From the weekly newsletter of Exploring Music. This week's theme is Let Me Tell You a Story.

Franz Schubert died asking for more of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels like The Last of the Mohicans.

At SiriusXM Martin Goldsmith dips into his memory archive (and mine) to remind us of what Phil Ochs said—

Ah, but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty.

I didn't listen long enough to hear whether Mr Goldsmith also asked "when will they ever learn?"

Most of all, I get the feeling that a languorous 19th-century invention — baseball — is being forced to fit a 21st-century pace of life. Most days, most places, I already feel rushed, sensing, as Andrew Marvell wrote, “time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” Now I have to feel that at the ballpark, too?

About writing, he said that it was very important that one should, at all costs, go on writing now. ‘It doesn’t seem to me to matter very much whether one isn’t able to do anything very good. The important thing is to keep going. Probably it’s impossible to do excellent work while things are so disturbed.’

 

 I mentioned that I hadn’t been able to work, so had started this journal. He said, ‘Yes, that’s an excellent idea. Just writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.’

Mandy Brown: “Are you a writer or a talker? That is, when you need to think about something, do you generally reach for something to write with, or look for someone to talk to?” I am an extreme writer — but I recognize the wisdom in this advice:

Talkers need to recognize that not everyone loves to think out loud, and that giving space for writing is part of what it means to make use of the best brains around you. Writers need to remember that writing isn‘t some perfected ideal of thinking and that making space for the messy, chaotic, and improvisational work of talking things out is often exactly what a team needs to create change. Whichever mode you prefer, it’s not feasible to abstain from the other; doing good, collaborative work requires that you practice both modes.

John Feinstein has a suggestion for the soon-to-be new owner of the Washington Commanders—

But there is one decision Harris can make the day he takes over, amid the celebratory fanfare of his “I’m not Dan Snyder” introductory news conference.

Change the team’s name. Yes, again.

How about “Washington Monuments?” Other than the White House, that monument is easily the most recognized landmark in a city full of them. Everyone knows exactly what it is, and it literally towers over the D.C. landscape. It is completely apolitical, the backdrop for so many civic events.

“For decades, the average proportion of humanities students in every class hovered around fifteen per cent nationally, following the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods. (If you major in a field like business for the purpose of getting rich, it doesn’t follow—but can be mistaken to—that majoring in English will make you poor.) Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller coaster is in free fall.” Nathan Heller in The New Yorker: The End of the English Major.

via NextDraft

As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide. As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. 

In 1739, there were three times more coffee shops per person in London than there are today. [Ben Leggett and Andrew Seymour]

via Tom Whitwell