This Craigslist ad made me feel so old, but also, I have NEVER been this young:

We are all in our late 20’s – early 30’s here in NYC to live it up, take advantage of the sweet neighborhood, and have as much fun as possible while still managing to make it to work on time!
We all play in bands, love live music, and entertain guests on a regular basis along with the occasional open jam session at random hours of the night. We don’t often smoke “cigarettes” but if you want to in your room, go right ahead. Must have active social life… if you are the type of person whose main source of entertainment is sitting at home, watching Netflix on your laptop, this apartment is definitely not for you.

The neighborhood is loud, people in the building make a ton of noise, once in while, you may even want to pop in some ear-plugs… but we love it here!! There is a drum-kit in the common room along with guitars & amplifiers, where we jam out on a regular basis, create art, and engage in stimulating conversations with other tenants in the building. If this is something you would enjoy, please join us!

I am really enraptured by Master of None, and this is cool beans too:

These days, Indian people, real Indian people, pop up way more in film and television, but fake Indians are still around more than you think. I loved “The Social Network,” but I have a hard time understanding why the Indian-American Harvard student Divya Narendra was played by Max Minghella, a half-Chinese, half-Italian British actor. More recently, “The Martian” was based on a novel with an Indian character named Venkat Kapoor, who in the film became Vincent, a character portrayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British actor of Nigerian origin. (The Indian actor Irrfan Khan was reportedly in talks to take the role, but couldn’t because of a scheduling conflict.)

My efforts to get responses from people who made these decisions were unsuccessful. But I don’t want to judge them before knowing the full story, especially because I know that both films made at least some attempts to pursue Indian actors. I auditioned for “The Social Network,” and I was horrible. I tried to improvise and make the role funny. I was a young actor who didn’t understand what he was doing. I was also asked to audition for a part in “The Martian” (not Kapoor), but I skimmed the script and — no offense — it seemed like a boring movie about a white guy stuck on Mars for two hours who gets fired up about plants, so it didn’t seem worth taking a break from my own projects. (I’ve heard the film is fantastic.) So, I know the filmmakers made an effort to cast Indian actors, but how hard did they try?

I was reading this and LOVING it when I realized one of the authors was my old prof John Stauffer, who is a Genius and a Cool Dude:

It may seem strange, if not implausible, to assert that a black man and former slave wrote more extensively on photography, and sat for his portrait more frequently, than any of his American peers. But he did. We know this because Douglass penned four separate talks on photography (“Lecture on Pictures,” “Life Pictures,” “Age of Pictures,” and “Pictures and Progress”), whereas Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Boston physician and writer who is generally considered the most prolific Civil-War era photo critic, penned only three. We have also identified, after years of research, 160 separate photographs of Douglass, as defined by distinct poses rather than multiple copies of the same negative. By contrast, scholars have identified 155 separate photographs of George Custer, 128 of Red Cloud, 127 of Walt Whitman, and 126 of Abraham Lincoln. Ulysses S. Grant is a contender, but no one has published the corpus of Grant photographs; one eminent scholar (Harold Holzer) has estimated 150 separate photographs of Grant. Although there are some 850 total portraits of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West Show, and 650 of Mark Twain, no one has analyzed how many of these are distinct poses, or photographs as opposed to engravings, lithographs, and other non-photographic media. Moreover, Cody and Twain were a generation younger, and many if not most of their portraits were taken after 1900, when the Eastman Kodak snapshot had transformed the medium, bringing photography “within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees,” as Kodak declared. In the world, the only contemporaries who surpass Douglass are the British Royal Family: there are 676 separate photographs of Princess Alexandra, 655 of the Prince of Wales, 593 of Ellen Terry, 428 of Queen Victoria, and 366 of William Gladstone.

Mallory is never happier and more invigorated than when emailed by rubes:

I am missing NYC a lot this week, which I have not felt in a while, and when I miss NYC, I read a lot of things about restaurants. If you are in the East Village in your jammies, please Seamless yourself one of these places for lunch or dinner, and think of me. Then tell me about it in the comments tomorrow.

This is a very good “book that changed your life” list, and also, this is a personal fav of mine:

MARGARET EBY author of South Toward Home, features & essays editor at HelloGiggles
Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End of Taste is one of the books that I wish I could pass out at street corners, or airdrop on parts of the country. It’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever read about Celine Dion, taste, and “reasonable people carting around cultural assumptions that make them assholes to millions of strangers.” It made me reassess those assumptions, and, honestly? Listen to Celine Dion again for the first time in a decade.

A really fun deep dive into wandering around LA while following Raymond Chandler’s directions. Also, I love LA.

Sansa’s breeder, on Sansa at five weeks:

1. She watches me as if she is willing me with her mind to pet her or acknowledge her.  (It works!)  haha.  2. She has learned to not take crap from anyone and she now fights back when she’s being picked on unnecessarily.  Awesome!  3. Her ears are going up already!  She’s the cutest little ball of fur and I love, love, love her!  She loves to just snuggle up close and will stare into your eyes the whole time.  It’s the sweetest thing ever!

She looks like a gremlin, though… haha!  The tiniest little thing compared to her siblings, but she has really learned to hold her own.  I’m so proud of her.