Singing To Me About Mustard And Jack Sparrow

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.

The most popular link last week was Celine Nguyen's reading life, with the Guyliner review of Ben and Maxim's blind date a very close second.

What I'm up to: My book A Body Made of Glass topped a ranking of "best self help books"! I put out a new episode of Shedunnit yesterday that investigates Agatha Christie's taste in crime fiction. My friend Jen used my prompt in her excellent AI newsletter. And I was the guest on Kim Hill Wants to Know, a podcast from Radio New Zealand.

1. As someone currently paying monthly fees for a storage unit full of stuff that will never fit in my house, I identified strongly with this essay on the subject.
2. What if we took the pharmacological concept of a "minimum effective dose" and applied it to other areas of life? Reading for only eight minutes a day or regularly doing a bad drawing is still doing something.
3. I can't explain why, but I'm already so into this way for a former child/teen star to return to acting: "Taylor Lautner to play Taylor Lautner in Taylor Lautner: Werewolf Hunter."

4. Any time I'm feeling a bit jaded, I like to spend a couple of minutes watching the live feed of the sea otters at the Vancouver aquarium.
5. These days, what with the decline influence of mainstream media and social media's increasing disinterest in sane, normal posts and links, it often feels like authors have to hand-sell each individual copy of their book. Why not do this on dating apps?
6. This Lonely Island medley is worth it for the cutaways to the audience alone, because then you can see which celebrities are vibing like mad and singing along, and which ones are thinking to themselves "why are Lady Gaga and Andy Samberg singing to me about incest, mustard and Captain Jack Sparrow?"

7. Peruse this visual collection of envelope liners, go on.
8. This one is a deep cut, perhaps, but if you have also cried at the Eva Ibbotson novel A Song for Summer, then you will also enjoy this interview about storks, Baltic-German identity, and the remaking of the Latvian landscape.
9. Finance is ruining popular art (again). "It’s democratic: Everyone’s brain gets melted. Critique dies. Numbed consumption wins. We pay good money for this."
10. A romance novel heroine's plea: "Lathaniel. You have to stop ripping my bodices."

11. Some art deco bathroom designs from the 1930s.
12. In a historic churchyard in Manhattan, there is a grave of a woman who never existed — Charlotte Temple, the heroine of Charlotte, A Tale of Truth, a novel by Susanna Rowson first published in 1791. For a few decades in the nineteenth century, it was the most popular grave in the whole place for visitors, and was likely erected as a cash grab.
13. You can now buy Paper Apps™, or as they used to be known, "notebooks".