I Found This Cool Thing!

A central idea of Avidly is that interesting things are all around us—and that these things become more interesting through the act of describing and debating them with other smart folks. Write here if: you found a random something in an archive or on the street; if you learned something about the past or the present; if you went someplace beautiful or grand or terrifying.

A Weaver’s Lover

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2
April 9, 2013
A Weaver’s Lover

When Laura Nyro retired from the music business in 1971, she had produced five studio albums.  She was also 24 years old.  A piano-tuner’s daughter with little classical training, in 1967 Nyro found a manager in an upstart promoter named David Geffen.  She recorded albums in the iconic Brill Building in Manhattan, collaborated with...
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Lighting Up

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1
March 5, 2013
Lighting Up

I hate smoking.  I also find it really difficult to hate smoking.  The reasons to abjure from it are well known; whereas, there is hardly a single benefit to the activity.  Therefore, the fact that so many people smoke requires some explanation. My grandmother was a smoker.  At her peak she probably smoked about...
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Losing the Super Bowl; or, What to Make of a Diminished Thing

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4
January 31, 2013
Losing the Super Bowl; or, What to Make of a Diminished Thing

This weekend one team, their coaches, and their fans will lose the Super Bowl. They will take the field riding the wave of a season in which everything has gone right. At some point, however, they will become failures. While one team is donning championship hats, the camera will turn to the expressions on...
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Best Nap in American Literature

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6
January 22, 2013
Best Nap in American Literature

How do you like to nap? For me, it’s like this: on top of the covers (never under the covers) with an extra blanket over me. Light outside (never nap when dark), with some sort of filtering of the light that is coming into the room. Some noise in the background. No socks and...
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Octopuses, not Obsession

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22
August 28, 2012
Octopuses, not Obsession

I’m a real easy guy to buy gifts for. If you see a toy octopus or something with an octopus on it, look no further. I love octopuses. I have a modest tattoo of an octopus on my left arm (I got it in 1992, arguably minutes before tattoos became de rigueur). I wear...
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Jumping Axis, Producing Trauma

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10
August 21, 2012
Jumping Axis, Producing Trauma

  So, The Hunger Games book is about a battle of personal survival, fought by a girl. The Hunter Games movie is different. It’s about a nascent war of rebellion, waged mostly between men. As The Hunger Games book climbed the bestseller charts and contracts were inked to produce The Hunger Games movie, fans and bloggers...
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The Palazzo Diaries

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3
August 16, 2012
The Palazzo Diaries

I first met my father in my early thirties. It sounds like a classic case of Freud’s family romance fantasy, but my father actually is an aristocrat – son of Count Manassei di Collestate, assuming the title when the old man died. His mother is from Scottish aristocracy, she was the sister of the...
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Awkward Ages

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34
July 31, 2012
Awkward Ages

For a while now I’ve been thinking about prophecy, counterfactuals, and time out of joint in twentieth-century adolescence. I’ve been searching under a lot of different rocks: Henry James’s 1890s novels about awkward adolescents; Cranky young Stephen Dedalus’ search for the perfect epiphany; Colin MacInnes’s sublime teenager-as-consumer-and-consumed novel, Absolute Beginners; the film oeuvre of...
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Expedition to Adulthood

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6
July 12, 2012
Expedition to Adulthood

It’s summer in New York and cool deals on food and concerts abound. The abundance is such that September will roll around and you’ll discover that shit, you missed Shakespeare, and the Bryant Park movies, and the apparently sick Childish Gambino performance. (You kinda got to hear Bieber’s live Today Show take, but that’s...
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Drunk Historiography

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7
July 10, 2012
Drunk Historiography

I avidly follow the sketch series Drunk History. From the first sketch I felt that shared recognition, that moment of contact that readers of nineteenth-century literature will know as a constitutive in the genre of the novel. If you’re not familiar with the Drunk History sketches–a deficiency you should remedy right away–the format is this: for each...
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