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The Starks

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Arya + Tony = best fake sibling pairing of all time

(No, Jon)

I just wanted to note that I’ve been listening to this lovely, sad album non-stop while traipsing around Bremen and that, if you’re looking for a soundtrack to the movie of your life—the one in which you’re always starring, that plays in your head as you go about your mundane, decidedly un-Hollywood existence—I cannot recommend it highly enough.

(Also, that bassist Chris Baio studied Russian at Columbia, which basically means that he is my betrothed. Basically.)

I don’t normally blog about Mad Men—I think it is the best, and what else is there to say?—but this is a) too, too great and b) an important reminder that shots o’ speed are never the answer to the question that is a creative deadline.

I read Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin on the train ride home from Heidelberg yesterday. I guess that I don’t have much to say about it, except that it was recommended to me a while ago (thanks, Hannah) and I finally read it; that I’m deliriously glad I did; that the plot, roughly, is about a man with a pet penguin who begins to write obituaries for notable who have not yet died, but that that doesn’t begin to address what happens in this book; that it’s an answer to everyone who asks about the state of post-Soviet Russian literature; and that I think it should be taught in every Russian literature program (and, failing that, that every student of Russian literature should make the time to read it on a train).

I remember when Luke Harding, then The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, was kicked out of Russia (his articles for the paper were particularly hard-hitting). I can remember reading that the officer at the airport told him, “For you, Russia is closed.” I know that Luke Harding no longer lives or works in Russia. 

And yet, as in Romeo and Juliet, knowing the ending doesn’t make Mafia State, the story of how and Harding all of the above happened, any less compelling or interesting. This is, of course, largely because Harding doesn’t make his story all about him. He is a journalist, and the book is a report on Russian affairs as much as it is his personal narrative. 

And, while one cannot help but notice that the book is, in some ways, already a bit outdated (it’s a book about modern Russia, but it doesn’t, and couldn’t have, included the most up to the minute modern Russia), it—that is, both the story of “how one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia,” and the story of what, exactly, that brutal new Russia is—is essential reading for anyone interested in today’s (or practically today’s) Russia.

This is the most important image of our, or any other, time.

My birthday card from my family got here, and it is the greatest. Happy early birthday to ME (and excellent, excellent find, guys!).

You guys know how I feel about Zooey Deschanel (if you don’t: adorkable is not a word, and nobody needs to ask Siri whether or not it’s raining), but this is the absolute best.