"My only objection [to the coverage of le Carré's death] would be: not enough discussion about the relationship between le Carré’s greatest character, George Smiley, and his wife, Ann, which plays out over the five novels where George Smiley appears as a central figure and is one of the weirdest portraits of a marriage ever committed to the page. The reasons for this omission are most likely either boring (something to do with expectations of the genre) or depressing (something to do with ambient contempt for women), but it’s nice to think that le Carré’s portrayal of their marriage is not given the attention it is due because it is so strange, to the degree that if you start talking about it you will never stop."

Every time I try to quote this I end up reading the whole thing again. For Gawker's "Famous Cuckolds" series, Rosa Lyster looks at George and Ann Smiley. It's a wonderful piece of writing about a wonderful writer, and about wonderful writing.

I viscerally resonated with the way just the thought of having to deal with other people's opinions can make one feel, especially now. Turks and Caicos, indeed.

Anyhow. Not a waste word, and you get the added bonus of remembering le Carré's own words as you read. Cannot recommend this enough.

"Either your workplace is a family or it’s not. It’s not, of course. The very concept of the workplace as family is a tool for exploitation. But if it’s not, where does that leave us in relation to each other? What does it mean to care about your colleagues, to love them?"

Mandy Brown on defeating binaries, and on oddkin. Resonated strongly.

Wonderful writing from Kate Wagner, on Primož Roglič, and cycling, and the arcs of careers, and change.

"… believing, Elbow says, is a separate muscle entirely, a willed and practiced capacity to assume some idea in a text, or some possible technical choice, or some inkling held before a group, is worth considering as if it were full of truth, for a set amount of time. It’s not just the “yes, and” approach that improv-style brainstorming is famous for. Believing is granting some interpretation of what’s at hand a provisional but deep sense of rightness. For a set amount of time. For that time—for the length of the believing game—your whole self is devoted to this idea, to see if the space and breathing room you give it helps you to see it in its full possibility."

Sara Hendren on the Beliving and Doubting games; reminds me a bit of critical reading, where – for the duration of an essay – you work to believe it as truth, and only outside the bounds of it do you then start to interrogate it.

"However, the most important factor for me at this point is that I have heard “Tom’s Diner” so many times that *I no longer hear it*. Like frog vision, I no longer notice what remains the same, only what has changed. I don’t hear the song anymore, just the different ways that my DSP algorithms respond to it."

"Here’s an important and (as far as I can yet tell) unaddressed question for Mare of Easttown criticism: when, exactly, did Mare Sheehan stop dying her hair blond?

This question may seem trivial compared to more pressing Mare of Easttown questions, such as “was that ending good?” and “is this copaganda?” However, don’t worry: all these are the same question."

Cracking writing about a cracking show, on the role of "femininity" in both the casting of drama and the plot of _Mare of Easttown_. The kind of essay that opens new doors without clsoing or criticising others.

Github experimenting with a formalised approach for using Actions/repositories as datastores. Interesting to see their end-to-end approach, including, in particular, custom VS Code plugins for generating configurations; it's a neat and accessible way to build end-user UI.

A remarkable book – and resource – from Chris Brejon. All on lighting for CG animation, but as usual with this sort of reference, so much to say about cinematic lighting fullstop.

A deeply personal obit that will likely be lost to the sands of Facebook, but hey.

Via Phil G, a nice modern boilerplate for HTML pages – notable because of the excellently narrated explanation around it. Always useful to have something like this to refer back to.

Marvellous writing on one of Infocom's most notably experimental works, and its relationships to the present.

"With static sites, we've come full circle, like exhausted poets who have travelled the world trying every form of poetry and realizing that the haiku is enough to see most of us through our tragedies." A line that particularly resonates in this lovely Craig Mod article on the solace of programming for yourself.

Electron-based displacement map generator.

Informative and fun new work from Stamen (along with a shout-out to How Big Really).

"It costs us something to be the beginner. Our minds opt for intellectual ejector seats, taking us away from new ideas. But “I hadn’t thought of that before” is actually the experience of joy trying to reach us." Sara Hendren on expressing discovery as pleasure rather than threat.