Thirty years ago (!) I wrote a little paper about a tool for suggesting new links for a hypertext. I’d started the paper expecting to show that then-current techniques couldn't do a decent job, but the code worked surprisingly well. I’ve revisited similar things from time to time — notably in Twig, but also in the Tinderbox Get Info ▸ Similar Notes pane.

I’ve had an opportunity to revisit the link apprentice today, and to test its performance I tried it out on this weblog’s working file (3,478 notes, half a million words). Some similar notes to The Cactus League include:

• Jewish Comedy: A Serious History
• The Chalk Artist

That’s interesting, though perhaps not very useful. Let’s try The Art Of Escapist Cooking:

• Prune
• Pancakes
• Relish
• Saving The City

Some top choices for last month’s post arguing that “In social media, we actually encounter monsters”, we get

• Five Days In London
• The Hunger Games
• Prizes, a note about my paper with Clare Hooper on “Villainy in Web Science And New Media”

One of the related notes to this note — appearing as I write, is John McPhee’s Draft No. 4. That’s interesting, too, though some other suggestions are mysterious. Jo Walton’s Farthing? An old piece of Tinderbox fan mail? Still, not bad for an afternoon.

by Emily Nemens

Get the book.

A charming and atmospheric book about the world that surrounds major league baseball, the perplexities of coaches, writers, agents, wives, and even of the minor league stadium organist. There is surprisingly little baseball here: occasionally, some part of a play might be mentioned but there's scarcely a trace of the game itself. Even so, the Nemens does get the details right and avoids the ancient stereotypes when possible. There’s some echoes of Annie Savoy, but perhaps that’s because art becomes life.

A while ago, I joined and did some chores for an online New England group combatting anti-semitism.

Alas: the loons have descended. They’re eager to denounce Linda Sarsour. They’re eager to denounce Bernie Sanders. They’re eager to denounce Islam. They denounce the illuminati, praise Trump, praise Russia, and muddy the waters.

In part, this is the old story of two Jews, three opinions. But I expect that in good part it’s a planned campaign from our old friends in St. Petersburg. Send a few trolls to stir things up. Get them to spread some Trump talking points: it might help. Slip in a few blood libels and Illuminati: that’s always fun. Start promoting “Islam is Evil!”: maybe we can get the Jews and the Moslems to exterminate each other, bringing on the End Times or giving Russia a nice Mediterranean port.

And if someone tries to object, shout ,“Censorship!” And shout, “Incivility!”

by Mandy Lee

Get the book.

A fascinating food book. Most of the best food writing has pursued what Adam Gopnik calls the “mystical microcosmic” — “sad thoughts on the love that got away or the plate that time forgot.” Mystical microcosmic writers — M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, Anthony Bourdain, Michael Ruhlman — implicitly argue that they are like us, that we would enjoy what they enjoyed, that thoughtful eating can improve your life. Julia went to a fish place in Normandy and found a future husband and beurre blanc, and much of her best writing implicitly concerns the pursuit and care of each.

Mandy Lee’s book comes from a different place. In 2012, Lee was deeply depressed and living in a city she hated. Lee was born in Taiwan, grew up in Vancouver, went to grad school in (and loved) New York. Now, she was in Beijing, and everything in Beijing was awful: so awful that she could seldom get out of bed. She became an obsessive cook because focusing on elaborate and time-consuming recipes (and on elaborate and lovely photography of the prep) meant she could spend hours — days — locked in her home. Her cooking is not fun or easy or fast: her cooking is very angry, and she knows it.

Lee is always cooking for herself. (She’s cooking for her husband too, but he’s even more in shadow here than were M.F.K. Fisher’s lovers.) There’s no patron, no restaurant, no one to please but herself, and Lee is not easy to please. Her tastes are unusual, and for this she offers no explanation or apology. Reading between the lines, she likes savory and bitter breakfasts on the Chinese model, but she also really likes cheese. A few of her recipes reinvent what Minnesotans call a Juicy Lucy — hamburgers infused with tons of cheese — but hers represent a systematic study of how much cheese is possible in a burger and also feature green chili aioli, poached eggs, spicy pork or lamb patties, and sweet potato buns.

Most of the recipes concern spectacular and complex interplay of contrasting flavors and textures — finding ways to combine hot and sweet, crisp and unctuous and sour in each bite. There’s a lot of prep and plenty of challenging ingredients. In my first foray into cooking one of these, I struck out on one ingredient not only at Whole Foods but also at Super 88, an big Asian store that has two separate freezer cases of frozen buns, a whole aisle of fish sauce, and family-size packages of beef penis.

The book has a chapter on elaborate home-cooked dog food.

This is not, in other woods, a replacement for The Joy Of Cooking. But it’s got some very fine (and hilarious) writing, some nifty food ideas, and a nice insight into what cooking means to many of us.

For various reasons, I’ve been keeping strange hours lately, and this has given me some spare moments to rewatch Moira Walley-Beckett’s Flesh And Bone. It’s a brilliant, if shaggy, look at art and the people who make art. It’s very complex, masquerading as simple. I don’t think I know anyone who has seen it. (It’s easily watchable: 8 episodes, only one season. They gave up after one season because dance injuries kept exploding the schedule, but I think the end of season one says everything that they wanted to say.)

Two of the subplots involves two very different people who are writing stories. One is a world-famous choreographer, commissioned to create a ballet that revisits a dance chestnut — a girl becomes a woman — with a modern, #MeToo sensibility. It starts out a travesty: sappy, awkward and doomed. By opening night, we’re not sure. (This is also the central subplot of Robert Altman’s underrated The Company.). At the same time, we meet a homeless guy, Romeo, who hangs around one of the shabby, cheap apartments in which the dancers live. He’s clearly disturbed, and he keeps trying to map people in the neighborhood into his weird Henry Darger fantasy of dragons and rats. He, too, is making a story — and he writes it down by taking a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit and turning it into an artist’s book. It’s a very good artist’s book, though he’s still nuts, and as he writes it he’s not quite sure where he fits into the story. “I thought I was the middleman,” he says, “the sayer of things and the seer of things. Maybe even the prophet. But now I’m concerned.”