The History of the Picnic

It is hard to disagree with W. Somerset Maugham’s view that ‘there are few things so pleasant as a picnic lunch’. Even if ants and wasps occasionally join the fun, picnics are the very epitome of innocent pastoral delight. But they haven’t always been so carefree – nor so bucolic.

Where the word ‘picnic’ comes from is something of a mystery. The French root may derive from the verb piquer (‘to peck’ or ‘to pick’) and the noun nique (‘a small amount’ or ‘nothing whatsoever’); but this is just speculation. What is certain, however, is that, originally, it did not refer to anything we would now recognise as a picnic. 

- History Today

25 Facts About Jaws On Its 45th Anniversary

Daah dun, daah dun, daah dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun. On June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws—the original summer blockbuster—arrived in theaters and scared moviegoers out of the water. Here are 25 things you might not have known about the Oscar-winning shark flick.

- MentalFloss

«Les montagnes russes»: ceci est mon corps, et il est à moi!

Le deuxième tome d’Extases, série auto-érotico-biographique du bédéiste français installé au Québec depuis 2003, Jean-Louis Tripp, devait paraître le 9 avril. COVID-19 oblige, la mise en librairie a été reportée, ici, au 4 juin même si l’album est bel et bien paru en mars dernier, en France. Un bien drôle de timing étant donné que le thème central de cette série, la célébration de la sexualité, en prenait pour son rhume en cette saison de distanciation physique. C’est, bien évidemment, un des sujets qui ont été abordés lors de la discussion, via écrans interposés, avec l’auteur.

- Le Devoir

From Bukowski to Kerouac: Tom Waits created a list of his top 10 favourite books of all time

Tom Waits is a man who places extreme importance on the aspect of intellectual culture. A singer-songwriter, an actor and a composer, a poet and an avid reader of literature, Tom Waits devours artistic information like a boozehound searching for his next drink.

Waits’ ex-girlfriend, Bobi Thomas, once described the endless nights he would tirelessly stay awake until five or six in the morning with no other companion than his mountain of reading material. “He’d tell me how inspired he was by some short story or other, and I think that was the source of his muse,” Thomas wrote in the 2009 biography Lowside of the Road. “Some writers go to the movies to get that emotional power, and then they write,” Thomas said before adding: “I think Tom got a lot of it from books.”

- Far Out

For a Year, They Lived Tied Together with 8 Feet of Social Distance

The promise was made on American Independence Day, 1983. “We, Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, plan to do a one year performance. We will stay together for one year and never be alone…tied together at [the] waist with an 8 foot rope.” Arguably the most difficult part of this promise? That artists Hsieh and Montano would “never touch each other during the year.” Decades later, their “Rope Piece” project resonates with us on an almost prophetic, eerie level – as if we’re glimpsing into the rearview mirror to see social distancing before it was co-opted by Covid-19. At time when we all continue to reflect on the distance between us, what can we learn from Rope Piece today?

- Messy Nessy Chic

Beautiful Vintage Color Photos Of New York City In The 1950s

Ernst Haas is considered one of the pioneers of color photography and one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. Taking up photography after World War II, his early work on the returning prisoners of war caught the attention of LIFE magazine.

- Design you Trust

Judd Apatow’s Best and Worst Movies, Ranked From Year One to this week’s The King of Staten Island

The Judd Apatow Cinematic Universe is more than the work of just one man. And yet, whether Apatow writes, produces, or directs a film, his bighearted sensibility permeates the final product: that giddy, mockingly irreverent attitude toward romance and family that, nonetheless, has a deeply sentimental core.

- Vulture

“We All Need Something”: The Oral History of Chuck’s BDSM Reveal on ‘Billions’

In advance of the new season, Paul Giamatti, Maggie Siff, and the creators of ‘Billions’ look back at the making of the show’s most shocking moment yet. WhileWhile writing the script of The Girlfriend Experience, director Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film about a high-end sex worker, Brian Koppelman and David Levien spoke to almost 20 top escorts. In nearly all of the interviews, the women volunteered that the vast majority of their wealthiest, most influential clients shared the same bedroom desire: to relinquish the power that they wielded during their daily lives.

- The Ringer

Unknown Hemingway short story Pursuit As Happiness published

Autobiographical tale tells of hunt for ‘the biggest goddam marlin that ever swam in the ocean’ and has strong echoes of The Old Man and the Sea. An unknown short story by Ernest Hemingway, recounting a hunt for a huge marlin, which echoes the narrative of The Old Man and the Sea, has been published for the first time.

Pursuit As Happiness, published in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, follows the narrator on a fishing trip in search of “the biggest goddam marlin that ever swam in the ocean”. One day, “the water so clear and in so close that you could see the shoals in the mouth of the harbor ten fathoms deep”, he and his friends hook one – although the trip isn’t, eventually, as successful as they might like.

- The Guardian