The We’ve Got Mail team got together to view of rough cut of the “interactive experience” this evening and, if this GIF is any indication, it’s going to be wonderful.
See you all in a week!
CAN’T WAIT.
Still doing this silly thing. But at least it provided me the chance to coin the term “Debbie Downton,” which I’m sure will be in rotation for at least the next few months. 
lisasimpsonbookclub: An oldie, but a goodie
There’s some instinctive attraction that draws you, as a writer, to your subject. And the attraction usually has to do with some primal personal thing that, of course, you have no idea about. In the end, the piece always comes down to the one or two sentences you struggle over. The sentences where you try to say explicitly what it is that the two of you, subject and writer, have in common. Those are the sentences that you just bang your head against the wall over until you get them right. It’s very hard to make that distillation but that is actually what your job is. Without trying to pin the person like a butterfly to the wall, to sum it up. If I can do that, then I feel satisfied. To give the subject a reality in the form of a sentence that is like a piece of rock crystal or a prism. — Judith Thurman, Cleopatra’s Nose
Dream room.
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See more at the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator
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Death before forty’s no bar. Lo!
These had accomplished their feats;
Chatterton, Burns, and Kit Marlowe,
Byron and Shelley and Keats.
Death, the eventual censor,
Lays for the forties, and so
Took off Jane Austen and Spenser,
Stephenson, Hood, and poor Poe.
You’ll leave a better-lined wallet
By reaching the end of your rope
After fifty, like Shakespeare and Smollett
Thackeray, Dickens, and Pope.
Try for the sixties — but say, boy,
That’s when the tombstones were built on
Butler and Sheridan, the play boy,
Arnold and Coleridge and Milton.
Three score and ten — the tides rippling
Over the bar; slip the hawser.
Godspeed to Clemens and Kipling,
Swinburne and Browning and Chaucer.
Some staved the debt off but paid it
At eighty — that’s after the law.
Wordsworth and Tennyson made it,
And Meredith, Hardy, and Shaw.
But, Death, while you make up your quota,
Please note this confession of candor —
That I wouldn’t give an iota
To linger till ninety, like Landor.