‘In the study she nodded to my husband, turned completely around once, and then remarked that we seemed to be making no practical use of the space in our house. “This room would be much larger,” she said, “if you took out all those books.”

Mrs. Ferrier thought the master bedroom should have faced west, and she barely put her head inside the smaller bedrooms. “They would be much larger,” I told her, “if we took out the beds.” Mrs. Ferrier fixed me with her cold eye. “If you took out the beds where would you sleep?” she wanted to know, and I followed her meekly downstairs.’

                   ― Shirley Jackson, ‘Raising Demons’

An article that showed up on Apple News picks the best independent bookstore in each state. It’s hard not to scroll down the list. I’ve never been in the store in New York State or the one in Ohio where I lived for almost 30 years: https://apple.news/AOibJfZAPTZSHBvJXoJ9yFA

As I stood looking over my unmade bed early this morning just after my feet hit the floor I noticed I was happy and I thought about that for a few seconds and recognized that I’m always happy like that when I first get up and I determined that that was because the newspaper was waiting for me outside the door. I’d heard it land there a few minutes before. Since I was a kid knowing that there was a morning newspaper with a sports page out in the kitchen I’ve been happy inside when I get up. A few months before the pandemic I stopped getting a morning paper in kind of an experiment to be like everybody else who made do with the the online version of a paper. I like the online version too. I subscribe to online papers and all sorts of other good digital publications and for a few months I was doing fine without an actual paper. I was saving money too and I was saving the trees if not many. Pretty quickly I missed it. Pretty quickly I realized I was on the computer enough already. It’s a special thing to get a newspaper in the morning. I’ve looked at two of the four sections so far today. It’s sitting right next to me. 

The New Yorker and ProPublica collaborated on this piece about kids without school now, the drawbacks of being at home, what’s being lost. Alec MacGillis wrote it. It’s not just another piece about the virus. Here’s the link: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-students-left-behind-by-remote-learning