Reaching The 'It's Always Grey And I Hate It' Stage

Welcome to Thursday Thirteen, my weekly digest of links to things I have found interesting and which I think you might be intrigued by as well. Except today I'm sending this on Friday, because I was busy yesterday meeting a big deadline.

The most popular link last week was this video summary of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, with this book about the iPhone notes app a close second.

What I'm up to: I released an episode of Shedunnit this week about a mostly-forgotten 1931 murder mystery, The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes, and I wrote 4,500 words of a project I'm not ready to tell people about yet.

1. A "lyric essay" dedicated to the pleasures of eating in bed.
2. This writer is engaged in a multi-year project where he visits every neighbourhood in New York City. This January, he finally went to his favourite one: Vinegar Hill in Brooklyn.
3. Have you been following the blurb discourse? As someone who is a) terrible at doing blurbs for other people's books in a timely fashion and b) hates asking them to do ones for mine but c) feels warm and fuzzy inside every time I get to see a name like "Lucy Worsley" or "John Green" on my book cover, I'm gripped. Rebecca Makkai in the NYT and this in the Economist are the best pro and con takes I've seen so far.

4. The newsletter I await most eagerly at the moment is by Karen Davis, who sends regular photographs from her walks in a country park near her home in Kansas City, Missouri. Her pictures are beautiful and seasonal, and a good pick-me-up now that I've reached the "it's always grey and I hate it" stage of winter.
5. I don't think I fully understand this surreal piece of satirical writing about the Netflix game show Is It Cake? but I think it is excellent all the same.
6. I did not know that the bonkers 1940 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was co-written by Aldous Huxley as "please help us in WW2" propaganda for the American audience.

7. ASMR doesn't do anything tingly or exciting to me, unfortunately, but I still enjoyed watching the pages of this medieval choirbook being turned for fifteen minutes.
8. This one really gave me feelings. A polemic about the media's unspoken hierarchy, and why some people get to be "talent" and others don't.
9. An Atlas of Space, so you can know where you are in relation to all the other planets and astroids.

10. How did they make cars just fall apart like this in early films by the likes of Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy? This frame by frame analysis explains. Mostly, the bits of the car weren't joined together in the first place.
11. I haven't looked at XKCD for years. This one, "Features of Adulthood", reminded me why I used to like it.
12. Women's needlework is a subversive and sometimes radical act.
13. Let's go on a bus tour of 1970s England.