Monica Carol Miller

Opinion | Daryl Hannah: How Can ‘Love Story’ Get Away With This?

Gift link 🔗
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/o...

Maps and Legends (This was going to be a short piece about how it’s the thirty-ninth anniversary of R.E.M.’s album Fables of the Reconstruction and how important the song “Maps and Legends” is to me.

Maps & Legends got me through some really tough times—thank you for it. I wrote about it here.

open.substack.com/pub/monicacm...

These Pilot ones are my favorite non-fountain-pen pens.

Happy birthday, @robynhitchcock.bsky.social ! I am grateful for you, your music, and the wonderful community that your work has fostered.

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

I believe my throat hurts from all of the singing and shouting for the last 2 nights at the 40 Watt Club. So worth it. We are hope despite the times. Take this joy wherever you may go.

If you feel strongly about anything long enough it becomes part of you

I did see Toad the Wet Sprocket play this past summer.

Health Rounds: Moderna combo flu/COVID vaccine succeeds in mid-stage trial A two-in-one mRNA vaccine developed by Moderna that targets seasonal influenza and COVID-19 produced robust and durable immune responses without safety concerns in a small mid-stage trial, the company...

More good news on vaccines

A two-in-one mRNA vaccine developed by Moderna targets seasonal influenza & COVID-19. It produced robust and durable immune responses w/o safety concerns in a small mid-stage trial.

mRNA is the future. We can’t afford to lose it.

🧪 www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Diamanda Galas’s The Litanies of Satan
Robyn Hitchcock’s Yip Yip Song
Ministry’s Jesus Built My Hotrod
Pylon’s Feast on My Heart
Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes
Patti Smith’s Gloria

Hemingway was once bet that he couldn’t write the world’s happiest short story in just 5 words. He replied,

And now I shall have “Don’t Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)” in my head. I have heard that song in eons.

(Joy, that is. You’re bringing us joy!)

@michaelstipe.bsky.social Please know that the video of you telling your “shut up” story is bringing hoy to so many people. I already have a lot of REM tshirts, but I may buy another one because of how tickled I am.

I wrote this about my friend Nikki Delamotte a few years ago too. anniezaleski.substack.com/p/i-am-tryin...

Swingin’ on the flippety flop! GenTen!

It was made for me,
(Just yesterday, in fact, I included a picture of Jareth on a slide about the tradition of the Erl-King.)

Help Me Make It Through the Night YouTube video by John Doe - Topic

Also this.

youtu.be/U6d_CQxhAyU

SADIES COUNTRY CLUB — JOHN DOE

Oh, I really enjoyed it, and I think you and yours would, too. Kicked up classic country covers. Stop the World and Let Me Off comes up on my iPod for walks regularly.

www.theejohndoe.com/sadies-count...

I thought of your post today. I’m in my office on campus, where I have this photo of Vic by Mike White (fantastic photographer of the Athens music scene) on my wall.

(Although that was a bunch of years ago, I realize. It’s still on regular rotation for me—that and the Knitters.)

Did you listen to the album he made with the Sadies?

Omg, I adored that novel in high school. I’m afraid to revisit!

Oh, you want these romances, you say? Congrats, they exist!
Historical bicycle riders: A Shore Thing by Joanna Lowell
Victorian werewolves: Soulless by Gail Carriger
Queer dragon shifters: Consort of Fire by Kit Rocha (aka the horny dragon book)
Hockey historical: Puck and Prejudice by Lia Riley

At one of my 1st conferences as a grad student, a people on a Eudora Welty panel had run way over—and the moderator then asked for questions, though it was over time already.
A rockstar in the back said, “Nope, we’ve got lunch reservations at Commander’s Palace.”
Panel over. I was in awe.

I love @emmaswiftsings.bsky.social ‘s Dylan covers. This is an especially gorgeous version of a gorgeous song.
(And the organ part is done exactly right, imho.)

“Everything is meaningless, in its own way/ Like a starry night, or a snow covered winter’s day” - find out why & how in my next memoir, “Stranded In the Future” due for publication this July.

Robyn!!! Such good news. I loved reading 1967–I look forward to this new one 💚

Trinity Sessions Revisited Cowboy Junkies w Natalie Merchant YouTube video by Timeless Voices

There’s a concert video of Cowboy Junkies doing Trinity Sessions songs with special guests. Vic is one of the special guests.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=50zm...

I adore his music. That song and Isadora Duncan are both on my “songs I play on repeat” playlist.