You should read this for 1/22/2020:
Art, Music, and Film
Economist Podcasts: 
This week we speak to Viggo Mortensen, the actor best known for playing Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, about making his directorial debut and the future of indie film-making
James Corden proves why straight actors should think twice before playing gay
Biden-Harris Begin/h4>
Harris assembles staff as she builds her vice presidential portfolio
PRIORITIES
We aren’t just going to rebuild what has worked in the past. This is our opportunity to build back better than ever.
Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language
H/T Lisa C: The book of love: 400-year-old tome of John Donne’s poems is unveiled
The volume was discovered in 2018 in private hands at Melford Hall, the National Trust property in Suffolk, where it is believed to have been kept for at least 200 years. In 2019, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport imposed a temporary export bar on the work, warning that it was “at risk of being lost abroad” unless a UK buyer could match the £466,000 asking price.
The British Library’s acquisition – to be announced on Monday – was made possible by various sources, including the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and individuals such as Paul Chrzanowski, an American physicist and collector of early English texts, who has made numerous donations to public institutions.
The binding and watermarks suggest that it dates from between 1625 to 1635. Lock described the text as “beautifully legible, in a lovely clear hand”, with partial annotations from a later reader
Denver’s Tattered Cover Bookstore Sold to Two Entrepreneurs This change in ownership means that Tattered Cover is now the largest Black-owned bookstore in the U.S.
The change in ownership was completed on Tuesday; Vlahos and Gilligan will stay on for a period of time as consultants. Spearman and Back have formed a limited liability company, Bended Page, with “a diverse group of Colorado-based investors and national bookselling and publishing experts” on board. The thirteen investors include Oren Teicher, the retired CEO of the American Booksellers Association and John Sargent, departing Macmillan CEO. Teicher and Sargent are among a seven-member board of directors, headed by Back, its chair, and Spearman, installed as the store’s CEO.
Coronavirus | COVID-19
The Vaccine Is Not Coming Soon Enough for Nursing Homes COVID-19 deaths in long-term-care facilities jumped 27 percent last week.
BBC Video: Covid-19: How everyday life has changed in Wuhan
While the rest of the world is still battling a second wave of infections, the city hasn’t had any locally transmitted cases for months. So how has Wuhan changed, and what’s life like for ordinary people living in the initial centre of the pandemic?
Food and Drink
H/T Lymond: The Kugel Joke
History and Archaeology
Tudor coins dedicated to three of Henry VIII’s wives found in family garden
That was certainly the case for the unnamed New Forest family who dug up 63 gold coins and one silver coin dating from the 15th and 16th centuries. “They were out turning up the soil and all of a sudden these coins popped out of the ground … miraculously,” said Richardson. “It is quite a shocking find for them and very interesting for us.”
Probably hidden in about 1540, they include coins from Henry VIII’s reign, which are unusual in that they also, separately, feature the initials of three of his wives – Catherine of Aragon (K), Anne Boleyn (A) and Jane Seymour (I).
But a stunning discovery at the Chedworth Roman villa in the Cotswolds suggests that some people at least managed to maintain a rich and sophisticated lifestyle.
National Trust archaeologists have established that a mosaic at the Gloucestershire villa was probably laid in the middle of the fifth century, years after such homes were thought to have been abandoned and fallen into ruin.
The mosaic, found in what may have been a summer dining room, is not quite as splendid as the ones at the villa dating to Roman times, but it seems to show the residents were clinging on to a very decent standard of living. . . .it was possible to date the mosaic thanks to traces of carbon found in a trench dug to build a wall to create the room the mosaic was found in. Dating the carbon strongly suggested the wall was built between 424 and 544 AD. The mosaic was laid in the newly created room after the wall was built.
Society
Substack isn’t a new model for journalism — it’s a very old one
Technology
Google is now blocking the ads publishers sell if they don’t meet Google’s standards
Let’s be blunt: Nobody likes ads that choke their browser and slow their webpage to a crawl. No one has sympathy for ads that actively harm the user experience. Readers would rather have a functional webpage with a gray box on it than a non-functional one with an ad.
And yet…on principle alone, I still can’t quite get over the idea that Google — the world’s largest advertising company, perennially investigated by regulators for its abuse of its market power, criticized for its negative impacts on the news industry — gets to decide, unilaterally, that an ad The New York Times sold can’t be shown to a New York Times reader.
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Women’s Work
‘It’s not a grave we must fit in’: the Kashmir women fighting for marital rights
💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰
Trump has a long history of responding to loss with anything but grace
It’s impossible to separate Trump’s behavior now from his comments well before the election in which he made clear that this was exactly how he’d respond to a loss. Over and over, Trump claimed that mail-in ballots are rife with fraud — a claim both untrue in the past and in the most recent election — and that the only way he could lose would be if rampant fraud occurred. He lost, so he worked backward to suggest that it had occurred unfairly, in the clumsiest way imaginable.
Pay It Forward and Make It Better
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Something Wonderful
‘Magical’ monolith appears on Isle of Wight beach in the UK
Humpback whale snapped during New York City harbour visit
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