media outlets.

Now the prob­lem on Twit­ter for media brands is that the man­power needed to curate and be clever means many pub­li­ca­tions just auto­mate it. Many use auto­mated RSS feeds as their Twit­ter feeds, espe­cially their sub­feeds. This usu­ally con­sist of just the link with the head­line, which is not suit­able for the 140-character commentary-driven for­mat Twit­ter. You can tell just with a scan because the head­line one are cap­i­tal­ized. And I espe­cially use to hate when Slate’s feed had the ellipses “…” in their feeds, because it was like not even good automa­tion. So, not sur­pris­ingly, the­se auto feeds do not do well in click­thru rates (except for maybe The Onion), because Twit­ter users can smell automation.

So, what Google could have in Sparks is the free­dom for the pub­li­ca­tion to post (auto­mat­i­cally or not) as much con­tent as they want (since they users are opt­ing in via sub­scrib­ing), but with a fuller con­tex­tual dis­play (videos, images, para­graphs) than the short-form bursty Twit­ter for­mat. And I can group them: food blogs, tech, MSM, gam­ing, etc.
This approach can also help answer the ques­tions that pub­li­ca­tions have, the “how do I get on Google+” as a media out­let. For exam­ple, do they cre­ate a Google pro­file? Mash­able did.

There is some­thing com­pletely awe-inspiring about dinosaurs, even when you are an adult. Unlike Santa Claus and R-rated movies, it is some­thing from child­hood that con­tin­ues to be both mys­te­ri­ous and real— even though every­thing you learned when you were young were wrong. For exam­ple, I specif­i­cally mean the extinct non-avian dinosaurs, since  birds are tech­ni­cally dinosaurs as well (avian dinosaurs)

Keep read­ing…

Tags: dinosaurs, montana

I saw these and imme­di­ately wanted to Insta­gram it.

This is the high school coun­ter­part to my ele­men­tary grad­u­a­tion speech, by sci­en­tist Adam Ezra Cohen, who was three years behind me in school, and the younger brother of my class­mate, Zoe. He is one of those magi­cians I speak about.

Grad­u­a­tion speech for Hunter Col­lege High School
June 23, 2011, New York City
Adam E. Cohen

Pres­i­dent Raab, Prin­ci­pal Fisher, teach­ers, fam­ily and friends, and mem­bers of the Hunter Col­lege High School class of 2011, thank you for the invi­ta­tion to join you today. This is a spe­cial occa­sion for me, because I missed my Hunter Grad­u­a­tion. It is a thrill finally to grad­u­ate from high school. I also missed Prom, because I was away at physics camp. Maybe next year I’ll be invited back to Prom, and I can finally gather the courage to invite a date.

****

In the begin­ning, there was the Big Bang. And the uni­verse was filled with quark-gluon plasma. And then baryo­ge­n­e­sis occurred, and the quarks and lep­tons out­num­bered the anti­quarks and antilep­tons. The par­ti­cles con­densed to atoms, the atoms to stars and galax­ies; some stars grew so dense they made super­novas, which formed the ele­ments heav­ier than hydro­gen and helium. These ele­ments aggre­gated, formed Earth. Life evolved, Pan­gaea split into the con­ti­nents, George Wash­ing­ton Carver invented peanut but­ter, Hunter High School was founded. The class of 2011 enrolled, and the class of 2011 grad­u­ated. And it was good.

