Hola Familia.<br>
I hope you're all doing very well. It's an unusually cool and rainy day here in NJ/NYC.

<I>Sky Blue</I>, Maria Schneider’s sixth album in 13 years, is at once her most ambitious and most fulfilled, a sweeping, gorgeous work about memory, dreams, love, life, death, the joys of birding…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Journalist Malcolm McPherson has become satiric novelist Malcolm McPherson. How come? Because the best stories in his reporter's notebook <I>stayed</I> in his reporter's notebook.

Or, in my case, doesn't. Gary Lynch thinks he has the answer.

Bryson writing about Shakespeare, that is. <I>The Times</I> offers an excerpt from <I>Shakespeare</I>.

Alexander Zakharov posts, well, a Soviet poster every day. Best of all, he provides a lot of useful historical and artistic context for them. I've always been fascinated by the visual bravura of these posters, now I get to discover the "hidden" meaning to them, which, of course, weren't hidden to the proletariat .

I was in an elevator with several others, coming down from the penthouse floor of an ordinary building on 32nd Street. My companions for the ride spoke in Spanish, lovely currents of flowing sound like:

Once united by poverty and marginalization, American Indians are now confronting success and wealth, thanks to their new casinos. How can that be a bad thing?