jackie futon

Jacqueline Suskin, a writer and former vegetable gardener, has taken to the Hollywood Farmers Market for her latest venture: The Poem Store.

Sitting with her typewriter, Suskin takes requests from curious passersby and regulars, taking requests for poems on back pain to making verse fit the title “Since Wednesday.”

As for the most popular request?

"Everyone is always asking for love poems," she says. "We are all obsessed with love."

But love, as a topic, is deeply unspecific. When someone asks her to write a poem about love, she responds by asking what kind of love. That usually leads to a story about a girlfriend living far

away, or a person new to Los Angeles desperately missing her family, or the love a mother has for her new baby.

She thinks people ask for poems that help them understand their path or direction in life.

"They want hope, or confidence, or they just need someone to see who they are," she says. "Half the time I feel like I am a therapist or a psychic."

Read more of reporter Deborah Netburn’s story in our latest Column One feature.

George Saunders

[via NYT]

Monsters On Magazine Covers: A Quick History

From The Protojournalist: Rolling Stone’s editors posted an explanatory note on the website version of its cover story on alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It began like this: “The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism." True enough. Controversy sells. At least it used to.

Read the rest on NPR.org.

Louis CK Animation About Global Warming

John Roney created an animated video tribute to Louis CK featuring the comedian’s bit on what God would say to humans about global warming if He were to return to Earth.

By-Hand Baseball Scorekeeping: A “Dying Art" That May Never Actually Die

The baseball season has reached its midway point, so it’s time once again for one of the history-minded sport’s traditional rites of passage.

Not the All-Star Game, which celebrates its 80th anniversary Tuesday night (but which has lost much of its former sparkle in the era of interleague play, free agency, and eroded league identity and loyalty—as its plummeting television ratings attest). I mean that it’s time for yet another report about the demise of the practice of keeping score at the ballpark.

Devised by pioneering statistician Henry Chadwick in the midst of the Civil War, its death was prominently featured on the first sports page of The New York Times a few days ago. “Who’s Keeping Score? Not So Many," Times asked (and answered). After all, the Times’s Harvey Araton wrote,

Today’s fans go to ballparks that feature upscale restaurants, play areas for children and other attractions besides the game. Digital apps aside, there are also e-mails and social media to check, photos and videos to shoot, phone calls to make.

What chance, after all, does a pencil and paper—talk about obsolete technology—have against such competition? As a scorecard vendor Araton quoted said, “It’s a dying thing." And what could be more crushing than the verdict of one completely uninterested 20-something fan: “It’s my dad’s thing"?

But that obituary was hardly breaking news of scorekeeping’s supposed death.

No big deal...I go to games a lot. I just don't usually "keep score" because I feel like it would be rude to the person I went with. However, since I was going solo to this game, I figured it would give me something to do, seeing as how there are about 17 minutes of actual action during a 3 hour game.

As the first few innings got under way, it all came back to me (one of my Mom's boyfriends taught me how to keep score as a kids. Here are some examples of typical scorecard symbols: "k" means strikeout, "_" means the player hit a single, "=" means the player hit a double, "bb" means player drew a walk, "6-4-3" means the player hit into a double play in which involved the shortstop, second baseman, and first baseman--in that order)

It was a good game. Bronson Arroyo was in the process of almost throwing a no-hitter, the weather was perfect, and since I only had to buy one ticket, I was residing in much better than usual seats.

But a funny thing happened: as the game progressed everyone around started asking me saw me at the game alone, writing every detail of what was happening in baseball code on an official scorecard, and they started peppering me with questions about strategy and about baseball in general. Holding that score card and mini-pencil made everyone think I was some kind of expert-genius.

"Should Dusty keep Phillips batting 4th?"

"What are they going to do about their lead off hitter?"

"Any idea why they didn't put on the shift for Votto?"

"Who do you think they'll go for at the trade deadline?"

And, though I mostly had no clue, I answered every question they asked in a nonchalant manner--making as many obscure sabermetric references as I could so as to keep up the charade.

Hollywood: city view from the hillside above, at night, with spotlights - 1929 - Los Angeles, California.

The Most Effective Recent Presidents: George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter

No, you didn’t read that wrong: The hapless man from Plains and the man often ranked as one of the worst presidents in history are the two most effective Oval Office residents since Lyndon Johnson — at least according to one metric.

Looking through AEI and Brookings’ Vital Statistics on Congress (you can see 5 charts showing how big money created the most polarized Congress in a century here), I came across a fascinating table of data: “Presidential Victories on Votes in Congress, 1953-2012." It’s a measure of how often Congress voted with the president divided by the number of votes on which he had taken a clear position. The results are rather surprising