Loving the short videos on grammar from The New Yorker’s Comma Queen.

Hua Hsu:

At the Voice, Tate became known for the slangy erudition he brought to bear on a range of topics, not just hip-hop and jazz but also science fiction, literary theory, movies, city politics, and police brutality. His best paragraphs throbbed like a party and chattered like a salon; they were stylishly jam-packed with names and reference points that shouldn’t have got along but did, a trans-everything collision of pop stars, filmmakers, subterranean graffiti artists, Ivory Tower theorists, and Tate’s personal buddies, who often came across as the wisest of the bunch.

I read Flyboy in the Buttermilk several times. Can’t wait to get my hands on Flyboy 2.

Joe Biden:

I do not know your name — but I know that a lot of people failed you that terrible January night and in the months that followed.

So proud of our VP for speaking up about this heart-breaking tragedy.

Jim Van Meer weighs in on the graphic design title in the new era:

In the 21^st century, to be a designer means you are a typesetting psychologist with a proclivity for marketing strategy. You need to be a web designer and app developer, one of the elite Digerati, well versed at storytelling. You must be an experiential manipulator; able to use your design thinking skills to lead innovative endeavors others wish they had the wherewithal to accomplish. If these skills sets weren’t enough, you must be a futurologist as well. You have to see the forest despite the trees, and you have to be able to envision what is far over the horizon.

Well-said.

These are the books I wanted to get through this summer. The order starts with the ones I wanted to read first.

• Branded Interactions: Creating the Digital Experience by Marco Spies (reading)
• The Power of Letterforms: Handwritten, Printed, Cut or Carved, How They Affect Us All by Rosemary Sassoon
• A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up with George by Kelly Carlin (started to read)
• Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
• Advertising Creative: Strategy, Copy, and Design by Tom Altstiel & Jean Grow
• InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign (2rd Edition) by Nigel French
• JavaScript: 20 Lessons to Successful Web Development by Robin Nixon
• Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design by Walter Tracy (to be reread)
• The Sympathizer: A Novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen (started to read)

A powerful letter from a rap victim:

He is a lifetime sex registrant. That doesn’t expire. Just like what he did to me doesn’t expire, doesn’t just go away after a set number of years. It stays with me, it’s part of my identity, it has forever changed the way I carry myself, the way I live the rest of my life.

Just heartbreaking.

• “Regressive Web Apps” by Jeremy Keith
• “Beywatch” by Hilton Als
• “Asian-American Actors Are Fighting for Visibility. They Will Not Be Ignored.” by Amanda Hess
• “Why is Clinton Disliked?” by David Brooks
• “The Sound of Hope: Chance the Rapper” by Vinson Cunningham
• “A Guide To Personal Side Projects” by Jon Yablonski
• “Position Wanted: Front-End Director” by Jeffrey Zeldman
• “Considerations in Component Design” by Jonathan Snook

Elizabeth Warren advises students to “get ready” in her commencement address at Suffolk University. She also took a stab at Donald Trump. The seven-minute speech is worth-watching.

In “‘The Artist’s Way’ in an Age of Self-Promotion,” Carrie Battan points out Julia Cameron’s advice for staying creative:

At the core of the process is a ritual called “morning pages,” based on the belief that writing out three pages of free-form writing, in longhand, each morning, will unclog one’s mental and emotional channels of all the muck that gets in the way of being happy, productive, and creative. Simple enough.

I am definitely looking to read Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

In “A Writer’s Justification,” Adam Ehrlich Sachs wrote a really long sentence:

Even if he succeeded in lining up all of his sentences on the right-hand margin of Word, he would then send the manuscript off to an agent who, with a single minor edit on page 1, would throw all of his painstaking formatting out of whack, unwittingly eliminating, with a well-intended keystroke, years of labor; and even if she edited nothing, his editor would probably edit something, and destroy everything; and even if his editor edited nothing, his copy editor would change a “1” to a “one,” and thereby destroy everything; and even if his copy editor destroyed nothing, the manuscript would then be typeset properly, his sentences would be lined up by a professional using the appropriate technology, by no means Microsoft Word, and his flush sentences would be jettisoned for the typesetter’s even flusher ones; and even if none of that happened, if his book were never properly typeset, if it were never copy edited, if it were never edited, even if he never found an agent, even if he self-published his book, simply uploaded his Word document to the Internet—even then no one would notice his meticulously, madly flush right-hand margin, since even he, while reading, paid almost no attention to the right-hand margin, ragged or justified, he paid almost no attention to it at all, a ragged right-hand margin never bothered him as a reader whatsoever, even though as a writer it was a scene of the most acute, unrelenting psychological drama.

Just brilliant.