Daily Office: Friday
¶ Matins: At Oktrends — you wouldn’t have believed this if we’d mentioned yesterday — some fascinating graphs (including an animated one!) demonstrate, ahem, that Democrats are never, ever going to show the kind of solidarity lately shown by Republican congressmen. Also: the Democratic Party is too big. Yes, we knew all that, but you’ve got to see the graphs!
¶ Lauds: Nina Munk goes over the Metropolitan Opera’s finances in the new Vanity Fair. Not a pretty picture. Will Peter Gelb’s spending today save tomorrow’s audiences? But what we especially liked was this snippet from opera non-person Luc Bondy, who devised last fall’s fiasco production.
¶ Prime: The funny thing about reading Felix Salmon on Netflix is that he sounds exactly like Jonah Lehrer on Costco, which we referred to yesterday — only without the lingo.Â
¶ Tierce: More than we ever knew about Angkor Watt, the “hydraulic city.” Dendrochronologists, examining ancient fir trees in nearby Vietnam, have pinpointed catastrophic droughts that finished off the already tottering Khmer empire. (Discovery; via MetaFilter)
¶ Sext: We can’t tell quite how it worked, but John Warner, of TMN‘s Tournament of Books ran a service that advised readers what their next book ought to be, given the past five that they’d read. The comment thread is interesting in many ways, but our favorite is the slice-of-life look at other people’s choices. We’ve actually read a few of those! Here’s Kevin Guilfoile’s two cents.
¶ Nones: If there’s one thing that Belgium’s Flemings and Walloons can agree on (and there can’t be two), it’s probably that the burqa ought to be illegal in public. A parliamentary committee has just passed such a prohibition, which will come to full vote in weeks. (BBC News)
¶ Vespers: At Maud Newton, James Hynes discusses some of the day-in-the-life novels that he read in preparation for writing his own contribution, the amazing Next.
¶ Compline: What is it about the book that that beautiful woman over there is reading, that’s making her look so dreamy? Well, sorry to pop your balloon, but it’s not about the book. The lady is a book model.