Annie Dillard on presence over productivity

For Black Music Month, beloved poet Langston Hughes’s little-known and lovely 1942 children’s book about the history of jazz.

A sensory map of New York’s smelliest neighborhoods by Scottish designer and cartographer Kate McLean. Best thing since these hand-drawn memory maps of Manhattan and Paula Scher’s stunningly subjective typographic maps.

Newly revealed manuscript of a Samuel Beckett’s much-revised first major novel features doodles of James Joyce, Charlie Chaplin, and the Becket himself. 

The Nobel laureate, as we know, was a notorious doodler and, as few knew, was once André the Giant’s chauffeur. 

Complement with a peek inside the notebooks and sketchbooks of celebrated creators and the Moleskines of great artists and designers.

Minimalist pictogram icons for famous painters, using colors and shapes reflective of their signature styles.

10 famous painters’ lives, visualized as minimalist infographic biographies. 

Which areas of NYC benefit from the CitiBike program the most – a heatmap of the average change in travel time across the city when a commuter has access to a bikeshare station.

Pair with WNYC’s Bike Advice project.

Stunning vintage footage of New York City in living color, 1939. Complement with Berenice Abbott’s iconic black-and-white series, Changing New York.

(↬ The Dish)

When André was 12, he was already over 6 feet tall and weighed 240 pounds. He was too big to fit on the local school bus and his family didn’t have the money to buy a car that could deal with his weight if it drove him to and from school.

Samuel Beckett, Nobel Prize winner (literature) and esteemed playwright, probably most noted for Waiting for Godot, bought some land in 1953 near a hamlet around forty miles northeast of Paris and built a cottage for himself with the help of some locals. One of the locals that helped him build the cottage was a Bulgarian-born farmer named Boris Rousimoff, who Beckett befriended and would sometimes play cards with. As you might’ve been able to guess, Rousimoff’s son was André the Giant, and when Beckett found out that Rousimoff was having trouble getting his son to school, Beckett offered to drive André to school in his truck — a vehicle that could fit André — to repay Rousimoff for helping to build Beckett’s cottage. Adorably, when André recounted the drives with Beckett, he revealed they rarely talked about anything other than cricket.

Who knew

A Smiths-influenced song about Charles Dickens from BBC’s children’s series Horrible Histories, the most delightful literary nerdery since The Elements of Style Rap.

(↬ @PageTurner)

A sociogram of jazz recording sessions in the 1920s.

Thomas Mann, born June 6, 1875, makes a fine addition to our collected wisdom on writing.