Keep read­ing…

Tags: Adam E. Cohen

I gave a grad­u­a­tion speech to my ele­men­tary school, which is actu­ally really ter­ri­fy­ing. What do you say to 12 year olds? Espe­cially because you also have to make it inter­est­ing for the adults in the audi­ence. I was totally pan­icked. So I stewed on it for a few weeks, I finally was inspired, and wrote this in 15 min­utes in a burst. You can also read the speech by Adam E. Cohen, one of the wiz­ards I talk about. Below is my speech, and you will see that my school really does look like a cas­tle. And these are just my notes. What I actu­ally said actu­ally varies from what is below.

~~~~

Today I’m going to talk about magic. How many of you have read Harry Pot­ter, or at least seen the movies?

Well, you are going to enter Hunter Col­lege High School, which is one of the few schools in the coun­try that starts when you are 12 and 13, just like Hog­warts. So more so than most peo­ple, I think us Hunterites could relate to going to a school which is a mag­i­cal place just as we are ready to become teenagers. I mean, you have to be spe­cial to get in, and it even looks like a castle.

So Hunter Ele­men­tary School, or baby Hog­warts, if you will, was for my fam­ily, a mag­i­cal trans­for­ma­tive place. My par­ents sac­ri­ficed a lot for me to come here. I started in the cas­tle in 1980, which is more than 30 years ago, when Pluto was still a planet and the sub­way token was $.60. Believe it or not, I didn’t really speak Eng­lish when I started. That sounds crazy, but I was the chil­dren of Chi­nese immi­grants, and some­how I took the Hunter test with­out speak­ing Eng­lish, I could under­stand it, but not speak it. Luck­ily the Hunter test for three-year olds only involved a lot of point­ing and rear­rang­ing things. I learned my Eng­lish from Sesame Street, which is weird, because there are cer­tain words you don’t learn from Sesame Street, and I remem­ber learn­ing them at Hunter from my class­mates. One is “preg­nant,” the other is “naked.” Another one was “chess.”

I remem­ber in kinder­garten, kids would be taken away to “chess” and come back from “chess” and say it was so much fun. So I had grown up watch­ing The Magic Gar­den, so I pic­tured “chess” as some mys­te­ri­ous won­der­ful play­ground full of giant slides and col­or­ful flow­ers. So imag­ine my dis­ap­point­ment when I one day finally went to “chess” and ended up in the high school library with these lit­tle funny-shaped black and white plas­tic pieces. I think that soured me on chess forever.

So magic. I am a writer. I worked for many years at The New York Times, writ­ing about this world. But now I am cre­at­ing a mag­i­cal world in my mind, a new uni­verse if you will. And I had to think hard about what magic was. It struck me, that in Harry Pot­ter, that magic is largely a fixed body of knowl­edge that you absorb in school. You learn spells, and potions, and incan­ta­tions. But except for the Weasley twins and their prac­ti­cal jokes, you do not see the young wiz­ards and witches cre­at­ing their own spells.

Now in real life, what is magic in our world? It’s kinda the oppo­site. It’s about imag­in­ing some­thing which is not yet exist, and believ­ing in it so much that you will it into exis­tence with a lot, lot, lot of hard work. So much work that peo­ple often think you are crazy. A lot of today’s magic is com­ing from Sil­i­con Val­ley. One exam­ple is Face­book, which was invented by Mark Zucker­berg a few years after I grad­u­ated from Har­vard. I know you guys, all not being yet 13, aren’t on Face­book yet. I won’t tell if you are. But he just had a vision, and dropped out of col­lege to pur­sue it.

Or Google or the iPad. Those are really mag­i­cal isn’t it? It’s about dream­ing, hav­ing a vision, even when other peo­ple think you are crazy, and just going for it.

And magic doesn’t just have to be about com­put­ers, it can be about sci­ence and art. I remem­ber in fifth grade, I was in the audi­to­rium and I heard this sixth grader play­ing a song that I didn’t rec­og­nize. And you know, on the piano you either played clas­si­cal music or cho­rus music, so I asked what he was doing. And he told me, he was writ­ing a musi­cal. And I remem­ber think­ing, I didn’t know peo­ple who were alive could write musicals.

A few years after that I bumped into this same guy in the Times Square sub­way stop and asked what he was doing. He said he was writ­ing a musi­cal about mup­pets in New York. And I remem­ber think­ing, good luck with that. Of course, that guy is Bobby Lopez, who just shared his sec­ond set of Tonys for best musi­cal. It took years and years of hard work? And he’s not the only one, used to take the school bus with another kid, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who won a Tony for Best Musi­cal with a project he started in col­lege that became In the Heights. When I first met Lin, he was like half my size.

They dreamed. And what they dreamed was magical.

