Matins

¶ Is Starbucks poised to bring good wine to a corner near you? At The Awl, Nilay Gandhi reads some very tender tea leaves — we’re only talking about a couple of locations in Seattle so far — but sees a juggernaut at the bottom of the cup — er, stem.

Lauds

¶ The BAM retrospective of Cary Grant’s movies spurs Aaron Cutler to post some interesting commentary on Grant’s physicality — his command of space. (The House Next Door)

Prime

¶ Simon Johnson puts his finger on the reason why the United States is not a good environment for globally competitive American banks. (The Baseline Scenario)

Government support for big American banks is unstructured and unofficial. This means that problems can get very big before bankers call for help. It also explains why so few Americans understand the “bailouts,” why they were necessary, and how they could have been more effective.

Tierce

¶ Fruit flies are adapting to the threat of parasitic nematodes, but the adaptation is parasitic as well, and does not involve the flies’ genes. It’s a bacterium called Spiroplasma, long resident in fruit flies, that has undergone the evolution. Brandom Keim reports on the findings at Wired Science.

The point of this hour’s link is to remind you of the difficulty of thinking about evolution.

Sext

¶ In “Dictionary Therapy,” Dominique Browning captures the “torpor” and “lassitude” of Northeast Corridor weather this week — and finds solace in the pages of a book that we used to take for granted. (Slow Love Life)

Nones

¶ How Thaksin Shinawatra ruined Thailand for democracy — in one (longish) paragraph. James Stent reflects, at Reuters. Be sure to read the italicized section at the beginning, in which Mr Stent lays out his thinking in the 1990s, when it didn’t see anything like Thaksin coming.

Vespers

¶ On the off-chance that you’ve never given blurbs much thought, and still believe that the bits of puffery that well-known writers often write for their less well-known brethren are meaningful, Laura Miller has the antidote.

Compline

¶ The crux of Arthur Kleinman’s achingly lucid essay on caregiving in general and his wife’s Alzheimer’s in particular is that we have to stop thinking of care as something that we’d rather not be bothered with. (Harvard; via The Morning News)

Have a Look

¶ “Columbia? They let him teach at Columbia?!” The hilarious “trailer” for Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. (via The Morning News)

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Have A Look, The Hours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.