Wellfleet

Inside the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, an Alaska Native Tradition With Cultural Flair

Found a great article in Vogue that talks about Jody, the Iditarod, and the blankets. www.vogue.com/article/idit... #Iditarod54 #MusherSky

Oh yeah, this thing I am actually doing, right now, in exchange for the money I live on….

Bring on the gardening content!

Oh my god….

And Mille is just about to leave Rohn, too—looks like Porsild & Drobny will both be camping on the trail. #mushersky #iditarod54

Bailey Vitello is also resting in Rohn. #mushersky #iditarod54

Paige Drobny is in to Rohn but will not be staying long, so she will take the lead here, as Jesse Holmes is still resting there. Mille Porsild will be in shortly. #mushersky #iditarod54

Grammarly declined my request to interview CEO Shishir Mehrotra today. But it told me that in response to criticisms, it will allow experts to opt out of the feature by emailing expertoptout@superhuman.com. The company gave me this statement over email: We’ve heard the feedback about this tool and appreciate the engagement from those who have taken the time to raise thoughtful questions about the functionality and the experts surfaced. We agree that the product experience can be improved for both users and experts. The agent was designed to help users discover influential perspectives and scholarship that add value to their work. We want the people behind those perspectives to have greater control over whether their name is used, while providing new ways for influential voices to reach new audiences. Our goal is to improve Expert Review to deliver this outcome.

NEWS: Grammarly tells me it will let "experts" like me opt out of having their names used against their will and for no compensation as part of its "expert review" feature www.platformer.news/grammarly-ex...

Evenings & weekends & breaks—it’s a recipe for burnout. I did ok teaching at a liberal arts school with a 3-3 and some research expectations, but that’s a different beast (and our class sizes were smaller than what CSU faculty deal with regularly).

We changed BIG when the consequences were a lot LESS than what we’re facing from the #ClimateCrisis. Don’t let anyone tell you we CAN’T change.

My team features all women this year & I couldn’t squeeze in all of my faves! Gonna be a good one!

sepia-toned black and white photo of a bookcover featuring a black woman wearing an elaborately fashioned dark colored dress juxtaposed against a color photo of 4 golden brown biscuits on a black castiron tray. white print reads "praisesong for the kitchen ghosts"

congrats to @crystalwilki.bsky.social's memoir with recipes, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, having been added to the exhibits at Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture. 🥰

It was going on one, two in the morning, and we were shooting what I felt was an important scene for me, when he makes an attempt to be quote-unquote straight, in a suit, and at the end of it he gets emotional and locks himself in the other room. And I felt like, I’m not getting what I want—I’m not happy with it. Mike was happy with it. He called me the next day and said, “I know you weren’t happy with the scene last night. Believe me, we wouldn’t have gone home if I had felt we weren’t getting it.” And then he sort of became my psychiatrist and said, “You find it difficult to be happy, don’t you? You find it difficult to enjoy things.” And I said, “Well, sometimes. Last night was about feeling too tired and not feeling I was reaching what I needed to reach for the scene.” He talked to me then about when he was making, I don’t know whether it was Virginia Woolf or The Graduate. He said, “I didn’t enjoy it for a second. I was worried about so many things.” And then he said, “You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you’ll have hours of happiness.”

The Birdcage opened thirty years ago today, so in its honor, I want to share one of my favorite stories about Mike Nichols that didn't make it into my biography. This is from an interview I did with Nathan Lane.

Oh gods yes! Iditapod was the very best

Value is everything

Very nice! I love the contrasting grays.

Brown, orange, and grey Icelandic sweater with penis motifs and “It’s all about Dicks!” knitted at the waist.

It’s a pretty interesting place! (Sorry for the glare)—sweater was behind glass & there were a lot of spotlights in this part of the exhibit)

I feel this in my bones!

My favorites!

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Argh!

Braids rule!

Part of my strategy for this is a pixie cut (which I understand not everyone would want, but I love mine & it looks spectacular in silver)

And a powerful father, endless yearning to make his own name in the world, lots of traumatic history that pops up constantly, and good taste in brainy women.

Yes, exactly. I needed to be farther away from my own experience to revel in those aspects of the story, but now I really appreciate it.

Yes, quite a bit. Makes me long for that uterine replicator tech.

I skipped the whole Vorkosigan series for a couple of decades because of the pregnancy trauma aspects of the story, but now it’s a fave. I love the Cordelia books the best. (I like Miles fine, but I prefer Peter Wimsey in London vs Peter Wimsey in space.)

Isn’t *Cordelia’s Honor* an omnibus of *Shards of Honor* and *Barrayar*?

Yes—in my town, we save 4 to 6 bucks per tank at Costco’s gas station. It’s why we have two memberships for our 4 adult household.

Oh no