Flowers!  Well, no, not flowers.  But links!  Lurvly.  If less fragrant.

As I have grown up, I have come to appreciate Frank Sinatra's singing, as (in my uninformed opinion, anyway) the best male counterpart, in expressiveness and articulation, to Billie Holliday; and as I have come to appreciate his singing, I have come to see how intimately he worked with his fellow musicians, and none more closely than Nelson Riddle.  This excerpt of a bio on Sinatra gives some of the details of their collaborations.

An interesting recounting of a 2010 debate sparked by Jennifer Weiner in outraged frustration at the attention given to Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom.  Very much worth reading, even if you think that some books deserve more attention than others.  

Wow, this is a great story about perhaps the earliest anti-hacking expert, Cliff Stoll, who later wrote a book about his experiences called The Cukoo's Egg.  I've not read it but I'm going to now.  The story goes along ok, pretty interesting, then takes a sudden and exhilarating swerve into moral outrage right at the end.  Really fascinating--as if Stoll were actually one of the angels from Eden, remembering a time before the serpent:

For Stoll, it seems to stem from a time few other internet users remember, a time before the World Wide Web even existed and when most denizens of the internet were idealistic academics and scientists like him. Before the hackers—or, at least, the criminal and state-sponsored ones—arrived.

“I remember when the internet was innocent, when it crossed political boundaries without a care, when it was a sandbox for intellectually happy people,” Stoll had told me in our first phone call. “Boy, did that bubble burst.”

He never imagined, 30 years ago, that the internet would become a medium for dark forces: disinformation, espionage, and war. “I look for the best in people. I want to live in a world where computing and technology are used for the good of humanity,” Stoll says. “And it breaks my heart.”

Like I said--read this.

Despite yesterday's assassination of Qassim Suleimani, American military and geopolitical strategy seems to be changing, and while it's certainly necessary to resist the entropy of bureaucracy always asking for more, I worry that this is more of an "all-or-nothing" strategy.  I think it is unwise of us to withdraw support from French forces in West Africa, and West African forces, fighting terrorists.  And it is unwise to rush forces to defend Saudi Arabia from fantasized threats.

--Unless, as perhaps now, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, we have called up those threats from the deep ourselves.

Get a good night's sleep, everybody.