Ten Things I Learned in February

Art for Candy for Breakfast is by Gari Widodo

1. David Lynch was offered the chance to direct Return of the Jedi, but turned it down. (Bennington Review)

2. Luca Guadagnino is writing a slapstick tragedy about OpenAI. (New Yorker)

3. Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio are both only one-quarter Italian. (Reddit)

4. Baby expert—and Snoo—inventor Harvey Karp has no biological children and has never raised a baby himself. (He has a stepdaughter, but she was already past infancy when he married her mother.) (New Yorker)

5. Saudi Arabia is the biggest country in the world with no rivers. (Uncharted Territories)

6. Uniqlo’s spelling is a mistake. (New Yorker again… I guess I read a lot of New Yorker articles last month)

7. The Amish are cool with GMOs. (Tyler Cowen)

8. Jethro Tull was a real person: a British agriculturalist who invented a horse-drawn seed drill. The band got their name from a history buff member of their booking agent’s staff. (Wikipedia)

9. The Old English “ye”—as in “Ye Olde Pub”—was always meant to be pronounced like “the”: it’s a stand-in for the thorn (þ), an Old English letter that represented the “th” sound. When the printing press arrived, typesetters—working with imported equipment that lacked the thorn—substituted the visually similar “y” rather than commission an entirely new character. (Dead Language Society)

10. Ezra Edelman, the director behind the epic O.J.: Made in America, has completed an eight-hour, supposedly incredible Prince documentary that Prince’s estate is blocking from release. (NYT Magazine)