And you can do magic in high school, even Hunter. I remem­ber when one of my high school class­mate, Zoe Cohen, told me her brother Adam, who also went to the ele­men­tary school, had build a scan­ning tun­nel­ing micro­scope and hung it from the ceil­ing in his bed­room. He went on to win the biggest high school sci­ence com­pe­ti­tion, which is now known as Intel, which by the way is a com­pany that makes mag­i­cal lit­tle things. I just vis­ited Adam’s secret lab at Har­vard, and what they are build­ing there is totally mag­i­cal. He can stop a sin­gle cell from mov­ing and make mutant nerve cells pulse with light. He’s actu­ally giv­ing the grad­u­a­tion speech at the high school tomor­row. He really is a wiz­ard. I just write about them.

Talk­ing to my friends who are par­ents, I think many kids wait for the Hog­warts invi­ta­tion to arrive by owl, or since we are in New York City, prob­a­bly pigeon. Because they believe you have to be spe­cial, be of wiz­ard blood or a spe­cial mug­gle like Hermione.

But I am telling you that owl invi­ta­tion or not, you already have this abil­ity within you. That you have the abil­ity to cre­ate magic within your­self. That you just have to imag­ine — and believe in your imag­i­na­tion so much that you work hard enough to make it real.

Thank you.

Tags: Graduation speech

It asks “Did you mean ‘recursion’?”

The French Riv­iera is a ridicu­lously beau­ti­ful place. It felt like crash­ing a movie set. Can’t believe just any­one can go there. Also great for cre­ative juices. I stayed in Nice, but vis­ited Antibes and Villede­franche sur Mer.

Since we’re so close to Italy, Ital­ian food is sec­ond nature. This was in Antibes.

Ran­dom pic­turesque garden.

Antibes Cathe­dral

View from inside the Picasso Museum in Antibes, an old cas­tle that Pablo Picasso used as a stu­dio once. They don’t let you take pic­tures inside, but at least you can take it outwards.

The streets of Antibes.

Ran­dom street scene in Nice?

Villede­franche sur Mer.

Taken on a seven-hour walk around Paris, brain­storm­ing about wiz­ards, kings and drag­ons. As much as I love New York City, we have noth­ing on Paris in terms of epic architecture.

Alexis Ohan­ian — cofounder of Red­dit, defender of swine, vision­ary behind fly­ing chip­munks — dug up my Jenny8 Red­dit alien (secret tid­bit. The alien is named as “Snoo” for “What’s new”) from 2006? Proud fact, I had the first non-founder Red­dit Alien.

I attended the e-G8 con­fer­ence, con­vened by French Pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy in Paris, which the Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tri­bune called “an elab­o­rate pub­lic rela­tions exer­cise as state­craft over­laid Inter­net cul­ture. While we were sup­posed to be invited for a con­ver­sa­tion, in real­ity, the com­mu­niqué was pre-written, as per state­craft tra­di­tions (noth­ing spon­ta­neous is sup­posed to hap­pen). In con­trast, in the Inter­net world, which is inher­ently more par­tic­i­pa­tory, peo­ple actu­ally expect to con­tribute when they are told to (and even when they are not).

As Larry Lessig said, the future of the Inter­net is not here, because it doesn’t know how to get invited. He also appealed to French sense of patri­o­tism by say­ing he expected more. “It’s sur­pris­ing to come to France and find some­thing so deeply Amer­i­can going on,” said Mr. Lessig in a spon­ta­neous press con­fer­ence. “I don’t remem­ber the French philoso­pher who said, ‘Let’s ask the busi­nesses that are to be reg­u­lated what the reg­u­la­tions ought to be.”’

Also, a num­ber of us, when we first got the invi­ta­tion e-mail, thought it was spam, à la the “I have inher­ited a sum of money but need your help” as there was a typo in the first line.

A the ini­tia­tive of Mon­sieur Nico­las Sarkozy, Pres­i­dent of the French Repub­lic and the cur­rent Pres­i­dent of the G8, the Heads of State and Gov­erne­ment of the Group of Eight – Canada, France, Ger­many, Italy, Japan, Rus­sia, the United King­dom and the United States – have decided to place the Inter­net and the dig­i­tal ecosys­tem on the agenda of next month’s G8 Summit.

Also because there was almost noth­ing about it on Google, though now there is a lovely Wikipedia page.

Guess who on the iPad?

I took part in the New York Pub­lic Library Find the Future all-night scav­enger hunt designed by Jane McGo­ni­gal! About 500 of us were locked up all night in the amaz­ing research library. It was all very From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which was pub­lished in 1967, but is still totally time­less (except for lack of cell phones). I loved the sound­track that played when we went in. It was sweep­ing and epic and made me feel like I was in a movie.

So we had these quests.

Here is our power-up badge.

Our goal was to write a book by morn­ing. Here is the book binder, putting together the book old style.. Crazy to vol­un­teer, but we love him for it.

Here is Jane with Hubba Bubba.

My friend Hugo, who came in from out of town to play the game.

Jack Kerouac’s belong­ings, also part of the per­ma­nent col­lec­tion of the library.

Death mask of e.e. cum­mings (was this his idea?)

The orig­i­nal Win­nie the Pooh, Tig­ger, Eey­ore and Kan­ga­roo dolls, in climate-controlled happiness.