Hellooooo, here are some lovely and/or meaningful things for you:
 

1. "We were historians, counters of years, markers of time, so this spring, twenty years since that day, day of birth, day of death, I opened her computer, to honor the anniversary. We’d bought our first laptops together when we were in graduate school. It had taken her forever to pick out hers. No one hated change more. She dreaded disappointment like a disease. She was also superstitious: she hated jinxing anything with her own expectations. She spent eight months deciding on what kind of a phone to buy when her old one broke—not a smartphone, not a cell phone, mind you; this was a mere landline telephone—and when she got sick we were working on the three-year-long decision of whether or not she should get a dog." Jill Lepore on the lingering of loss.
    
2. "Hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in conversation with Greta Thunberg. 
    
3. "What to the slave is the fourth of July?"
    
4. The difference between epigrams, epigraphs, and epitaphs; dictionaries include deliberately fake words, or "mountweazels," to trap people who try to copy them without permission, among other fun facts about language.
    
5. Why is the Grub Street Diet series, in which people talk about where and when they eat what, so captivating? Maybe because there's nothing more intimate than what you eat and who you eat it with. Here's Chris Hayes, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Reply All's PJ Vogt.
    
6. How a NASA engineer accidentally invented the greatest water gun of all time.
    
7. Men serenading cows, sax and trombone editions.
    
8. Movie interlude: I am very excited for Rian Johnson's new murder-mystery movie, Knives Out, and the Kristen Stewart edition of Charlie's Angels. Also: Cast Tituss Burgess as Ursula, you cowards.
    
9. Finland's unofficial national anthem, "Finlandia," played on four electric toothbrushes.
    
10. i pledge allegiance to my
    homies      to my mother’s
    small & cool palms     to 
    the gap between my brother’s
    two front teeth      & to 
    my grandmother’s good brown
    hands    

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Bye,

Laura