I was lucky to visit the Remarque Institute in person this week, where I’ll be a fellow in the Spring. It’s a beautiful office near Union Square, and I’m really looking forward to being there.
I also made the most of the trip to buy some good books from Harvard Book Store, snatching a copy of Cecilia Rikap’s latest and Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory. (Both of these authors will be at the Remarque in the Spring, so these are both homework of sorts.) On the way out, walking around Cambridge, I spied giveaway copies on the sidewalk of Dealers of Lightning and Real World OCaml (2nd Edition), both of which I was pretty chuffed to find. As soon as I work through to the end of the beautiful hardcover copy of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which has been sitting on my bedside table for a few months now, I’m excited to rip into these.
Last but not least, we attended our dear friends’ wedding in Western Massachusetts. My wife told me that my speech (given as a trio with the others who had lived with the bride in college) got “the least laughs”; but the guests in attendance were appropriately courteous and congratulated me on it afterwards regardless, so I considered it a quiet success.