“A new study suggest[s] you should watch your punctuation when you send text messages or you may be sending an incorrect emotional message. Researchers at Binghamton University discovered text messages that end with a period are perceived to be less sincere than messages that do not.” Also: “[A] text response with an exclamation mark is interpreted as more, rather than less, sincere.”

If you’ve got someone in your life who’s a cat person — and I won’t judge you, because somehow we all do and it’s usually not our fault — here’s a great holiday gift from Awl pals Amy Goldwasser and Peter Arkle that, as a bonus, does not involve you needing to touch or even see a cat in real life. Everybody wins!

The good news about today is that no matter how terrible it is it will all be over come tomorrow. The good news about tomorrow is the same rule applies. Everything sucks, but at least it ends. In the meantime, there’s music. This one will absolutely appeal to fans of Nils Frahm, seeing as he’s part of it. Enjoy.

★★★ Out the window downriver in the late-arriving dawn was a vision of Victoria Harbor, purple false mountains rising beyond the water. In the other direction, rather than solidifying the unreal, the haze was dissolving the ordinary landscape into luminous pink. Overhead was quietly spectacular cirrus: whorled or wind-pulled into sharp little bits that clumped and spaced like iron filings in a magnetic field, or wood shavings on a drumhead. One string of them had been dragged, somehow, into a full loop. It was too chilly to check the aging phone on the way back from the pre-K dropoff, for fear of driving the battery into its death spiral. The sun slipped between buildings and found a small tree, still in leaf and flame-colored, in the shelter of the north side of an apartment slab. The illusory mountains were just clouds again, and then the sky was clear.

by Peter Wieben

Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13th, Molenbeek, a neighborhood just outside of Brussels, became the focus of international attention as “a haven for jihadists.” I went there a week later and stayed in an Airbnb in the neighborhood.

The day I arrived, I mostly walked around in the cold and the rain, reading graffiti; I heard an argument in Arabic about Air Jordans, saw a man in conservative clothes adjust his baby’s carriage, and in the afternoon, when the schools let out, was surrounded by a swarm of children.

It got dark early. By the time I wandered into a market, some of the vendors were already closing shop. I asked a shoe salesman to tell me about the neighborhood, but as he packed up his stall, he mostly talked about the events in Paris from the week before. “The currents events you mean, right?” He sighed as he was putting some shoes into a box. “Well my brother, we are also bewildered and confused… People are saying ‘Islam, terrorist,’ but these are not Islamic events… These boys, one of them had a café. They brainwashed them. They don’t have religion. They wash their brains quickly to get them to kill themselves.”

After talking for a few minutes, I went to get some food. There were some men hanging out outside a store that recommended me a shwarma shop. Seeing that I only had four euros, the owner of the shwarma shop recommended a sandwich shop across the street.

Some graffiti in Molenbeek: “Struggle with rage and joy against prisons.”

Items for sale in the market.

People in Molenbeek on a Friday afternoon. Short break from rain.

A small part of an argument about Air Jordans. Also, the Jordans in question.

After nightfall, as sirens rang out against the rain, men wearing black body armor searched apartments in Molenbeek. Later that night, the terror alert was raised to its highest possible level; the metro was shut down, and shops in the center of the neighborhood were told to close. The news said explosives and chemicals had been found in Molenbeek.

On Saturday morning, people dragged shopping trolleys towards a weekend market. Despite the rain, shopkeepers set up again outside an old airplane hangar-looking building. In Molenbeek, it seemed like a normal day, despite everything.

In the center of Brussels, the streets were filled with army trucks and APCs, while men wearing camouflage and carrying large guns patrolled beneath Christmas lights.

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Sometimes we get so locked into our own habits and styles and ways of being that they start to feel like a prison, and we reach a point where we worry that unless we alter things, drastically and soon, we might be trapped forever in those same patterns and paths until we become incapable of change altogether and drift into a stale parody of what once made us so interesting. That kind of change is difficult, though. People crave predictability, and even when our attempts at doing something different are often vital for our own sanity, everyone else seems to see them as an affront aimed at them, an indictment of their own inability to make other moves. This increases the challenge of undertaking a serious transformation, because when our own doubts are amplified by the disapproval of others it is often much more comfortable to slip back into the easy, familiar ways. It leads to serious existential questions about who we are and how much of that is defined by what we’re known for and how that feeds into the responses of those around us. For example: Is Sleigh Bells Sleigh Bells without the crunchy guitars? There are several arguments on either side, but it says here yes. Enjoy.

★★★★ Sun flooded buildings on both sides of the avenue, overwhelming the mirroring on the glass tower to light its east-facing interiors even as it bounced off the building top to reach the west-facing rooms across the street. The haze flooded the southern view with silver, raised mellow colors on the river to the north, and made the western horizon look grimy. Errand running was agreeable; it was a good time to try parkas on for size, to order one for later delivery with no urgency. Thin, high clouds decorated the sky late, picking up pretty pink bands just when it seemed as if the sunset would be unremarkable.

I’m sure that Stumptown and Intelligentsia, which were recently purchased by Peet’s, would taste just as delicious as always — to most people anyway! — flowing out of Keurig pods. (That new, extra bold flavor? That would be the taste of the corporate synergy, since they’re now all owned by the same holding company with JAB Holding’s $13.9 billion purchase of Green Mountain Coffee, the company behind Keurig.) Nothing tastes better than convenience. =)

Photo by bnpositive

What is remarkable about the frequency with which Aidan Baker puts out new music — three records just emerged in the time it took me to type that clause — is the level of quality so much of his work achieves. Baker’s new one (apart from the next one that he has probably completed since I made the earlier reference to how prolific he is in the previous sentence) is out at the end of the week. Here’s a preview. Enjoy! You will also enjoy the following two releases, which he should be done with…. ah, there we go.