According to an AP poll, one out of every four Americans hasn't read a single book in the last year. Okay, maybe I <I>can</I> believe that, but whenever I read articles like this, they inevitably include some guy (and yes, it is always a guy) who says something like, "I just don't have time for fiction, when I read I want to learn something."

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 .