Chris Holden

When I waited tables there was a Cheesecake Factory across the street and we spoke about their staff in hushed, reverent tones. “Do you know how *big* their menu is? And they have to memorize the whole thing!”

In Kotor, Montenegro, I took a boat tour into an old Yugoslavian submarine tunnel. The captain blasted James Bond music and said the famous cave boat scene from Casino Royale was filmed here. That is not true; Casino Royale never filmed nearby, and no such scene exists in the movie. 10/10 tour.

I love a good list, but the Internet has been oversaturated with lists for a while now. And the Times’ arts coverage has really dropped off a cliff in the past decade.

Thank you, Google, for clarifying that I should not bring my chastity device to the local history festival

Saw the Gance Napoleon last weekend and I'm still thinking about this dude who played Robespierre. giphy.com/gifs/robespi...

Big news for the library I go to when I'm on lunch break from working at another library (I love libraries)

Dolly Parton might be the coolest person I have ever been in the same room with. RIP.

I took the first picture in 2016, so I’m going to have to demand royalties from Christopher Nolan for using the exact same camera angle in 2026. (Ait Ben Haddou, Morocco. Once you’ve been there you start to recognize it in every movie set in a desert)

Because of the limited number of books, and how expensive it was to distribute them, the medieval scholastics were capable of feats of memorization that would seem magical today. Aquinas memorized the Bible and the works of Aristotle! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_...

Happy July 4, the day we listen to "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel, the beloved song written in 7/4 time

Hands on a Hardbody (1997) They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) Both movies about our collective desire to degrade and humiliate ourselves in pursuit of a free jackpot we somehow feel entitled to, all while it’s repurposed as mass entertainment. What’s more American than that? 🇺🇸

Now I’m curious how Wirecutter gets the blood to test this.

Old maps would just throw in pictures of little guys wherever there was a blank space, and we should bring that back.

This is the opposite of an interesting origin, but no one seems to know why we call trite or schmaltz things "cheesy" or if this word is related to the food. ("Corny," on the other hand, comes from a long tradition of deriding rural residents [mocked as "corn-fed"] and assuming they were uncultured)

This is me for pretty much every paperback reissue in the past twenty years. (Also happy belated birthday to Tom P.)

Thinking about Ted Turner makes me nostalgic for the days when billionaires coped with their own insecurities about mortality by bankrolling Captain Planet cartoons and offering vanity literary prizes for novels that could bring about world peace.

Marcia Lucas' contributions to the original film have become overrated; Gloria Katz's and Willard Huyck's contributions are still underrated.

This has pretty much always been true; the big difference is that today's ultra-rich have the "I learned everything I need to know about every subject from Wikipedia and AI" disease that is endemic to the 21st century, and stands in the way of the work involved in actually developing aesthetic taste