With the properly cinematic resources of space, time, and mise-en-sc�ne, Gerwig approaches these contradictions as Alcott could not. Intercut with the meeting with Dashwood is a generically romantic resolution to the story - Jo’s dull professor-ex-machina, Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), is retrieved from the train station on the brink of departure by a whole troop of Marches and March hangers-on in a rom-com race to unite the hetero-couple. However, the images of this resolution do not actually depict a proposal or a wedding. Rather, after the professor is brought together with Jo for the kiss that signifies traditional closure, the scene continues. A sweeping overhead long take, in motion like much of the film, depicts Bhaer as one among many teachers, family members, and students who fill the halls and grounds of the (integrated and co-ed) school Jo sets up at Plumfield, the home she inherits from Aunt March. (Meryl Streep introduces all kinds of intertextual noise in this role, one note of which derives from her turn as Emmeline Pankhurst in 2015’s Suffragette.)

— Ambidextrous Authorship: Greta Gerwig and the Politics of Women’s Genres, Patricia White in Los Angeles Review of Books

Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven, in part, by a new way to think about why Americans vote the way they do. She counts as an intellectual mentor Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who popularized the concept of ’negative partisanship,’ the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than by any particular policy goals.

— An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter, Rachel Bitecofer in POLITICO

All that I know of Jules Breton’s The Weeders is that it was painted somewhere in northern France in 1868. He has kindly provided a thin sliver of a moon, which is (for the northern hemisphere) a waxing crescent moon, a few days after a new moon. That moon is higher in the sky than the sun, which is only just peeping above the horizon. A waxing crescent moon rises and sets after the sun, so for the moon to be higher above the horizon, this should be late sunset rather than dawn.

— Dawn or Dusk?, hoakley in The Eclectic Light Company

But, in an odd way, Stephen Joyce is probably one of the last of his kind we’ll see. D.T. Max, the journalist who profiled him, also happens to be David Foster Wallace’s biographer, and in the notes to his biography he writes that “David may have been the last great letter writer in American literature (with the advent of email his correspondence grows terser, less ambitious).” This is a claim that will probably be plausibly made about other writers in that generation or just before. But anyone whose career really began after the iPhone is likely to have archives that will present wholly different problems.

— James Joyce’s grandson and the death of the stubborn literary executor, B.D. McClay in The Outline

A stutter does not get worse as a person ages, but trying to keep it at bay can take immense physical and mental energy. Biden talks all day to audiences both small and large. In addition to periodically stuttering or blocking on certain sounds, he appears to intentionally not stutter by switching to an alternative word-a technique called ‘circumlocution’-�which can yield mangled syntax. I’ve been following practically everything he’s said for months now, and sometimes what is quickly characterized as a memory lapse is indeed a stutter. As Eric Jackson, the speech pathologist, pointed out to me, during a town hall in August Biden briefly blocked on Obama, before quickly subbing in my boss. The headlines after the event? ‘Biden Forgets Obama’s Name.’ Other times when Biden fudges a detail or loses his train of thought, it seems unrelated to stuttering, like he’s just making a mistake. The kind of mistake other candidates make too, though less frequently than he does.

— What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself To Say, John Hendrickson in The Atlantic

Perhaps this is the archivist in me, but this process of creating files and flinging them into an unsorted pot and then searching or hoping that the newest one is the one we want gives me the collywobbles. It seems like a rejection of our past work, to just sling all the files into a heap, immediately devaluing them as soon as something newer comes along.

— Computer Files Are Going Extinct, Simon Pitt in OneZero

Willard’s devotion to visual mnemonics shaped much of her work. In the 1840s, she published another elaborate visual device, named the ‘Temple of Time’. Here, she attempted to integrate chronology with geography: the stream of time she had charted in the previous decade now occupied the floor of the temple, whose architecture she used to magnify perspective through a visual convention.

— Emma Willard&amp’s Maps of Time, Susan Schulten in The Public Domain Review

Basically, we should be begging for the most analog election technology possible.

— The Only Safe Election Is a Low-Tech Election, Kevin Roose in The New York Times

In fact, Roman cuisine wasn’t at all like Italian food. It was all about contrasting sweet with salty and sour foods (they liked to eat fishgut sauce, garum, with melon). Instead Rowan compares it to modern Chinese food. ‘If it was edible, they were eating it nothing was off the table,’ she says.

— The mystery of the lost Roman herb, Zaria Gorvett in BBC Future

There is the online reality, the reality portrayed by state media, and the reality I’m living. On the seventh day after the lockdown, a university classmate called my friend Ningning, and told her about another: hospitals do not have enough beds for the infected in Wuhan. They go home, they die, they never enter the official count as they were not diagnosed.

— Stuck in Central China on Coronavirus Lockdown, Lavender Au in The New York Review of Books