Read it here if you haven't yet. Today is the very best day of all days to read it for the first time. short-stories.co/@raybradbury...

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The voice-clock sang, breakfast was ejected, but no doors slammed. The garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. The house sat alone in a city of rubble and…

short-stories.co

Adam Rawnsley@arawnsley.bsky.social · yesterday

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

Our AirBnb has a Technics turntable and an LP collection that’s mostly stuff like this. this trip is going to be entirely subsumed by teenage nostalgia.

Re-issues of Chaim Grade's 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑌𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑣𝑎 www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/818559... and 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑔𝑢𝑛𝑎ℎ www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/818561... coming 4/2027 from Schocken !

For this weekend's WSJ Fiction Chronicle I review three novels with dog narrators. The books are each of different breeds and pedigrees, but they are all to some degree about the conflict between wildness and domestication. Gift link: www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Fiction: ‘The Oldest Bitch Alive’ by Morgan Day

Plus “Wolf, Moon, Dog” by Thomas Wharton and “Etna” by Paul Yoon.

wsj.com

A fine review by South African folk musician Mike Raftery on Ashley Kahn's 'Days of Miracle and Wonder,' about the making of Paul Simon's 'Graceland.' "It’s all obsessively about the sound, and we are the beneficiaries." openlettersreview.com/posts/days-o...

Days of Miracle and Wondery by Ashely Kahn — Open Letters Review

A new history of Paul Simon’s seminal album “Graceland”

openlettersreview.com

Phrase of the day: "You look as if you lived on buttered thunder."

Nice interview with the And Other Books founder and senior editor--Stefan and Tara Tobler, respectively--who have published the past two International Booker Prize winners thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-l...

Inside And Other Stories: The Sheffield-based small press taking translated fiction to a global stage | The Booker Prizes

We speak to the team at And Other Stories – the small press with big ambition – about their two consecutive International Booker Prize wins, their commitment to championing adventurous authors, and th...

thebookerprizes.com

"By removing the usual scaffolding that renders human life intelligible, above all custom and language, the books ask what lies beneath." Terrific Elizabeth Lowry piece on the non-"Lord of the Flies" books of William Golding. www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Mind and Matter: Four Novels by William Golding

The novels that followed “Lord of the Flies” explored the strange states human consciousness can create.

wsj.com

ICE is quietly arresting more people than ever. After months of releasing no detention data at all, the new numbers show a record 1,474 arrests a day in early July, the highest daily pace of the entire Trump administration. 🧵 austinkocher.substack.com/p/ice-quietl...

ICE Quietly Arresting More People Than Ever According to Latest Data

NEW DATA ALERT 🚨 After months of data silence, ICE's new numbers show 65,765 people in immigration detention, deportations near 1,250 a day, and arrests now at 1,473 a day.

austinkocher.substack.com

A very good time to read Cavafy's poem Ithaca (this version translated by the great Daniel Mendelsohn)

This 1964 study turns out to be interesting in light of recent bursts of literacy Doomerism. Fiedler's premise as he looks at the book scene is that the novel is in its death throes: "The reigning narrative art of the not so distant future may well be one appropriate to a post-literate culture."

Sam Sacks@ssacks.bsky.social · 3w ago

Made my annual visit to this place and bought this Pelican

Made my annual visit to this place and bought this Pelican

Sam Sacks@ssacks.bsky.social · last yr.

A shelf of Pelicans in this bookshop

A depressing situation once again anticipated by Stuart Gibbs' FunJungle series

Kate Wong@katewong.bsky.social · 3w ago

Today at 10 AM EDT Sotheby's will start the live bidding on its natural history auction featuring one of the largest, most complete skeletons of T. rex ever found. It could fetch $30M+ and go to a private collector. Here's what science--and the public--stand to lose. My story for @wired.com 🧪

NBC News shared footage of a visibly shaken Sister Letty being released from ICE custody and embraced by Sister Norma Pimentel, a Catholic Charities leader. “She was very distraught and scared, and didn’t understand what was happening,” Sister Pimentel said: youtu.be/a-h-bmkaxfw?...

Nun released from custody after ICE arrested her on the way to Sunday Mass

YouTube video by NBC News

youtu.be

Gabe Ortíz@tusk81.bsky.social · 3w ago

“Defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants,” Leo wrote in his July 4 letter. Just days earlier, Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja was abducted by mass deportation agents while on her way to Mass. They even confiscated her rosary: open.substack.com/pub/americas...

Saw a pretty cool stag beetle

“Like Putin’s Russia, the Islamic Republic believes that its security depends not on the prosperity of its people, but on the insecurity of its neighbors.” www.wsj.com/world/middle...

Aspiring to Regional Domination, Iran Is Ready to Escalate Over Hormuz

A fresh round of fighting over the key waterway highlights that for Tehran, keeping a chokehold on the strait cements its new power in the region.

wsj.com

“He’d have spats with other scholars. Hershel would think they hadn’t done enough research. Nobody could have done as much as he did.”

Hershel Parker, Melville Scholar of Ahab-Like Obsessiveness, Dies at 90

The author of an exhaustive two-volume biography, he was “fanatical about his approach to scholarship and infatuated with Melville,” a colleague said.

nytimes.com

My tired children cosplaying the Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica

"Here in the Villa, around that chapel of Canopus where his cult is celebrated in Egyptian fashion, I have encouraged the establishment of various pleasure pavilions" (Marguerite Yourcenar). We saw no pleasure pavilions on today's visit to Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, but it was exceptional even so.

NEW: He was picking up a work crew to take them to construction site at 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning. ICE showed up. And now this small business owner, the father of three American citizens, is dead. www.thebulwark.com/p/he-lived-h...

He Lived Here for 35 Years. Put Three Kids in College. ICE Killed Him.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was picking up a crew for a construction project when ICE shot him. It now claims he was the aggressor.

thebulwark.com

I guess 2018 was also bad, but that has got to be the most feeble Brazil team I've ever seen in a World Cup. Subbing on Neymar, who cannot run, at the game's most critical moment is extraordinary. Hurts the soul to watch it.

Well, shit. This morning brings news of Alex Ross's decision to relinquish his post as music critic of the New Yorker. I don't yet have the words to fully convey my awe and admiration at the brilliance of his work, or to gauge the magnitude of his coming absence. h/t @lisairontongue.bsky.social

I'm sorry to report that a hardcover copy of Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance has appeared on the giveaway shelf in my building's laundry room. As I have explained, in Jewish tradition, this denotes the passing of an elder.

I saw a woman reading Air Fryer Recipes magazine on the subway today; incredible looking blueberry muffins on the cover. Subscription turns out to be only $12.99 a year. My first issue is scheduled to arrive early next month.

My son at the Panini Sticker trading hub. Humanity at its most pure, imo.

Found this in my "liberated" copy of MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO. Poignancy of a long-gone bookstore and a price of ninety-five cents plus tax for a truly great book. Sigh.

A propos of nothing, or simply because it is such a beautiful, perfectly-shaped melody, This is the world's oldest notated song, the "Seikilos Epitaph", nearly 2,000 years old.

"Seikilos Epitaph/Σεικίλος Εὐτέρπῃ" - Oldest Complete Musical Composition (Greek Folk Song)

YouTube video by hanque

youtu.be

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehT2...

Dor di amor

YouTube video by Simentera - Topic

youtube.com