how to make water in the 17th century

I. Just Kidding, the Internet is Good
Samuel Pepys's diary is one of the more important primary documents of the 17th-century. I'd never read it. I've begun reading it thanks to a website that posts his entries every day, almost as if Pepys is blogging. Easy access to these kinds of classic texts has always been one of the best features of life on the internet - Project Gutenberg, etc. - but this is an especially perfect fusion. A diary is always written in a semi-public voice. A diary deserves, for many writers of the past, to be read as casually and obsessively as a blog. Also, he had kidney stones and hated them:

Anon I went to make water, not dreaming of any thing but my testicle that by some accident I might have bruised as I used to do, but in pissing there come from me two stones, I could feel them, and caused my water to be looked into; but without any pain to me in going out, which makes me think that it was not a fit of the stone at all; for my pain was asswaged upon my lying down a great while before I went to make water. Anon I made water again very freely and plentifully.

We should all say make water more often.

II. Someone Wrote Some Things So I Don't Have To
Everything Katy Waldman says in the New Yorker about the new Wrinkle in Time movie was evident from its trailer. She has some softening words at the very end, but even those are along lines one might have predicted. The movie is big-hearted and well-meaning, but fails both on its own and in comparison to L'Engle's classic.

The adaptation flattens L’Engle’s characters and themes into the most simplistic, feel-good version of themselves. Movie-Meg defeats the darkness when she learns to embrace the person she is; she discovers not some ineffable quality of light or interconnectedness out in the universe but, rather, the self-help mantra that she deserves love. A message of affirmation directed specifically toward black girls is thrilling, but movie-Meg hardly has any features beyond her wounds and self-doubt[...] Meanwhile, the rest of the film’s mechanics are so rote and obvious, its coincidences so contrived, that the original “Wrinkle”—all capaciousness and wonder—feels very far away.

Bonus: The problem is an Oprah-fication of L'Engle's Episcopalian theology. It's spirituality for dummies.

III. Excerpt from "Explication de Texte," by Marie Ponsot

Despite the lazy bowels, gin breath,
Wronged things, sick souls,
Murder, life at its worst

Life came first, not death.
Despite you death
Life comes first.

VI. "We Should Try Socialism"
Elizabeth Bruenig's thoughts in the Washington Post, which I'm still mulling, includes a diagnosis I'm inclined to endorse:

Capitalism is an ideology that is far more encompassing than it admits, and one that turns every relationship into a calculable exchange. Bodies, time, energy, creativity, love — all become commodities to be priced and sold. Alienation reigns. There is no room for sustained contemplation and little interest in public morality; everything collapses down to the level of the atomized individual. 

V. Opinion
Don't see the new Wrinkle in Time movie. Read the book. Hell, read the first three books of the Time Quintet this weekend. They're short! And cheap! Where Wrinkle in Time zooms out to the universe, A Wind in the Door zooms down to the many worlds of physical biology - including, you know, indescribable bird-like angel figures. The third, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, is a bonkers journey through the history of the world. Growing up, I believe it was my favorite. The fourth and the fifth are perhaps a level below the other three, but worth reading back to back a different weekend.