Small stuff just for a quiet Sunday evening.

There was a "Mutual Admiration Society" of women writers at Oxford in the 1910s and 1920s.  Dorothy Sayers was one of them, and they constituted a group of intellectuals fundamentally committed to "conservative modernity." Really an interesting story, and I'm especially interested in the group aspect of this narrative:

The Mutual Admiration Society was an incubator. It provided a forum for collaboration, support, and critical feedback, as well as a model for forging other productive partnerships. Although the struggle to build independent lives pulled the members of the MAS apart from each other in the 1920s, the group, remarkably, came back together, in reunions and reconnections around the end of that decade, when its members were in their mid to late thirties. These reunions led to a series of collaborations that would ultimately transform their careers and reconnect them with work as a life’s endeavor, rather than merely the means to financial independence. DLS’s much-loved mystery novel Gaudy Night, set in a fictionalized Somerville, grew directly out of these collaborations and underscores the importance of balancing the demands of head and heart in this way.

Kind of annoyed this didn't involve my (maybe) ancestor Augustine Mathewes, but it's cool anyway.  We've finally found out (maybe) the printers who produced the first edition of Milton's Areopagitica, as well as some early work of Roger Williams, among others:

Funny: Christopher Walken once told Will Ferrell that the famous "More Cowbell" sketch on SNL ruined his life.

Jon Malesic is a friend of mine, and also someone whose writing reliably surprises me with discoveries he's  made, discoveries about the world and himself. This one starts by being about twitter, but expands. “Twitter is not where you expect to find spiritual comfort. Too often, it is the site for call-outs, pile-ons and racist trolling. But there are also pockets of compassion and inspiration. Accounts like JesusOfNaz316 are one pocket, sanctifying an often-profane virtual space. If good ministry means meeting people where they are, and if Twitter is where they are, then these accounts are showing how to shepherd an extremely-online flock.”

I talked about Amazon a couple of days ago, this is more info about the company and what it is doing with and to the city of Baltimore, often in ways that are quite invisible to the ordinary consumer, and citizen.

May all of us have a restful evening before we plunge back into the holiday week; and for those of you celebrating, may we all have a blessed Advent:

Veni, veni, Emmanuel
captivum solve Israel,
qui gemit in exsilio,
privatus Dei Filio.
Gaude! Gaude! Emmanuel,
nascetur pro te Israel!